Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

ing under his feet, but in reality the two regarded Rule from points as far removed from each other as those of Luther and Voltaire. Carlyle's ideal was one of a Royal Necessity, an incarnate law indifferent to the crushed in its marchings and rulings,-burly, brutal, contemptuous of the luckless individual or the overtaken straggler; his Rule exists not for the sake of humanity, but for that of Order, as if Order and Rule were called out for their own sake; he puffs into perdition the trivial details of individual men, closing accounts by ignoring the fractions. Ruskin loses sight of no detail, but calls in to the benefit of his Order and Rule every child and likeness of a child in larger form, full of a tenderness which is utterly human yet inexhaustible. Carlyle's Ruler is like a Viking's god, his conception utterly pagan; Ruskin's is Christlike; Carlyle's word is like the mace of Charlemagne, Ruskin's like the sword of the Angel Gabriel; if Ruskin is notably egotistical, Carlyle is utterly selfish; if Ruskin dogmatizes like an Evan

gelist, Carlyle poses as a Prophet; and the difference, when we come to sum up all the qualities, moral, intellectual, and literary, seems to me to be in favor of Ruskin. Their ideals are similarly antithetical,- Ruskin's lying in a hopeful future, an unattainable Utopia, perhaps, but still a blessed dream; Carlyle's in a return to a brutal and barren past, made forever impossible by the successful assertion of human individuality, and for whose irrevocability we thank God with all our hearts and in all hope of human progress. The public estimate has not overrated Ruskin, just as he had not overrated Turner, because the aggregate impression of power received was adequate to the cause; but in the one case as in the other the mistake has been relative, and consisted in misestimating the genius and attributing the highest value to the wrong item in the aggregate. I may be mistaken in my estimate of Ruskin, but I believe that the future will exalt him above it rather than depress him below it. W. J. Stillman.

I

WOULD I were as eagles are, That I might fly o'er hill and plain, A trackless course; defenseless, bare To the cold dash of mountain rain, But armed against a world of pain. Or that I were as morning dove That shoots into her forest green; Or that I had the wings of love, The spirit speed, and heart serene,

THE HAWK.

But yesterday a Hawk I saw !
Full-poised he hung in the clear blue,
And servant to no stricter law
Than will or wish, he seemed to view
The city's circuits; — yet he knew
A freer heaven, and hills. My mind
Grew troubled for his fate. I stood,
And pausing pitied him, designed
For freedom and the fastness rude:

Forgetting all to be once more as I have Had hunger urged, or cold or tempest him

been.

For now I live where none rejoice;

I move amid a world of woe.

How from its husky throat the voice

Of the great city sounds below,
Hoarse, indistinct; - these hills of snow
Are shamed with foulness; the clear sky
Is lowered from its haughty height,
And hangs like dingy drapery,
And shifts but changes not; and white,
Pallid, and thin the sun sends down unlovely
light.

subdued?

Oh, weary lot! would thou wert dead!
When sudden he did his wings unbind,
And down the sky like light he fled
Borne on the bosom of the wind,
And left nor track nor trace behind!
And he was free! and free were I
Love should not stop, hate should not stay,
Nor strength deter, nor orb descry,

Nor fraud impede, nor doubt delay
Thy upward flight, O Soul! through darkness
to the day!

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell.

OLD

THE OLD MAN AND JIM.

LD man never had much to say -
'Ceptin' to Jim,-

And Jim was the wildest boy he had-
And the Old man jes' wrapped up in him!
Never heerd him speak but once

Er twice in my life,- and first time was
When the army broke out, and Jim he went,
The Old man backin' him, fer three months.
And all 'at I heerd the Old man say
Was, jes' as we turned to start away,-
"Well; good-bye, Jim:

Take keer of yourse'f!"

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

Never was nothin' about the farm
Disting'ished Jim;-
Neighbors all ust to wonder why

The Old man 'peared wrapped up in him: But when Cap. Biggler, he writ back 'At Jim was the bravest boy we had In the whole dern rigiment, white er black, And his fightin' good as his farmin' bad'At he had led, with a bullet clean

Bored through his thigh, and carried the flag
Through the bloodiest battle you ever seen,-
The Old man wound up a letter to him
'At Cap. read to us, 'at said,-"Tell Jim
Good-bye;

And take keer of hisse'f."

Jim come back jes' long enough

To take the whim

'At he'd like to go back in the calveryAnd the Old man jes' wrapped up in him!

Jim 'lowed 'at he 'd had sich luck afore,
Guessed he 'd tackle her three years more.
And the Old man give him a colt he'd raised
And follered him over to Camp Ben Wade,
And laid around fer a week er so,
Watchin' Jim on dress-parade-
Tel finally he rid away,

And last he heerd was the Old man say,"Well; good-bye, Jim:

Take keer of yourse'f!"

Tuk the papers, the Old man did,
A-watchin' fer Jim-

Fully believin' he 'd make his mark

Some way-jes' wrapped up in him! And many a time the word 'u'd come 'At stirred him up like the tap of a drum At Petersburg, fer instance, where Jim rid right into their cannons there, And tuk 'em, and p'inted 'em t' other way, And socked it home to the boys in gray, As they skooted fer timber, and on and on Jim a lieutenant and one arm gone, And the Old man's words in his mind all day,

"Well; good-bye, Jim:

Take keer of yourse'f!"

Think of a private, now, perhaps, We'll say like Jim,

[ocr errors]

'At's clumb clean up to the shoulder-straps

And the Old man jes' wrapped up in him! Think of him with the war plum' through, And the glorious old Red-White-and-Blue A-laughin' the news down over Jim And the Old man, bendin' over him The surgeon turnin' away with tears 'At had n't leaked fer years and years As the hand of the dyin' boy clung to His father's, the old voice in his ears,"Well; good-bye, Jim:

Take keer of yourse'f!"

James Whitcomb Riley.

[graphic]

THE GRAYSONS: A STORY OF ILLINOIS.*

BY EDWARD EGGLESTON,

Author of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," "The Circuit Rider," "Roxy," etc.

VIII.

BARBARA'S PRIVATE AFFAIRS.

ROM childhood Barbara's ambition had centered in Tom: it was her plan that the clever brother should give standing to the family by his success in life. If Tom could only be persuaded to be steady, he might come to be a great man. A great man, in her thinking, was a member of the State legislature, or a circuit judge, for example: to her provincial imagination the heights above these were hazy and almost inaccessible. The scheme of a professional career for Tom had been her own, in conception and management; for though her brother was nearly two years her senior, she, being prudent and forecasting, had always played the part of an elder. Tom's undeniable "brightness" was a great source of pride to her. In spite of his heedless collisions with the masters, he was always at the head of his classes; and it seemed to Barbara the most natural thing in the world that she, being a girl, should subordinate herself to the success of a brother so promising. She had left school to devote herself to the house and the cares of the farm, in order that Tom might be educated-in the moderate sense of the word then prevalent. The brother was far from being ungrateful: if he accepted his sister's sacrifices without protest, he repaid her with a demonstrative affection and admiration not often seen in brothers; and there were times when he almost reverenced in her that prudence and practical wisdom in which he found himself deficient.

It was only during this summer that Barbara had been seized with independent aspirations for herself; and perhaps even these were not without some relation to Tom. If Tom should come to be somebody in the county, she would sit in a reflected light as his sister. It became her, therefore, not to neglect entirely her own education. To go to Moscow to a winter school was out of the question. Every nerve was strained to extricate the farm from debt and to give a little help, now and then, to Tom. It chanced,

however, that a student from an incipient Western college, intent on getting money to pay his winter's board bills, had that summer opened a "pay school" in the Timber Creek district school-house, which was only two miles from the Grayson farm.

Those who could attend school in the summer were, for the most part, small fry too young to be of much service in the field, and such girls, larger and smaller, as could be spared from home. But the appetite for "schooling" in the new country was always greater than the supply; and when it was reported that a school was "to be took up" in the Timber Creek school-house, by a young man who had not only "ciphered plumb through the Rule of Three," but had even begun to penetrate the far-away mysteries of Latin and algebra, it came to pass that several young men and young women, living beyond the district limits, subscribed to the school, that they might attend it, even if only irregularly;- not that any of the pupils dreamed of attacking the Latin, but a teacher who had attained this Ultima Thule of human learning was supposed to know well all that lay on the hither side of it. The terms of a "pay school," in that day, were low enough,-a dollar and twenty-five cents was the teacher's charge for each pupil for thirteen weeks; but the new schoolmaster had walked from home to avoid traveling expenses, the log school-house cost him no rent, and he had stipulated that he should "board 'round" in the families of his patrons, so that the money he received from twenty pupils was clear profit, and at the price of living in those primitive times would pay his board at college for six months.

Barbara, for one, had resolved to treat herself to a dollar and a quarter's worth of additional learning. The Timber Creek schoolhouse was on the road leading to the village of Moscow: she could therefore catch a ride, now and then, on the wagon of some farmer bound to the village, by mounting on top of a load of wood, hay, or potatoes; and often she got a lift in the evening in a neighbor's empty wagon rattling homeward from town, or for a part of the way by sitting in the tail of some ox-cart plying between forest and prairie; but more frequently she had to walk

* Copyright, 1887, by Edward Eggleston. All rights reserved.

[graphic]

both in going and coming, besides working early and late at her household duties.

Hiram Mason was the name of the new teacher whom the pupils found behind the master's desk on the first day of school. He was the son of a minister who had come out from New England with the laudable intention of lending a hand in evangelizing this great strapping West, whose vigorous and rather boisterous youth was ever a source of bewilderment, and even a cause of grief, to the minds of well-regulated Down-easters. The evangelists sent out aimed at the impossible, even at the undesirable, in seeking to reproduce a New England in communities born under a different star. Perhaps it was this peninsular trait of mind that prevented the self-denying missionaries from making any considerable impression on the country south of the belt peopled by the current of migration from New England. The civilization of the broad, wedgeshaped region on the north side of the Ohio River, which was settled by Southern and Middle State people, and which is the great land of the Indian corn, has been evolved out of the healthier elements of its own native constitution. But it was indebted to New England, in the time of its need, for many teachers of arithmetic and grammar, as well as for the less-admirable but neverto-be-forgotten clock-peddlers and tin-peddlers from Connecticut, who also taught the rustics of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois things they had never dreamed of before, and took high pay for the instruction. Young Mason, though he had mostly grown up in the new country, and would have scorned the name of Yankee, had got from his father that almost superstitious faith in the efficacy of knowledge which, in the North-eastern States, has been handed down from generation to generation, and which has produced much learning and not a little pedantry. Mason was of middle stature, good breadth of shoulder, prominent, broad forehead, and brows that overhung his eyes, but were rather high above them. He had a well-set chin and a solid jaw; his mouth was too large to be handsome and was firmly closed; his gait was strong, straightforward, resolute, and unhurried. There were little touches of eccentricity in him he had a way of looking at an interlocutor askance, and his habitual expression was one of mingled shyness and selfcontained amusement. The religious enthusiasm of his father had been transmuted in him to a general earnestness of character, which was veiled under a keen perception of the droll side of life, derived from a mother of Southern extraction. His early-and-late diligence in study was the wonder of the coun

:

try, but the tastes and aspirations that impelled him to so much toil rarely found utterance in any confessions, even to his nearest friends. Reserved as he was, the people could never complain that he held himself above them. A new-country youth, the son of a minister on slender pay, Hiram understood how to extend a helping hand, when occasion required, in any work that might be going on. At school; when the young master saw the boys playing at the boisterous and promiscuous "soak-about," he would sometimes catch the contagion of the wild fun, and, thrusting his "Livy" into the desk, rush out of the door to mix in the confusion, throwing the yarn ball at one and another with a vigor and an accuracy of aim that doubled the respect of his pupils for him. But when once he had extricated himself from the mêlée, and had rapped on the door-frame with his ruler, crying, "Books, books!" the boy who a minute before had enjoyed the luxury of giving the master what was known in schoolboy lingo as a "sockdolager," delivered full in the back, or even on the side of the head, did not find any encouragement to presume on that experience in school hours.

The new master's punishments usually had a touch of his drollery in them; he contrived to make the culprit ridiculous, and so to keep the humor of the school on his side. A girl who could not otherwise be cured of munching in school had to stand in front of the master's desk with an apple in her teeth; a boy who was wont to get his sport by pinching his neighbors, and sticking them with pins, was forced to make no end of amusement for the school in his turn, by standing on the hearth with a cleft stick pinching his nose out of shape. It was soon concluded that there was no fun in "fooling" with a master who was sure to turn the joke on the offender.

The older pupils who occupied the "writing bench," in front of a continuous shelf-like desk fixed along the wall, spent much of their time in smuggling from one to another fervid little love-notes, which, for disguise, were folded like the "thumb-papers" that served to protect their books from the wear and tear of their over-vigorous thumbs, and from soiling. By passing books from one to another, with such innocent-looking square papers in them, a refreshing correspondence was kept up. This exchange of smuggled billets-doux was particularly active when Rachel Albaugh was present. As for the love-letters thus dispatched, they were fearfully monotonous and not worth the pains of capture by a schoolmaster. Some were straightforward and shameless declarations of admiration and affection in prose scrawls, but a very common sort was com

posed entirely of one or another of those wellworn doggerel couplets that have perhaps done duty since the art of writing became known to the Anglo-Saxons.

"If you love me as I love you,

No knife can cut our love in two,"

the arithmetic would be, according to the standard of the country, to have a liberal education, and she was ambitious enough to like that. But where would she get the money to buy a text-book? She did n't wish to confess her scruple of economy. It was not that she was ashamed of her poverty, for poverty might

was a favorite with the swains of the country be said to be the prevailing fashion in the school-house; but

"The rose is red, the violet 's blue,
Sugar's sweet, and so are you,"

had a molasses-like consistency in its alliterative lines that gave it the preference over all other love poems extant.

Amongst these unblushing scribblers of love doggerel and patient cutters and folders of many sorts of thumb-papers, whose fits of studying, like chills and fever, came on only "by spells," Barbara sat without being one of them. The last chance for education was not to be thrown away; and Mason soon singled out this rather under-sized, sharp-eyed girl, not only as the most industrious and clever of the pupils in the Timber Creek school, but as a person of quite another sort from the rest of them. When he was explaining anything to a group of half-listless scholars, her dark eyes, drawn to beads, almost startled him with their concentrated interest. She could not be taught in any kind of classification with the rest; her rate of progress was too rapid. So, finding that Barbara studied all through the recess time, he undertook to give her extra instruction while the others were on the playground. The most agreeable minutes of his day were those in which he unfolded to her the prosaic principles of Vulgar Fractions, of Tare and Tret, and of the Rule of Three. This last was the great and final goal, and it was attained by few of those who attended an intermittent country school in that time. To reach it was to become competent to teach school. Barbara, with the help of the master, who directed her to save time by omitting some of the rubbish of Pike's Arithmetic, was soon in sight of this promised land of the Rule of Three, and it became a question of reviewing the book once more, when she should be through with it, so as to take rank among those who would certainly "do every sum in the book." "Why not take up algebra ?" said the teacher to her, during a long noon recess as they sat side by side at his desk poring over a slate full of figures.

"Do you think I could learn it?" she asked.

"You could learn anything," he said; and the assurance gave Barbara more pleasure than any commendation she had ever received. But she did not know what to reply. To go beyond

Timber Creek country; but it would be bringing to Mason's attention her private affairs, and from that she shrank with an instinct of delicacy for which she could not have given any reason. Yet there sat Mason, leaning back and waiting for her to reply to his question. After a few moments she mustered courage to ask timidly:

"Would the book cost much?"

"I would n't buy any book just now," said the master, seeing the drift of her thoughts. He went to one corner of the school-room, and, standing on the bench, pushed aside one of the boards laid loosely over the joists above. It was here, in the dark loft, that he kept the few articles not necessary to his daily existence in boarding 'round. Reaching his hand up above the boards, he found a copy of a school text-book on algebra, and brought it down with him, rapping it against his hand and blowing the dust off it.

"Use that for a while," he said.

"Oh, thank you!" said Barbara, taking hold of the book with a curious sense of reverence, which was greatly increased as she turned the leaves and regarded the symbols, whose nature and use were quite inconceivable to her. Here was a knowledge beyond any that she had ever dreamed of looking into; beyond that of any schoolmaster she had ever known, except Mason. "It looks hard," she said, regarding him.

"Take it home and try it," he replied, as he took up his ruler to call the scholars to books.

A closer companionship now grew up between the master and the pupil. Both of them anticipated with pleasure the coming of recess time, when the new study could be discussed together. Henceforth the boys looked in vain for Mason to take a turn with them in playing soak-about.

To a man of high aims nothing is more delightful than to have a devoted disciple. Even the self-contained Mason could not be quite unmoved in contemplating this young girl, all of whose tastes and ambitions flowed in the same channel with his own, listening to him as to an oracle. If he had not been so firmly fixed in his resolve that he would not allow any woman to engage his affections before he had completed his college course, he might have come to fall in love with her. But all such thoughts he resolutely put aside. Of

« AnteriorContinuar »