Chapter I: Preface (1)

_The appearance of a new book is an indication that another man has found a mission, has entered upon the performance of a lofty duty, actuated only by the noblest impulses that can spur the soul of man to action. It is the proudest boast of the profession of literature, that no man ever published a book for selfish purposes or with ignoble aim. Books have been published for the consolation of the distressed; for the guidance of the wandering; for the relief of the destitute; for the hope of the penitent; for uplifting the burdened soul above its sorrows and fears; for the general amelioration of the condition of all mankind; for the right against the wrong; for the good against the bad; for the truth. This book is published for two dollars per volume._

_R. J. B._

CONTENTS.

PAGE.

A BOY’S DAY AT HOME, 273

A BURLINGTON ADDER, 94

A BURLINGTON NOVELETTE, 173

A CANDID CONFESSION, 171

A MODERN GOBLIN, 210

A RAINY DAY IDYL, 86

A REMINISCENCE OF EXHIBITION DAY, 177

A SAFE BET, 204

A SUNDAY IDYL, 262

A TACITURN WITNESS, 124

A THRILLING ENCOUNTER, 144

A TRYING SITUATION, 193

AN AUTUMNAL REVERIE, 286

BUYING A TIN CUP, 119

CORNERING THE BOYS, 128

DANGERS OF BATHING, 164

DRIVING THE COW, 64

FIVE WOMEN, 146

GETTING READY FOR THE TRAIN, 59

HAWK-EYETEMS, 298-328

INFANTILE SCINTILLATIONS, 293

INSPIRATIONS OF TRUTH, 156

LIFE IN THE “HAWKEYE” SANCTUM, 109

MASTER BILDERBACK RETURNS TO SCHOOL, 74

MASTER BILDERBACK’S POULTRY YARD, 258

MIDDLERIB’S DOG, 270

MIDDLERIB’S PICNIC, 250

MIND READING, 200

MISAPPLIED SCIENCE, 96

MR. BARINGER’S HOUSE-CLEANING, 282

MR. BILDERBACK LOSES HIS HAT, 195

MR. GEROLMAN LOSES HIS DOG, 82

MR. OLENDORF’S COMPLAINT, 180

ODE TO AUTUMN, 78

ONE OF THE LEGION, 121

RUPERTINO’S PANORAMA, 266

RURAL FELICITY, 185

SELLING THE HEIRLOOM, 129

SETTLING UNDER DIFFICULTIES, 296

SINGULAR TRANSFORMATION, 87

SODDING AS A FINE ART, 135

SPECIAL PROVIDENCES, 279

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY, 158

SPRING DAYS IN BURLINGTON, 108

SPRING TIME IN AMERICA, 115

SUBURBAN SOLITUDE, 90

THE AMENITIES OF POLITICS, 139

THE ARTLESS PRATTLE OF CHILDHOOD, 102

THE AUTOMATIC CLOTHES-LINE REEL, 152

THE DEMAND FOR LIGHT LABOR, 70

THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, 189

THE GOBLIN GATE, 148

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS, 113

THE LAY OF THE COW, 206

THE POWER OF DIGNITY, 169

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUSTACHE, 9

THE ROMANCE OF THE CARPET, 132

THE SEEDSMAN, 127

THE SORROWS OF THE POOR, 79

VOICES OF THE NIGHT, 67

WHY MR. BOSTWICK MOVED, 275

WIDE-AWAKE, 99

WOODLAND MUSIC AND POETRY, 116

WRITING FOR THE PRESS, 161

YOUNG MR. COFFINBERRY BUYS A DOG, 207

THE RISE AND FALL

OF

THE MUSTACHE.

We open our eyes in this living world around us, in a wonder land, peopled with dreams, and haunted with wonderful shapes; and every day dawns upon us in a medley of new marvels. We are awakened from these dreams by contact with hard, stubborn facts, not rudely and harshly, but gradually and tenderly. So much that is bright and beautiful, and full of romance and wonder, passes away with the earlier years of life, that by the time we are able to earn our first salary we hold in our hands only the crumpled, withered leaves of childhood’s simple creeds and loving superstitions. Year after year, the iconoclastic hand of earnest, real life, tears from the lofty pedestals upon which our loving fancy had enshrined them, the gods of gold that crumble into worthless clay at our feet. We live to lose faith, at last, in “Puss in Boots;” we cease to weep over the sad tragedy of “Cock Robin;” there comes a time when we can read “Arabian Nights,” and then go to bed without a tremor; with one heart-breaking pang at last we give up darling “Jack the Giant Killer,” and acknowledge him to be the fraud he stands confessed; it is not long after that, we learn to look upon William Tell as a national myth, and then we come to know, in spite of all that orthodox theology has taught us to the contrary, that Adam was not the first man--that raised a mustache. Adam was too old--when he was born--to care very much about what our grander and more gradually developed civilization considers the crowning facial ornament. And after his natural human idleness got him into perfectly natural human trouble, he was kept too busy something to put under his lip, to think much about what grew above it. If Adam wore a mustache, he never raised it. It raised itself. It evolved itself out of its own inner consciousness, like a primordial germ. It grew, like the weeds on his farm, in spite of him, and to torment him. For Adam had hardly got his farm reduced to a kind of turbulent, weed producing, granger fighting, regular order of things--had scarcely settled down to the quiet, happy, care-free, independent life of a jocund farmer, with nothing under the canopy to molest or make him afraid, with every thing on the plantation going on smoothly and lovelily, with a little rust in the oats; army worm in the corn; Colorado beetles swarming up and down the potato patch; cut-worms laying waste the cucumbers; curculio in the plums and borers in the apple trees; a new kind of bug that he didn’t know the name of desolating the wheat fields; dry weather burning up the wheat, wet weather blighting the corn; too cold for the melons, too dreadfully hot for the strawberries; chickens dying with the pip; hogs being gathered to their fathers with the cholera; sheep fading away with a complication of things that no man could remember; horses getting along as well as could be expected, with a little spavin, ring bone, wolf teeth, distemper, heaves, blind staggers, collar chafes, saddle galls, colic now and then, founder occasionally, epizootic when there was nothing else; cattle going wild with the horn ail; moth in the bee hives; snakes in the milk house; moles in the kitchen garden--Adam had just about got through breaking wild land with a crooked stick, and settled down comfortably, when the sound of the boy was heard in the land.

Did it ever occur to you that Adam was probably the most troubled and worried man that ever lived? We have always pictured Adam as a care-worn looking man; a puzzled looking granger who would sigh fifty times a day, and sit down on a log and run his irresolute fingers through his hair while he wondered what under the canopy he was going to do with those boys, and whatever was going to become of them. We have thought too, that as often as our esteemed parent asked himself this conundrum, he gave it up. They must have been a source of constant trouble and mystification to him. For you see they were the first boys that humanity ever had any experience with. And there was no one else in the neighborhood who had any boy, with whom Adam, in his moments of perplexity, could consult. There wasn’t a boy in the country with whom Adam’s boys were on speaking terms, and with whom they could play and fight. Adam, you see, labored under the most distressing disadvantages that ever opposed a married man and the father of a family. He had never been a boy himself, and what could he know about boy nature or boy troubles and pleasure? His perplexity began at an early date. Imagine, if you can, the celerity with which he kicked off the leaves, and paced up and down in the moonlight the first time little Cain made the welkin ring when he had the colic. How did Adam know what ailed him? He couldn’t tell Eve that she had been sticking the baby full of pins. He didn’t even know enough to turn the vociferous infant over on his face and jolt him into serenity. If the fence corners on his farm had been overgrown with catnip, never an idea would Adam have had what to do with it. It is probable that after he got down on his knees and felt for thorns or snakes or rats in the bed, and thoroughly examined young Cain for bites or scratches, he passed him over to Eve with the usual remark, “There, take him and hush him up, for heaven’s sake,” and then went off and sat down under a distant tree with his fingers in his ears, and perplexity in his brain. And young Cain just split the night with the most hideous howls the little world had ever listened to. It must have stirred the animals up to a degree that no menagerie has ever since attained. There was no sleep in the vicinity of Eden that night for anybody, baby, beasts or Adam. And it is more than probable that the weeds got a long start of Adam the next day, while he lay around in shady places and slept in troubled dozes, disturbed, perhaps by awful visions of possible twins and more colic.

And when the other boy came along, and the boys got old enough to sleep in a bed by themselves, they had no pillows to fight with, and it is a moral impossibility for two brothers to go to bed without a fracas. And what comfort could two boys get out of pelting each other with fragments of moss or bundles of brush? What dismal views of future humanity Adam must have received from the glimpses of original sin which began to develop itself in his boys. How he must have wondered what put into their heads the thousand and one questions with which they plied their parents day after day. We wonder what he thought when they first began to string buckeyes on the cat’s tail. And when night came, there was no hired girl to keep the boys quiet by telling them ghost stories, and Adam didn’t even know so much as an anecdote.

Cain, when he made his appearance, was the first and only boy in the fair young world. And all his education depended on his inexperienced parents, who had never in their lives seen a boy until they saw Cain. And there wasn’t an educational help in the market. There wasn’t an alphabet block in the county; not even a Centennial illustrated handkerchief. There were no other boys in the republic, to teach young Cain to lie, and swear, and smoke, and drink, fight, and steal, and thus develop the boy’s dormant statesmanship, and prepare him for the sterner political duties of his maturer years. There wasn’t a pocket knife in the universe that he could borrow--and lose, and when he wanted to cut his finger, as all boys must do, now and then, he had to cut it with a clam shell. There were no country relations upon whom little Cain could be inflicted for two or three weeks at a time, when his wearied parents wanted a little rest. There was nothing for him to play with. Adam couldn’t show him how to make a kite. He had a much better idea of angels’ wings than he had of a kite. And if little Cain had even asked for such a simple bit of mechanism as a shinny club, Adam would have gone out into the depths of the primeval forest and wept in sheer mortification and helpless, confessed ignorance. I don’t wonder that Cain turned out bad. I always said he would. For his entire education depended upon a most ignorant man, a man in the very palmiest days of his ignorance, who couldn’t have known less if he had tried all his life on a high salary and had a man to help him. And the boy’s education had to be conducted entirely upon the catechetical system; only, in this instance, the boy pupil asked the questions, and his parent teachers, heaven help them, tried to answer them. And they had to answer at them. For they could not take refuge from the steady stream of questions that poured in upon them day after day, by interpolating a fairy story, as you do when your boy asks you questions about something of which you never heard. For how could Adam begin, “Once upon a time,” when with one quick, incisive question, Cain could pin him right back against the dead wall of creation, and make him either specify exactly what time, or acknowledge the fraud? How could Eve tell him about “Jack and the bean stalk,” when Cain, fairly crazy for some one to play with, knew perfectly well there was not, and never had been, another boy on the plantation? And as day by day Cain brought home things in his hands about which to ask questions that no mortal could answer, how grateful his bewildered parents must have been that he had no pockets in which to transport his collections. For many generations came into the fair young world, got into no end of trouble, and died out of it, before a boy’s pocket solved the problem how to make the thing contained seven times greater than the container. The only thing that saved Adam and Eve from interrogational insanity was the paucity of language. If little Cain had possessed the verbal abundance of the language in which men are to-day talked to death, his father’s bald head would have gone down in shining flight to the ends of the earth to escape him, leaving Eve to look after the stock, save the crop, and raise her boy as best she could. Which would have been, 6,000 years ago, as to-day, just like a man.

Because, it was no off hand, absent-minded work answering questions about things in those spacious old days, when there was crowds of room, and everything grew by the acre. When a placid, but exceedingly unanimous looking animal went rolling by, producing the general effect of an eclipse, and Cain would shout, “Oh, lookee, lookee pa! what’s that?” the patient Adam, trying to saw enough kitchen wood to last over Sunday, with a piece of flint, would have to pause and gather up words enough to say:

“That, my son? That is only a mastodon giganteus; he has a bad look, but a Christian temper.”

And then, presently:

“Oh, pop! pop! What’s that over yon?”

“Oh, bother,” Adam would reply; “it’s only a paleotherium, mammalia pachydermata.”

“Oh, yes; theliocomeafterus. Oh! lookee, lookee at this ’un!”

“Where, Cainny? Oh, that in the mud? That’s only an acephala lamelli branchiata. It won’t bite you, but you mustn’t eat it. It’s poison as politics.”

“Whee! See there! see, see, see! What’s him?”

“Oh, that? Looks like a plesiosaurus; keep out of his way; he has a jaw like your mother.”

“Oh yes; a plenosserus. And what’s that fellow, poppy?”

“That’s a silurus malapterus. Don’t you go near him, for he has the disposition of a Georgia mule.”

“Oh, yes; a slapterus. And what’s this little one?”

“Oh, it’s nothing but an aristolochioid. Where did you get it? There now, quit throwing stones at that acanthopterygian; do you want to be kicked? And keep away from the nothodenatrichomanoides. My stars, Eve! where _did_ he get that anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid? Do you never look after him at all? Here, you Cain, get right away down from there, and chase that megalosaurius out of the melon patch, or I’ll set the monopleuro branchian on you.”

Just think of it, Christian man with a family to support, with last year’s stock on your shelves, and a draft as long as a clothes-line to pay to-morrow! Think of it, woman with all a woman’s love and constancy, and a mother’s sympathetic nature, with three meals a day 365 times a year to think of, and the flies to chase out of the sitting-room; think, if your cherub boy was the only boy in the wide wide world, and all his questions which now radiate in a thousand directions among other boys, who tell him lies and help him to cut his eye-teeth, were focused upon you! Adam had only one consolation that has been denied his more remote descendants. His boy never belonged to a base ball club, and never teased his father from the first of November till the last of March for a pair of skates.

Well, you have no time to pity Adam. You have your own boy to look after. Or, your neighbor has a boy, whom you can look after much more closely than his mother does, and much more to your own satisfaction than to the boy’s comfort. Your boy is, as Adam’s boy was, an animal that asks questions. If there were any truth in the old theory of the transmigration of souls, when a boy died he would pass into an interrogation point. And he’d stay there. He’d never get out of it; for he never gets through asking questions. The older he grows the more he asks, and the more perplexing his questions are, and the more unreasonable he is about wanting them answered to suit himself. Why, the oldest boy I ever knew--he was fifty-seven years old, and I went to school to him--could and did ask the longest, hardest, crookedest questions, that no fellow, who used to trade off all his books for a pair of skates and a knife with a corkscrew in it, could answer. And when his questions were not answered to suit him, it was his custom--a custom more honored in the breeches, we used to think, than in the observance--to take up a long, slender, but exceedingly tenacious rod, which lay ever near the big dictionary, and smite with it the boy whose naturally derived Adamic ignorance was made manifest. Ah me, if the boy could only do as he is done by, and ferule the man or the woman who fails to reply to his inquiries, as he is himself corrected for similar shortcomings, what a valley of tears, what a literally howling wilderness he could and would make of this world.

Your boy, asking to-day pretty much the same questions, with heaven knows how many additional ones, that Adam’s boy did, is told, every time he asks one that you don’t know any thing about, just as Adam told Cain fifty times a day, that he will know all about it when he is a man. And so from the days of Cain down to the present wickeder generation of boys, the boy ever looks forward to the time when he will be a man and know everything. That happy, far away, omniscient, unattainable manhood, which never comes to your boy; which would never come to him if he lived a thousand years; manhood, that like boyhood, ever looks forward from to-day to the morrow; still peering into the future for brighter light and broader knowledge; day after day, as its world opens before it, stumbling upon ever new and unsolved mysteries; manhood, whose wisdom is folly and whose light is often darkness, and whose knowledge is selfishness; manhood, that so often looks over its shoulder and glances back toward boyhood, when its knowledge was at least always equal to its day; manhood, that after groping for years through tangled labyrinths of failing human theories and tottering human wisdom, at last only rises to the sublimity of childhood, only reaches the grandeur of boyhood, and accepts the grandest, eternal truths of the universe, truths that it does not comprehend, truths that it can not, by searching, find out, accepting and believing them with the simple, unquestioning faith of childhood in Truth itself.

And now, your boy, not entirely ceasing to ask questions, begins to answer them, until you stand amazed at the breadth and depth of his knowledge. He asks questions and gets answers of teachers that you and the school board know not of. Day by day, great unprinted books, upon the broad pages of which the hand of nature has traced characters that only a boy can read, are spread out before him. He knows now where the first snow-drop lifts its tiny head, a pearl on the bosom of the barren earth, in the Spring; he knows where the last Indian pink lingers, a flame in the brown and rustling woods, in the autumn days. His pockets are cabinets, from which he drags curious fossils that he does not know the names of; monstrous and hideous beetles and bugs and things that you never saw before, and for which he has appropriate names of his own. He knows where there are three orioles’ nests, and so far back as you can remember, you never saw an oriole’s nest in your life. He can tell you how to distinguish the good mushrooms from the poisonous ones, and poison grapes from good ones, and how he ever found out, except by eating both kinds, is a mystery to his mother. Every root, bud, leaf, berry or bark, that will make any bitter, horrible, semi-poisonous tea, reputed to have marvelous medicinal virtues, he knows where to find, and in the season he does find, and brings home, and all but sends the entire family to the cemetery by making practical tests of his teas.

And as his knowledge broadens, his human superstition develops itself. He has a formula, repeating which nine times a day, while pointing his finger fixedly toward the sun, will cause warts to disappear from the hand, or, to use his own expression, will “knock warts.” If the eight day clock at home tells him it is two o’clock, and the flying leaves of the dandelion declare it is half-past five, he will stand or fall with the dandelion. He has a formula, by which any thing that has been lost may be found. He has, above all things, a natural, infallible instinct for the woods, and can no more be lost in them than a squirrel. If the cow does not come home--and if she is a town cow, like a town man, she does not come home, three nights in the week--you lose half a day of valuable time looking for her. Then you pay a man three dollars to look for her two days longer, or so long as the appropriation holds out. Finally, a quarter sends a boy to the woods; he comes back at milking time, whistling the tune that no man ever imitated, and the cow ambles contentedly along before him. He has one particular marble which he regards with about the same superstitious reverence that a pagan does his idol, and his Sunday-school teacher can’t drive it out of him, either. Carnelian, crystal, bull’s eye, china, pottery, boly, blood alley, or commie, whatever he may call it, there is “luck in it.” When he loses this marble, he sees panic and bankruptcy ahead of him, and retires from business prudently, before the crash comes, failing, in true centennial style, with both pockets and a cigar box full of winnings, and a creditors’ meeting in the back room. A boy’s world is open to no one but a boy. You never really revisit the glimpses of your boyhood, much as you may dream of it. After you get into a tail-coat, and tight boots, you never again set foot in boy world. You lose this marvelous instinct for the woods, you can’t tell a pig-nut tree from a pecan; you can’t make friends with strange dogs; you can’t make the terrific noises with your mouth, you can’t invent the inimitable signals or the characteristic catchwords of boyhood.

He is getting on, is your boy. He reaches the dime novel age. He wants to be a missionary. Or a pirate. So far as he expresses any preference, he would rather be a pirate, an occupation in which there are more chances for making money, and fewer opportunities for being devoured. He develops a yearning love for school and study about this time, also, and every time he dreams of being a pirate he dreams of hanging his dear teacher at the yard arm in the presence of the delighted scholars. His voice develops, even more rapidly and thoroughly than his morals. In the yard, on the house top, down the street, around the corner; wherever there is a patch of ice big enough for him to break his neck on, or a pond of water deep enough to drown in, the voice of your boy is heard. He whispers in a shout, and converses, in ordinary, confidential moments, in a shriek. He exchanges bits of back-fence gossip about his father’s domestic matters with the boy living in the adjacent township, to which interesting revelations of home life the intermediate neighborhood listens with intense satisfaction, and the two home circles in helpless dismay. He has an unconquerable hatred for company, and an aversion for walking down stairs. For a year or two his feet never touch the stairway in his descent, and his habit of polishing the stair rail by using it as a passenger tramway, soon breaks the other members of the family of the careless habit of setting the hall lamp or the water pitcher on the baluster post. He wears the same size boot as his father; and on the dryest, dustiest days in the year, always manages to convey some mud on the carpets. He carefully steps over the door mat, and until he is about seventeen years old, he actually never knew there was a scraper at the front porch. About this time, bold but inartistic pencil sketches break out mysteriously on the alluring back ground of the wall paper. He asks, with great regularity, alarming frequency, and growing diffidence, for a new hat. You might as well buy him a new disposition. He wears his hat in the air and on the ground far more than he does on his head, and he never hangs it up that he doesn’t pull the hook through the crown; unless the hook breaks off or the hat-rack pulls over. He is a perfect Robinson Crusoe in inventive genius. He can make a kite that will fly higher and pull harder than a balloon. He can, and, on occasion, will, take out a couple of the pantry shelves and make a sled that is amazement itself. The mouse-trap he builds out of the water pitcher and the family bible is a marvel of mechanical ingenuity. So is the excuse he gives for such a selection of raw material. When suddenly, some Monday morning, the clothes-line, without any just or apparent cause or provocation, shrinks sixteen feet, philosophy can not make you believe that Prof. Tice did it with his little barometer. Because, far down the dusty street, you can see Tom in the dim distance, driving a prancing team, six-in-hand, with the missing link. You send him on an errand. There are three ladies in the parlor. You have waited, as long as you can, in all courtesy, for them to go. They have developed alarming symptoms of staying to tea. And you know there aren’t half enough strawberries to go around. It is only a three minutes’ walk to the grocery, however, and Tom sets off like a rocket, and you are so pleased with his celerity and ready good nature that you want to run after him and kiss him. He is gone a long time, however. Ten minutes become fifteen, fifteen grow into twenty; the twenty swell into the half hour, and your guests exchange very significant glances as the half becomes three-quarters. Your boy returns at last. Apprehension in his downcast eyes, humility in his laggard step, penitence in the appealing slouch of his battered hat, and a pound and a half of shingle nails in his hands. “Mother,” he says, “what else was it you told me to get besides the nails?” And while you are counting your scanty store of berries to make them go round without a fraction, you hear Tom out in the back yard whistling and hammering away, building a dog house with the nails you never told him to get.

Poor Tom, he loves at this age quite as ardently as he makes mistakes and mischief. And he is repulsed quite as ardently as he makes love. If he hugs his sister, he musses her ruffle, and gets cuffed for it. Two hours later, another boy, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years older than Tom, some neighbor’s Tom, will come in, and will just make the most hopeless, terrible, chaotic wreck of that ruffle that lace or footing can be distorted into. And the only reproof he gets is the reproachful murmur, “Must he go so soon?” when he doesn’t make a movement to go until he hears the alarm clock go off up stairs and the old gentleman in the adjoining room banging around building the morning fires, and loudly wondering if young Mr. Bostwick is going to stay to breakfast?

Tom is at this age set in deadly enmity against company, which he soon learns to regard as his mortal foe. He regards company as a mysterious and eminently respectable delegation that always stays to dinner, invariably crowds him to the second table, never leaves him any of the pie, and generally makes him late for school. Naturally, he learns to love refined society, but in a conservative, non-committal sort of a way, dissembling his love so effectually that even his parents never dream of its existence until it is gone.

Poor Tom, his life is not all comedy at this period. Go up to your boy’s room some night, and his sleeping face will preach you a sermon on the griefs and troubles that sometimes weigh his little heart down almost to breaking, more eloquently than the lips of a Spurgeon could picture them. The curtain has fallen on one day’s act in the drama of his active little life. The restless feet that all day long have pattered so far--down dusty streets, over scorching pavements, through long stretches of quiet wooded lanes, along the winding cattle paths in the deep, silent woods; that have dabbled in the cool brook where it wrangles and scolds over the shining pebbles, that have filled your house with noise and dust and racket, are still. The stained hand outside the sheet is soiled and rough, and the cut finger with the rude bandage of the boy’s own surgery, pleads with a mute, effective pathos of its own, for the mischievous hand that is never idle. On the brown cheek the trace of a tear marks the piteous close of the day’s troubles, the closing scene in a troubled little drama; trouble at school with books that were too many for him; trouble with temptations to have unlawful fun that were too strong for him, as they are frequently too strong for his father; trouble in the street with boys that were too big for him; and at last, in his home, in his castle, his refuge, trouble has pursued him until, feeling utterly friendless and in everybody’s way, he has crawled off to the dismantled den, dignified usually by the title of “the boy’s room,” and his over-charged heart has welled up into his eyes, and his last waking breath has broken into a sob, and just as he begins to think that after all, life is only one broad sea of troubles, whose restless billows, in never-ending succession, break and beat and double and dash upon the short shore line of a boy’s life, he has drifted away into the wonderland of a boy’s sleep, where fairy fingers picture his dreams. How soundly, deeply, peacefully he sleeps. No mother, who has never dragged a sleepy boy off the lounge at 9 o’clock, and hauled him off up stairs to bed, can know with what a herculean grip a square sleep takes hold of a boy’s senses, nor how fearfully and wonderfully limp and nerveless it makes him; nor how, in direct antagonism to all established laws of anatomy, it develops joints that work both ways, all the way up and down that boy. And what pen can portray the wonderful enchantments of a boy’s dreamland! No marvelous visions wrought by the weird, strange power of hasheesh, no dreams that come to the sleep of jaded woman or tired man, no ghastly specters that dance attendance upon cold mince pie, but shrink into tiresome, stale, and trifling commonplaces compared with the marvelous, the grotesque, the wonderful, the terrible, the beautiful and the enchanting scenes and people of a boy’s dreamland. This may be owing, in a great measure, to the fact that the boy never relates his dream until all the other members of the family have related theirs; and then he comes in, like a back county, with the necessary majority; like the directory of a western city, following the census of a rival town.

Tom is a miniature Ishmaelite at this period of his career. His hand is against every man, and about every man’s hand, and nearly every woman’s hand, is against him, off and on. Often, and then the iron enters his soul, the hand that is against him holds the slipper. He wears his mother’s slipper on his jacket quite as often as she wears it on her foot. And this is all wrong, unchristian and impolitic. It spreads the slipper and discourages the boy. When he reads in his Sunday-school lesson that the wicked stand in slippery places, he takes it as a direct personal reference, and he is affronted, and maybe the seeds of atheism are implanted in his breast. Moreover, this repeated application of the slipper not only sours his temper, and gives a bias to his moral ideas, but it sharpens his wits. How many a Christian mother, her soft eyes swimming in tears of real pain that plashed up from the depths of a loving heart, as she bent over her wayward boy until his heart-rending wails and piteous shrieks drowned her own choking, sympathetic, sobs, has been wasting her strength, and wearing out a good slipper, and pouring out all that priceless flood of mother-love and duty and pity and tender sympathy upon a concealed atlas-back, or a Saginaw shingle.

It is a historical fact that no boy is ever whipped twice for precisely the same offense. He varies and improves a little on every repetition of the prank, until at last he reaches a point where detection is almost impossible. He is a big boy then, and glides almost imperceptibly from the discipline of his father, under the surveillance of the police.

By easy stages he passes into the uncomfortable period of boyhood. His jacket develops into a tail-coat. The boy of to-day, who is slipped into a hollow, abbreviated mockery of a tail-coat, when he is taken out of long dresses, has no idea--not the faintest conception of the grandeur, the momentous importance of the epoch in a boy’s life that was marked by the transition from the old-fashioned cadet roundabout to the tail-coat. It is an experience that heaven, ever chary of its choicest blessings, and mindful of the decadence of the race of boys, has not vouchsafed to the untoward, forsaken boys of this wicked generation. When the roundabout went out of fashion, the heroic race of boys passed away from earth, and weeping nature sobbed and broke the moulds. The fashion that started a boy of six years on his pilgrimage of life in a miniature edition of his father’s coat, marked a period of retrogression in the affairs of men, and stamped a decaying and degenerate race. There are no boys now, or very few at least, such as peopled the grand old earth when the men of our age were boys. And that it is so, society is to be congratulated. The step from the roundabout to the tail-coat was a leap in life. It was the boy Iulus, doffing the _prætexta_ and flinging upon his shoulders the _toga virilis_ of Julius; Patroclus, donning the armor of Achilles, in which to go forth and be Hectored to death.

Tom is slow to realize the grandeur of that tail-coat, however, on its trial trip. How differently it feels from his good, snug-fitting, comfortable old jacket. It fits him too much in every direction, he knows. Every now and then he stops, with a gasp of terror, feeling positive, from the awful sensation of nothingness about the neck, that the entire collar has fallen off in the street. The tails are prairies, the pockets are caverns, and the back is one vast, illimitable, stretching waste. How Tom sidles along as close to the fence as he can scrape, and what a wary eye he keeps in every direction for other boys. When he forgets the school, he is half tempted to feel proud of his toga; but when he thinks of the boys, and the reception that awaits him, his heart sinks, and he is tempted to go back home, sneak up stairs, and rescue his worn old jacket from the rag-bag. He glances in terror at his distorted shadow on the fence, and, confident that it is a faithful outline of his figure, he knows that he has worn his father’s coat off by mistake. He tries various methods of buttoning his coat, to make it conform more harmoniously to his figure and his ideas of the eternal fitness of things. He buttons just the lower button, and immediately it flies all abroad at the shoulders, and he beholds himself an exaggerated mannikin of “Cap’n Cuttle.” Then he fastens just the upper button, and the frantic tails flap and flutter like a clothes-line in a cyclone. Then he buttons it all up, _a la militaire_, and tries to look soldierly, but the effect is so theological-studently that it frightens him until his heart stops beating. As he reaches the last friendly corner that shields him from the pitiless gaze of the boys he can hear howling and shrieking not fifty yards away, he pauses to give the final adjustment to the manly and unmanageable raiment. It is bigger and looser, flappier and wrinklier than ever. New and startling folds, and unexpected wrinkles, and uncontemplated bulges develop themselves, like masked batteries, just when and where their effect will be most demoralizing. And a new horror discloses itself at this trying and awful juncture. He wants to lie down on the sidewalk and try to die. For the first time he notices the color of his coat. Hideous! He has been duped, swindled, betrayed--made a monstrous idiot by that silver-tongued salesman, who has palmed off upon him a coat 2,000 years old; a coat that the most sweetly enthusiastic and terribly misinformed women’s missionary society would hesitate to offer a wild Hottentot; and which the most benighted, old-fashioned Hottentot that ever disdained clothes, would certainly blush to wear in the dark, and would probably decline with thanks. Oh madness! The color is no color. It is all colors. It is a brindle--a veritable, undeniable brindle. There must have been a fabulous amount of brindle cloth made up into boys’ first coats, sixteen or eighteen or nineteen years ago; because, out of 894--I like to be exact in the use of figures, because nothing else in the world lends such an air of profound truthfulness to a discourse--out of 894 boys I knew in their first tail-coat period, 893 came to school in brindle coats. And the other one--the 894th boy--made his wretched debut in a bottle-green toga, with dreadful glaring brass buttons. He left school very suddenly, and we always believed that the angels saw him in that coat, and ran away with him. But Tom, shivering with apprehension, and faint with mortification over the discovery of this new horror, gives one last despairing scrooch of his shoulders, to make the coat look shorter, and, with a final frantic tug at the tails, to make it appear longer, steps out from the protecting ægis of the corner, is stunned with a vocal hurricane of “Oh, what a coat!” and his cup of misery is as full as a rag-bag in three minutes.

Passing into the tail-coat period, Tom awakens to a knowledge of the broad physical truth, that he has hands. He is not very positive in his own mind how many. At times he is ready to swear to an even two; one pair; good hand. Again, when cruel fate and the non-appearance of some one else’s brother has compelled him to accompany his sister to a church sociable, he can see eleven; and as he sits bolt upright in the grimmest of straight-back chairs, plastered right up against the wall, as the “sociable” custom is, or used to be, trying to find enough unoccupied pockets in which to sequester all his hands, he is dimly conscious that hands should come in pairs, and vaguely wonders, if he has only five pair of regularly ordained hands, where this odd hand came from. And hitherto, Tom has been content to encase his feet in anything that would stay on them. Now, however, he has an eye for a glove-fitting boot, and learns to wreathe his face in smiles, hollow, heartless, deceitful smiles, while his boots are as full of agony as a broken heart, and his tortured feet cry out for vengeance upon the shoemaker, and make Tom feel that life is a hollow mockery and there is nothing real but soft corns and bunions.

And: His mother never cuts his hair again. Never. When Tom assumes the manly gown she has looked her last upon his head, with trimming ideas. His hair will be trimmed and clipped, barberously it may be, but she will not be acscissory before the fact. She may sometimes long to have her boy kneel down before her, while she gnaws around his terrified locks with a pair of scissors that were sharpened when they were made; and have since then cut acres of calico, and miles and miles of paper, and great stretches of cloth, and snarls and coils of string; and furlongs of lamp wick; and have snuffed candles; and dug refractory corks, out of the family ink bottle; and punched holes in skate straps; and trimmed the family nails; and have even done their level best, at the annual struggle, to cut stove-pipe lengths in two; and have successfully opened oyster and fruit cans; and pried up carpet tacks; and have many a time and oft gone snarlingly and toilsomely around Tom’s head, and made him an object of terror to the children in the street, and made him look so much like a yearling colt with the run of a bur pasture, that people have been afraid to approach him too suddenly, lest he should jump through his collar and run away.

He feels too, the dawning consciousness of another grand truth in the human economy. It dawns upon his deepening intelligence with the inherent strength and the unquestioned truth of a new revelation, that man’s upper lip was designed by nature for a mustache pasture. How tenderly reserved he is when he is brooding over this momentous discovery. With what exquisite caution and delicacy are his primal investigations conducted. In his microscopical researches, it appears to him that the down on his upper lip is certainly more determined down; more positive, more pronounced, more individual fuzz than that which vegetates in neglected tenderness upon his cheeks. He makes cautious explorations along the land of promise with the tip of his tenderest finger, delicately backing up the grade the wrong way, going always against the grain, that he may the more readily detect the slightest symptom of an uprising by the first feeling of velvety resistance. And day by day he is more and more firmly convinced that there is in his lip, the primordial germs, the protoplasm of a glory that will, in its full development, eclipse even the majesty and grandeur of his first tail-coat. And in the first dawning consciousness that the mustache is there, like the vote, and only needs to be brought out, how often Tom walks down to the barber-shop, gazes longingly in at the window, and walks past. And how often, when he musters up sufficient courage to go in, and climbs into the chair, and is just on the point of huskily whispering to the barber that he would like a shave, the entrance of a man with a beard like Frederick Barbarossa, frightens away his resolution, and he has his hair cut again. The third time that week, and it is so short that the barber has to hold it with his teeth while he files it off, and parts it with a straight edge and a scratch awl. Naturally, driven from the barber chair, Tom casts longing eyes upon the ancestral shaving machinery at home. And who shall say by what means he at length obtains possession of the paternal razor? No one. Nobody knows. Nobody ever did know. Even the searching investigation that always follows the paternal demand for the immediate extradition of whoever opened a fruit can with that razor, which always follows Tom’s first shave, is always, and ever will be, barren of results. All that we know about it is, that Tom holds the razor in his hand about a minute, wondering what to do with it, before the blade falls across his fingers and cuts every one of them. First blood claimed and allowed, for the razor. Then he straps the razor furiously. Or rather, he razors the strap. He slashes and cuts that passive implement in as many directions as he can make motions with the razor. He would cut it oftener if the strap lasted longer. Then he nicks the razor against the side of the mug. Then he drops it on the floor and steps on it and nicks it again. They are small nicks, not so large by half as a saw tooth, and he flatters himself his father will never see them. Then he soaks the razor in hot water, as he has seen his father do. Then he takes it out, at a temperature anywhere under 980° Fahrenheit, and lays it against his cheek, and raises a blister there the size of the razor, as he never saw his father do, but as his father most assuredly did, many, many years before Tom met him. Then he makes a variety of indescribable grimaces and labial contortions in a frenzied effort to get his upper lip into approachable shape, and at last, the first offer he makes at his embryo mustache, he slashes his nose with a vicious upper cut. He gashes the corners of his mouth; wherever those nicks touch his cheek they leave a scratch apiece, and he learns what a good nick in a razor is for, and at last when he lays the blood stained weapon down, his gory lip looks as though it had just come out of a long, stubborn, exciting contest with a straw cutter.

But he learns to shave, after a while--just before he cuts his lip clear off. He has to take quite a course of instruction, however, in that great school of experience about which the old philosopher had a remark to make. It is a grand old school; the only school at which men will study and learn, each for himself. One man’s experience never does another man any good; never did and never will teach another man anything. If the philosopher had said that it was a hard school, but that some men would learn at no other than this grand old school of experience, we might have inferred that all women, and most boys, and a few men were exempt from its hard teachings. But he used the more comprehensive term, if you remember what that is, and took us all in. We have all been there. There is no other school, in fact. Poor little Cain; dear, lonesome, wicked little Cain--I know it isn’t fashionable to pet him; I know it is popular to speak harshly and savagely about our eldest brother, when the fact is we resemble him more closely in disposition than any other member of the family--poor little Cain never knew the difference between his father’s sunburned nose and a glowing coal, until he had pulled the one and picked up the other. And Abel had to find out the difference in the same way, although he was told five hundred times, by his brother’s experience, that the coal would burn him and the nose wouldn’t. And Cain’s boy wouldn’t believe that fire was any hotter than an icicle, until he made a digital experiment, and understood why they called it fire. And so Enoch and Methusaleh, and Moses, and Daniel, and Solomon, and Cæsar, and Napoleon, and Washington, and the President, and the Governor, and the Mayor, and you and I have all of us, at one time or another, in one way or another, burned our fingers at the same old fires that have scorched human fingers in the same monotonous old ways, at the same reliable old stands, for the past 6,000 years; and all the verbal instruction between here and the silent grave couldn’t teach us so much, or teach it so thoroughly, as one well directed singe. And a million of years from now--if this weary old world may endure so long--when human knowledge shall fall a little short of the infinite, and all the lore and erudition of this wonderful age will be but the primer of that day of light--the baby that is born into that world of knowledge and wisdom and progress, rich with all the years of human experience, will cry for the lamp, and, the very first time that opportunity favors it, will try to pull the flame up by the roots, and will know just as much as ignorant, untaught, stupid little Cain knew on the same subject. Year after year, century after unfolding century, how true it is that the lion on the fence is always bigger, fiercer, and more given to majestic attitudes and dramatic situations than the lion in the tent. And yet it costs us, often as the circus comes around, fifty cents to find that out.

But while we have been moralizing, Tom’s mustache has taken a start. It has attained the physical density, though not the color, by any means, of the Egyptian darkness--it can be felt; and it is felt; very soft felt. The world begins to take notice of the new-comer; and Tom, as generations of Toms before him have done, patiently endures dark hints from other members of the family about his face being dirty. He loftily ignores his experienced father’s suggestions that he should perform his tonsorial toilet with a spoonful of cream and the family cat. When his sisters, in meekly dissembled ignorance and innocence, inquire, “Tom, what _have_ you on your lip?” he is austere, as becomes a man annoyed by the frivolous small talk of women. And when his younger brother takes advantage of the presence of a numerous company in the house, to shriek over the baluster up stairs, apparently to any boy anywhere this side of China, “Tom’s a raisin’ mustashers!” Tom smiles, a wan, neglected-orphan smile; a smile that looks as though it had come up on his face to weep over the barrenness of the land; a perfect ghost of a smile, as compared with the rugged 7 × 9 smiles that play like animated crescents over the countenances of the company. But the mustache grows. It comes on apace; very short in the middle, very no longer at the ends, and very blonde all round. Whenever you see such a mustache, do not laugh at it; do not point at it the slow, unmoving finger of scorn. Encourage it; speak kindly of it; affect admiration for it; coax it along. Pray for it--for it is a first. They always come that way. And when, in the fullness of time, it has developed so far that it can be pulled, there is all the agony of making it take color. It is worse, and more obstinate, and more deliberate than a meerschaum. The sun, that tans Tom’s cheeks and blisters his nose, only bleaches his mustache. Nothing ever hastens its color; nothing does it any permanent good; nothing but patience, and faith, and persistent pulling.