Chapter VI: Part 6

When we alighted from the train, a large factory greeted our vision, across the road from the railway station. We walked up a faintly familiar street to the village square. There we paused, with wry faces. Six trolley lines converged in its centre, and out of the surrounding country were rolling in great cars, as big almost as Pullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut trees that once lined the walks were down, to expose more brazenly to view the rows of tawdry little shops. These trees had once furnished shade and ammunition. I had to smile at the sign above the new fish-market--

IF IT SWIMS--WE HAVE IT.

But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, rising behind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of the old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses had disappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the head of the common looked down benignly, unchanged.

"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old Hundred murmured, as we hastened northward, out of the village.

After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, "It ought to be around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anything out, for these new houses."

"There was a lane down to it," said I, "and woods beyond."

"Sure," he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman's field."

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. "Come on down to Kingman's, fellers," I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch, in somebody's back yard. It was very small.

"This ain't Kingman's," wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar in his grief. "Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over right field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!"

There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. "See," said I, trying to be cheerful, "here's where home was." And I rooted up a potato sprout viciously. "You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing the bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn't any more."

"Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League'," said Old Hundred, "and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?"

He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.

"Here's something, anyhow," said Old Hundred. "You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!"

"About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were," said I. "Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em."

"Then times would be changed," said he, smiling a little.

We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain view of half a dozen houses. "Why" cried Old Hundred, "it was miles away from _anything_!"

I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in his hand. "You ought to be wearing red mittens," said I, "and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod bent."

"The ramrod was always bent," said he. "It kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be."

"I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy--soon enough," I answered.

Just then a whistle shrieked. "Good Lord," said Old Hundred, "there's one of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, past Sandy."

"Let's take it!" I cried.

He looked at me savagely. "We'll walk!" he said.

"But it's miles and miles," I remonstrated.

"Nevertheless," said he, "we'll walk."

It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughtered forest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by the school-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in the ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a few stones. We paused sadly by the ruins.

"I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now," said I. "Centralization, you know."

"There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went all across the room," Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. "If you sat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze. Do you remember Miss Campbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes--

Three little mice ran up the stairs
To hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers;
And when they heard her say Amen,
The three little mice ran down again.

And, gee but you were the punk speller! Remember how there was always a spelling match Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you fell down on 'nausea.' You'd lasted pretty well that day, for you; everybody'd gone down but you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or two more. But when Biddy Campbell put that word up to you, you looked it, if you couldn't spell it!"

"Hum," said I, "I wouldn't rub it in, if I were you. I seem to recall a public day when old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked you what was the largest bird that flies, and you said, 'The Kangaroo.'"

Old Hundred grinned. "That's the day the new boy laughed," said he. "Remember the new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby which we used to push down over his eyes? Sometimes in the yard one of us would squat behind him, and then somebody else would push him over backward. We made him walk Spanish, too. But after that public day he and I went way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting-house in the village, and had it out. I wonder why we always fought in the holy horse-sheds? The ones behind the town hall were never used for that purpose."

This was true, but I couldn't explain it. "We couldn't always wait to get to the horse-sheds, as I remember it," said I. "Sometimes we couldn't wait to get out of sight of school."

I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-and-seek spots. The barn and the carriage-shed across the road were still there, with cracks yawning between the mouse-gray boards. The shed was also ideal for "Anthony over." And in the pasture behind the school stood the great boulder, by the sassafras tree. "I'll bet you can't count out," said I.

"Pooh!" said Old Hundred. He raised his finger, pointed it at an imaginary line of boys and girls, and chanted--

"Acker, backer, soda cracker,
Acker, backer, boo!
If yer father chews terbacker,
Out goes you.

And now you're it," he finished pointing at me.

I was not to be outdone. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty,--" I began to mumble. Then, "One thousand!" I shouted.

"Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,
All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!"

I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it fall. It fell toward the boulder. "You're up in the sassafras tree," I said.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's Benny."

Then we looked at each other and laughed.

"You poor old idiot," said Old Hundred.

"You doddering imbecile," said I, "come on up to Sandy."

Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to be miles. We passed by Myrtie Swett's house on the way. It stood back from the turnpike just as ever, with its ample doorway, its great shadowing elms, its air of haughty well-being. Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something of a social queen. She was very beautiful and she affected ennui.

"Oh, dear, bread and beer,
If I was home I shouldn't be here!"

she used to say at parties, with a tired air that was the secret envy of the other little girls, who were unable to conceal their pleasure at being "here." However, Myrtie never went home, we noticed. Rather did she take a leading part in every game of Drop-the-handkerchief, Post Office, or Copenhagen--tinglingly thrilling games, with unknown possibilities of a sentimental nature.

"If I thought she still lived in the old place, I'd go up and tell her I had a letter for her," said Old Hundred.

"She'd probably give you a stamp," I replied.

"Not unless she's changed!" he grinned.

But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several children played in the yard. There was the face of a strange woman at the window, a very plain woman, who looked old, as she peered keenly at the two urban passers.

"It _can't_ be Myrtie!" I heard Old Hundred mutter, as he hastened on.

Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in the world. It was, as most swimming holes are, on the down-stream side of a bridge. The little river widened out, on its way through the meadows, here and there into swimming holes of greater or less desirability. There was Lob's Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandy was the best of them all. It was shaded on one side by great trees, and the banks were hidden from the road by alder screens. At one end there was a shelving bottom, of clean sand, where the "little kids" who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the opposite bank the water ran deep for diving. And in mid-stream the pool was so very deep that nobody had ever been able to find bottom there. In the other holes, you could hold your hands over your head and go down till your feet touched, without wetting your fingers. But not the longest fish-line had ever been long enough to plumb Sandy's depths. Indeed, it was popularly believed that there was _no_ bottom in Sandy, and a mythical horn pout, of gigantic proportions, was supposed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses.

Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and looked down on a little pool. "I could jump across it now," he sighed. "But I wish it were a warmer day. I'd go in, just the same."

There was a honk up the road, and a touring car jolted over the boards behind us, with a load of veils and goggles. The dust sifted through the bridge, and we heard it patter on the water below.

"I fancy there's more travel now," said I. "And the alder screen seems to be gone. Perhaps we'd better not go in."

Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white rail--the sign of a State highway; for the dusty old Turnpike was now converted into a gray strip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles, with a trolley track at one side.

"There's a lucky bug on the water," he said presently. "If we were in now, we might catch him, and make our fortunes."

"And get our clothes tied up," said I.

"As I recall it, you were the prize beef chawer," he remarked. "I never could see why you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini act. I used to soak the knots in your shirt and dry 'em, and soak 'em again; but you always untied 'em, often without using your teeth, either."

"You couldn't, though," I grinned.

"Charlo beef,
The beef was tough,
Poor Old Hundred
Couldn't get enough!

"How many times have you gone home barefoot, with your stockings and your undershirt, in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?"

"Not many," said he.

"What?" said I.

"It wasn't often that I wore stockings and an undershirt in swimming season," he answered. "Don't you remember being made to soak your feet in a tub on the back porch before going to bed, and going fast asleep in the process?"

"If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn to a snake," I replied, irrelevantly.

"Anybody knows that," said Old Hundred. "If you toss a fish back in the water before you're done fishing, you won't get any more bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Bet yer I can swim farther under the water 'n you can. Come on, it isn't very cold."

I looked hesitantly at the pool.

"Stump yer!" he taunted.

I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we had quite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old man alighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brown water. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up the cross-road, came over to us.

("Know him?" I whispered.)

("Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the white top?" said Old Hundred. "Lord, is it so many years ago!")

"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I.

"Thot I didn't mistake ye," said the old man, putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand. "Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to look over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't know it myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face."

"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked Old Hundred.

"I don't calc'late thar be any," said the old man. "The gol durn trolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's no good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam. Maybe the little fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em splashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in the kitchen, same's in winter."

"But the boys must swim somewhere," said I.

"I presume likely they go to the beaches," said Henry Flint. "I see 'em ridin' off in the trolley."

"Yes," said I, "it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleys so thick."

"It's too durn easy," he commented. "Thar hain't a place ye can't git to, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on 'em."

He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer father wus a fine man," he said to Old Hundred--"a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wus born."

Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently a return trolley approached.

"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "They go everywhere and carry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the country houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one."

We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew near a cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and we signalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turned silently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame houses along the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw cows lying down in a pasture.

"It's going to rain," said I.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign when they lie down first thing in the morning."

Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, lay familiar--how familiar!--to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset.

"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper," said Old Hundred.

"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six," said I, "and the Cap'n one hundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"

"It doesn't seem so," he answered. "It seems only yesterday that we met up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns, and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up at Betsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?"

"I remember," said I, "the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'n Charles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next day you did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there were times when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave you a walloping."

"It was some walloping, too," said Old Hundred, with a reminiscent grin. "It would be a good time now," he added, "to swipe melons, if Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stems connected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought to have taken out a patent on that invention!"

He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. "How small the orchard is now," he mused. "The trees are like little old women. And look at Crow's Nest--it used to be a hundred feet high."

The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn over in bed?"

"Always," Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn over now, but it was years before I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got that superstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up in Crow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walked around the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other side without turning over. Remember?"

I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well we dug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars for the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holding the prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of the twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place, followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around, silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bent sharply down. "Dig there," said Solon. He examined the twig to see if the bark was twisted. It was, so he added, "Bent hard. Won't have ter dig more'n ten foot." We dug twenty-six, but water came. And such water!

"I want some of that water," said I. "I don't want to go into the house; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some of that water."

We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid bounding down against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull splash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house. Old Hundred recognized him first.

"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he cried. "We've come to get our hair cut."

Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. "Yes," he said, "I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them. John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it none. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout three year back--got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears."

A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. "Clarkie," he said, "you were always up on such things--is it rats or warts that you write a note to when you want 'em to go away?"

"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded, for the first time, of our real quest.

"Why," said Clarkie, "you must be sure to make the note very partic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that."

"Yes, yes," said we, "but is it warts or rats?"

"Well," said Clarkie, "it's both."

We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly.

"Only thar's a better way fer warts," Clarkie went on. "I knew a boy once who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually to sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five cents fer yer warts,' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn,' and then they go. Fact."

We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like a checkered carpet over the low hills--the sweet, familiar hills. For an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we were boys again.

"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heard the thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind, with the peeled switch," he added, "looking dreamily up at the first star, and wishing on it--wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'm sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go."

As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap frame houses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the corner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman's field. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boarded the Boston train, rather cross for want of supper.

"I wonder," said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, "whether we'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?"

_Mumblety-peg and Middle Age_

Old Hundred and I were taking our Saturday afternoon walk in the country--that is, in such suburbanized country as we could achieve in the neighborhood of New York. We had passed innumerable small boys and not a few small girls, but save for an occasional noisy group on a base-ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing any definite games.

"Did we use to wander aimlessly round that way?" asked Old Hundred.

"We did not," said I. "If it wasn't marbles in spring or tops in autumn it was duck-on-the-rock or stick-knife or----"

"Only we didn't call it stick-knife," said Old Hundred, "we called it mumblety-peg."

"We called it stick-knife," said I.

"Your memory is curiously bad," said Old Hundred. "You are always forgetting about these important matters. It was mumblety-peg."

"My memory bad!" I sniffed. "I suppose you think I've forgotten how I always licked you at stick-knife?"

Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin, to-day as much as thirty years ago, is a mask for some coming trouble. He always grinned before he sailed into the other fellow, which was an effective way to catch the other fellow off his guard. I presume he grins now before he cross-questions a witness. "I'll play you a game right now," he said softly.

"You're on," said I.

We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a roadside fence. It was in reality a part of somebody's yard, but it was the best we could do. I still carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to whittle with when we go for a walk, and this I produced and opened, handing it to Old Hundred. "Now begin," said I, as we squatted down.

He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by the blade, then by the handle. "Wha--what do you do first?" he finally asked.

"Do?" said I. "Don't you remember?"

"No," he replied, "and neither do you."

"Give me the knife," I cried. I relied on the feel of it in my hand to awaken a dormant muscular memory to help me out. But no muscular memory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me with a smile. "Begin, begin!" he urged.

"Let's see," said I, "I think you took it first by the tip of the blade, this way, and made it stick up." I threw the knife. It stuck, but almost lay upon the ground.

"You've got to get two fingers under it," said Old Hundred. He tried, but there wasn't room. "You fail," he cried. "There's a point for me."

"Not till you've made it stick," said I.

We grew interested in our game. We threw the knife from our nose and chin, we dropped it from our forehead, we jumped it over our hand, we half-closed the blade and tossed it that way, and finally, when the talley was reckoned up in my favor, I began to look about for a stick to whittle into the peg.

Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. "Here," I cried. "You're not done yet!"

"Oh, yes I am!" he answered.

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted.

"That may be," said he, "but a learned lawyer of forty-five with a dirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy you a dinner when we get to town."

"Oh, very well," said I, peevishly, "but I didn't think you'd so degenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife."

"I'll admit it," said Old Hundred. "I suppose in a minute you'll ask me to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo."

"What _was_ relievo, by the way?" I asked.

"Relievo--relievo?" said Old Hundred. "Why that was a game we played mostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we got tired of hockey, we all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line around the pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he got around, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody was caught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start."

"I remember that game," said I. "I remember how Frank White, who could skate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd get around a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile of ice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't many playing, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't think that game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me."

"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred.

"I don't know," I answered. "It's funny how you forget things."

By this time we were strolling along the road again. "Speaking of Birch Meadow," said Old Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids used to have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pitying the poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on a half-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever forget that mile-long pond in the woods, not deep enough to drown in anywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early as Thanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon as school was out!"

"Do you remember," said I, "how we passed it last year, and found the woods all cut and the water drained off?"

"Don't be a wet blanket," said Old Hundred, crossly. "The country has to grow."

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was on him. I repented of my speech. "Yes," I answered. "No doubt the country has to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the fire department. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners nor that long-drawn echo from the wooded shores when a crack crosses the ice."

"I can see it all this minute," said Old Hundred. "I can see my little self like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the crowd. We had chosen up sides--ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the shores, were put down for goals. Most of us had hockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bit of the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys who could afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Pratt was always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice, against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles of white pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the ice sagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from the maze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action, panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautiful sight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roar of the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!"

I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick got caught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie made!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where my anatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface."

Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals we were!" he said. "I suppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because we live in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city, dirtied all over with its spawn. Lord, Bill, think if we'd been cramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for a skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds, and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poor beggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play a game! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the American spirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'em playing anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smut an otherwise attractive landscape."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of space and free open in the city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasons there grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by a kind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitation of the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks after the frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of the season, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey to the ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games as hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at one period, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, they didn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these game periods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground and climate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in the artificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may be wild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which we accepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as our parents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature which surrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids' games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't help believing that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, for thousands of children, of one more game."

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding his head approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt," he said. "I shall hereafter regard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bear an inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw some poor little duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak with a tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts."

"They die hard," said I.

We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, the outskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly walking about.

"Why don't they _do_ something," Old Hundred exclaimed, half to himself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.

Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, who stopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever play duck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarrassed friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood. After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boy as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.

The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how," he said. "They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State all the time."

"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in an aside to me.

"You're a liar," said one of the other boys. "We ain't afraid, are we Bill?"

"Naw," said Bill.

"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling his fists. "I'll knock your block off in about a minute."

"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the other.

Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not fight, let's play," he said. "If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to learn, boys?"

They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion of their class, decided in his favor, and assented. Like all men, Old Hundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severest critics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed it on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck, Old Hundred tried to count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn the job over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:

"As I went up to Salt Lake
I met a little rattlesnake,
He'd e't so much of jelly cake,
It made his little belly ache."

When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a smiling by-stander. "Hi," he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'."

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hundred.

I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of a learned _litterateur_ of forty-five, but my speech was drowned in a derisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable, and hunted myself out a duck.

After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by those supernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again to pick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and sometimes not succeeding, I was quite ready to quit. Old Hundred, flushed and perspiring, was playing as if his life depended on it. When he was tagged, he took his turn as It without a murmur. He was one of the kids, and they knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in his bones. We left the boys still playing, quite careless of whether we went or stayed. We were dusty and hot; our hands were scratched and grimed. "Ah!" said Old Hundred, looking back, "I've accomplished something to-day and had a good time doing it! The ungrateful little savages; they might have said good-bye."

"Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg for me," I said.

"My dear fellow," he replied, "that is quite different. To take a dare from a man is childish. Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly."

"You talk like G. K. Chesterton," said I.

"Which shows that occasionally Chesterton is right," said he. "Speaking of dares, I'd like to see a gang of kids playing dares or follow-your-leader right now. Remember how we used to play follow-your-leader by the hour? You had to do just what he did, like a row of sheep. When there were girls in the game, you always ended up by turning a somersault, which was a subtle jest never to be too much enjoyed."

"And Alice Perkins used to take that dare, too, I remember," said I.

"Alice never could bear to be stumped," he mused. "She's either become a mighty fine woman or a bad one. She was the only girl we ever allowed to perform in the circuses up in your backyard. Often we wouldn't even admit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you painted to that effect? She was the lady trapeze artist and bareback rider. You were the bareback, as I recall it--or was it Fatty Newell? Anyhow, one of her stunts was to hang by her legs and drink a tumbler of water."

I felt my muscles. "I wonder," said I, "if I could still skin the cat?"

"I'll bet I can chin myself ten times," said Old Hundred.

We cast about for a convenient limb. There was an apple-tree beside the road, with a horizontal limb some eight feet above the ground. I tried first. I got myself over all right, till I hung inverted, my fountain-pen, pencil, and eyeglass case falling out of my pocket. But there I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to pull me up. So I curled clean over and dropped to the ground, very red in the face, my clothes covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old Hundred grasped the limb to chin himself. He got up once easily, he got up a second time with difficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort, the veins standing out on his forehead. The fourth time he stuck two inches off the ground.

"'You are old, Father William,'" I quoted.

He rubbed his biceps sadly. "I'm out of practice!" he said with some asperity. But we tried no more stunts on the apple-tree.

Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail fence, gray and old, with brambles growing at the intersections--one of the relics of an elder day in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked at it as he put on his coat.

"There ought to be a bumblebees' nest in that fence," he said. "If we should poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over rotted wood from our fingers."

"Are you looking for trouble?" I asked. "However, if you hold your breath, a bee can't sting you."

"I recall that ancient superstition--with pain," he smiled. "Why does a bee have such a fascination for a boy? Is it because he makes honey?"

"Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's because he's a bee," I answered. "Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets' nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer? We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, and nobody could get back in the door without being stung. It was against the unwritten law to stone the school-house nests in vacation time!"

"Recess!" mused Old Hundred. "Do you know, sometimes in court when the judge announces a recess (which he pronounces with the accent on the second syllable, a manifest error), those old school-days come back to me, and my case drops clean out of my head for the moment."

"I should think that would be embarrassing," said I.

"It isn't," he said, "it's restful. Besides, it often restores my mislaid sense of humor. I picture the judge out in a school-yard playing leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prosecution and the foreman of the jury. It makes 'em more human to see 'em so."

"A Gilbertian idea, to say the least," I smiled. "Why not set the whole court to playing squat-tag?"

"There was step-tag, too," said Old Hundred. "Remember that? The boy or girl who was It shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened his eyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you moving you became It. On 'ten' you tried to freeze into stiffness. We must have struck some funny attitudes."

"Attitudes," said I, "that was another game. Somebody said 'fear' or 'cat' or 'geography,' and you had to assume an attitude expressive of the word. The girls liked that game."

"Oh, the girls always liked games where they could show off or get personal attention," replied Old Hundred. "They liked hide-and-seek because you came after them, or because you took one of 'em and went off with her alone to hide behind the wood-shed. They liked kissing games best, though--drop-the-handkerchief and post-office."

"Those weren't recess games," I amended. "Those were party games. You played them when you had your best clothes on, which entirely changed your mental attitude, anyhow. When a girl dropped the handkerchief behind you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you could, and when you got a letter in post-office you had to go into the next room and be kissed. Everybody tittered at you when you came back."

"Well, soak and scrub were recess games, anyhow. I can hear that glad yell, 'Scrub one!' rising from the first boy who burst out of the school-house door. Then there were dare-base, and foot-ball, which we used to play with an old bladder, or at best a round, black rubber ball, not one of these modern leather lemons. We used to kick it, too. I don't remember tackling and rushing, till we got older and went to prep school--or you and I went to prep school."

"I'd hate to have been tackled on the old school playground," said I. "It was hard as rocks."

"It _was_ rocks," said Old Hundred. "You could spin a top on it anywhere."

"Could you spin a top now?" I asked.

"Sure!" said Old Hundred. "And pop at a snapper, too."

"It's wicked to play marbles for keeps," said I impressively. "Only the bad boys do that."

"Poor mother!" said Old Hundred. "Remember the marble rakes we used to make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for the owner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went into the kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences of gambling."

"I know," said I. "It was almost as terrible as sending 'comic valentines.' Remember the 'comics'? They were horribly colored lithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought 'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles wouldn't sell 'em."

"Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "Shall you ever forget Emily Ruggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a flight of steps--a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it was just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars' companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for all her forbidding manner."

"Of course she loved us," said I. "She loved her country, too. Don't you remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil War, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poor woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us. She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see such shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops and marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important any longer."

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a hill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun. Old Hundred sat down on a stone.

"I'm weary," he said, "and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore and forty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You look ridiculous."

"Shut up," said I, "and don't get maudlin just because you can't chin yourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"

"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said viciously. "A year at Muldoon's wouldn't bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game, would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, or following a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling 'Daddy on the castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped on Frank Swain's veranda and off again into his mother's flower-bed!"

"I trust not," said I. "Just what are you getting at?"

"This," answered Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive--usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right."

"Old Hundred," said I, "you are something of an idiot. Those games of ours were nature's school; nature takes that way to teach us how to behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how to conquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake, can't you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood without becoming maudlin?"

"You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall," retorted Old Hundred. "No doubt our games were nature's way of teaching us how to be men, but that doesn't alter the fact that the process of being taught was better than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hate these folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as 'potential little men.' Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because they _ain't_ men yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory, because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nasty little beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you! Well, come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous heap of mortar down there to the south, where there are no children who know how to play, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees' nests in the fences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, the gravestone of a game, and the only sport left is the playing of the market for keeps!"

He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hill in silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. "What do you say to the club for dinner?" he asked. "I ought to go across to the Bar Association afterward and look up some cases on that rebate suit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"

"That pleases me all right," I answered. "I've got to meet Ainsley after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going to like it better than the old."

At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a newsboy. "I want to see how the market closed," he explained, as he buried himself in his paper.

_Barber Shops of Yesterday_

I have just been to a barber shop,--not a city barber shop, where you expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, "Manicures himself!"--but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not, that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he held a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite like his city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say the cut _wasn't_ all right, when the barber held that hand-glass behind his head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the walls!

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one flight up--a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair between the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go by below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a dark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of the sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the spittoons,--large shallow boxes, two feet square,--four of them, full of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps, and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top shelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used to thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, to see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the not-too-distant future.