Chapter 11

And he had a little small bull pup, that to look at him you'd think he wan't worth a cent, but to set around and look ornery, and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as the money was up on him, he was a different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover, and shine savage like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him, and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson--which was the name of the pup--Andrew Jackson would never let on but what _he_ was satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else--and the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his hind leg and freeze to it--not chaw, you understand, but only jest grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that didn't have no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off by a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he saw in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was _his_ fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had genius--I know it, because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.

Well, this-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats, and all them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he _did_ learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of catching flies, and kept him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as far as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do most any thing--and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing out, "Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink, he'd spring straight up, and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straight-for'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had travelled and been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever _they_ see.

Well, Smiley kept the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller--a stranger in the camp, he was--come across him with his box, and says,

"What might it be that you've got in the box?"

And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, "It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, may be, but it ain't--it's only just a frog."

And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way and that, and says, "H'm--so't is. Well, what's _he_ good for?"

"Well," Smiley says, easy and careless, "he's good enough for _one_ thing, I should judge--he can out-jump ary frog in Calaveras county."

The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were. Any ways, I've got _my_ opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can out-jump any frog in Calaveras county."

And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you."

And then Smiley says, "That's all right--that's all right--if you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait.

So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot--filled him pretty near up to his chin--and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, and says:

"Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan'l, and I'll give the word." Then he says, "One--two--three--jump!" and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders--so--like a Frenchman, but it wan't no use--he couldn't budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course.

The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulders--this way--at Dan'l, and says again, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long time, and at last he says, "I do wonder what in the nation that frog throw'd off for--I wonder if there ain't some thing the matter with him--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the neck, and lifted him up and says, "Why, blame my cats, if he don't weigh five pound!" and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man--he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him. And--

(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.) And turning to me as he moved away, he said: "Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I an't going to be gone a second."

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond _Jim_ Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. _Leonidas W._ Smiley, and so I started away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me and recommenced:

"Well, this-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--"

"Oh, hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. (BORN, 1836--DIED, 1870.)

* * * * *

BEN THIRLWALL'S SCHOOLDAYS.

My name is Ben Thirlwall, and I am the son of rich but honest parents. I never had a wish ungratified until I was twelve years of age. My wish then was to stay on a two-year-old colt which had never been broken. He did not coincide with me, and a vast revelation of the resistances to individual will of which the universe is capable, also of a terrestrial horizon, bottom upward, burst upon me during the brief space which I spent in flying over his head. Picked up senseless, I was carried to the bosom of my family on a wheelbarrow, and awoke to the consciousness that my parents had decided on sending me to a boarding-school,--a remedy to this day sovereign in the opinion of all well-regulated parents for all tangential aberrations from the back of a colt or the laws of society.

The principal's name was Barker; and my only clue to his character consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian. I was afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a geographical distinction, and, associating him with Mesopotamia or Beloochistan, expected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep's wool, and did a large business in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.

Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first chapter.

I need not say that the reality of Mr. Barker was a very terrible awakening, which contained no lineament of my purple dream, save the bastinado. Without distinction of age or season the youths who, as per circular, enjoyed the softening influence of his refined Christian home, rose to the sound of the gong at five A.M., which may have been very nice in a home for the early Christians, but was reported among the boys to have entirely stopped the growth of Little Briggs. This was a child, whose mother had married again, and whose step-father had felt his duty to his future too keenly to deprive him of the benign influences of Barker at any time in the last six years. After rising, we had ten minutes to wash our faces and hands,--a period by the experience of mankind demonstrably insufficient, where the soap is of that kind very properly denominated cast-steel (though purists have a different spelling), and you have to break an inch of ice to get into the available region of your water-pitcher. Chunks, who has since made a large fortune on war-contracts, kept himself in peanuts and four-cent pies for an entire winter session, by selling an invention of his own, which consisted of soap, dissolved in water on the stove during the day-time, put in bottles hooked from the lamp-room by means of a false key, to be carried to bed and kept warm by boys, whose pocket-money and desire for a prompt detergent in the morning were adequate to the disbursement of half a dime a package. I myself took several violent colds from having the glass next my skin during severe nights; but that was nothing so bad as the case of Little Briggs, who from lack of the half-dime, often came down to prayers with a stripe of yesterday's pencil black on one side of his nose, and a shaving of soap, which, in the frenzy of despair he had gouged out of his stony cake, on the other. The state of mind consistent with such a condition of countenance did not favor correct recitation of the tougher names in Deuteronomy; so, it can be a cause of surprise to no one, that, when called on at prayers, and prompted by a ridiculous neighbor, little Briggs sometimes asserted Joshua to have driven out the Hivites and the Amorites, and the Canaanites and the Jebusites, and the Hittites and the Perizzites, and the Moabites and the Musquito-bites, for which he was regularly sent to bed on Saturday afternoon, as he had no pocket-money to stop, his papa desiring him to learn self-denial young, as he was intended for a missionary; though goodness knows that there wasn't enough of him to go round among many heathen.

From this specimen of discipline may be learned the entire Barkerian system of training. I was about to say, "_ex uno disce omnes_," but, as it's the only Latin I remember from the lot which got rubbed into--or rather over--me at Barker's, I'm rather sparing of it, not knowing but I can bring it in somewhere else with better effect. As with the Word of God, so with that of man,--the grand Barkerian idea of how to fix it in a boy's memory was to send him to bed, or excoriate his palm. If religion and polite learning could have been communicated by sheets, like chicken-pox, or blistered into one like the stern but curative cantharides, Mr. Barker's boys would have become the envy of mankind and the beloved of the gods; but not even Little Briggs died young from the latter or any other cause, which speaks volumes for his constitution....

The two Misses Moodle came to establish a young ladies' seminary in the village of Mungerville, on whose outskirts our own school was situated, bringing along with them, as the county paper stated, "that charming atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality in which they ever moved"; and, what was of more consequence, a capital of twenty girls to start with. Professional politeness inspired Mr. Barker to make a call on the fair strangers, which the personal fascinations of the younger Miss Moodle induced him to repeat. The atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality gradually acted on him in the nature of an intoxicating gas, until at length, after twenty-five years of successfully intrenched widowhood, he laid his heart in the mits of the younger Miss Moodle, and the two became one Barker.

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 Saturday 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 passion 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-balls, 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 assistant 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 passing her the sandwiches, I came very near dropping the plate; and when I had a chance to open it unobserved, 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 circumstances,--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.