SCHOOL REVISITED
The old school was there still—with the high cupola upon it, and the long galleries, with the sleeping rooms opening out on either side, and the corner one, where I slept. But the boys are not there, nor the old teachers. They have plowed up the play-ground to plant corn, and the apple tree with the low limb, that made our gymnasium, is cut down.
I was there only a little time ago. It was on a Sunday. One of the old houses of the village had been fashioned into a tavern, and it was there I stopped. But I strolled by the old one, and looked into the bar-room, where I used to gaze with wonder upon the enormous pictures of wild animals which heralded some coming menagerie. There was just such a picture hanging still, and two or three advertisements of sheriffs, and a little bill of a “horse stolen,” and—as I thought—the same brown pitcher on the edge of the bar. I was sure it was the same great wood-box that stood by the fireplace, and the same whip and greatcoat hung in the corner.
I was not in so gay costume as I once thought I would be wearing when a man; I had nothing better than a rusty shooting jacket; but even with this I was determined to have a look about the church, and see if I could trace any of the faces of the old times. They had sadly altered the building; they had cut out its long galleries and its old-fashioned square pews, and filled it with narrow boxes, as they do in the city. The pulpit was not so high or grand, and it was covered over with the work of the cabinet-makers.
I missed, too, the old preacher, whom we all feared so much, and in place of him was a jaunty-looking man, whom I thought I would not be at all afraid to speak to, or, if need be, to slap on the shoulder. And when I did meet him after church, I looked him in the eye as boldly as a lion—what a change was that from the school days!
Here and there I could detect about the church some old farmer by the stoop in his shoulders, or by a particular twist in his nose, and one or two young fellows who used to storm into the gallery in my school days in very gay jackets, dressed off with ribbons—which we thought was astonishing heroism, and admired accordingly—were now settled away into fathers of families, and looked as demure and peaceable at the head of their pews, with a white-headed boy or two between them and their wives, as if they had been married all their days.
There was a stout man, too, with a slight limp in his gait, who used to work on harnesses, and strap our skates, and who I always thought would have made a capital Vulcan—he stalked up the aisle past me, as if I had my skates strapped at his shop only yesterday.
The bald-pated shoemaker, who never kept his word, and who worked in the brick shop, and who had a son called Theodore—which we all thought a very pretty name for a shoemaker’s son—I could not find. I feared he might be dead. I hoped, if he was, that his broken promises about patching boots would not come up against him.
The old factor of tamarinds and sugar crackers who used to drive his covered wagon every Saturday evening into the play-ground, I observed, still holding his place in the village choir, and singing—though with a tooth or two gone—as serenely and obstreperously as ever.
I looked around the church to find the black-eyed girl who always sat behind the choir—the one I loved to look at so much. I knew she must be grown up; but I could fix upon no face positively; once, as a stout woman with a pair of boys, and who wore a big red shawl, turned half around, I thought I recognized her nose. If it was she, it had grown red though, and I felt cured of my old fondness. As for the other, who wore the hat trimmed with fur—she was nowhere to be seen, among either maids or matrons; and when I asked the tavern-keeper, and described her, and her father, as they were in my school days, he told me that she had married, too, and lived some five miles from the village; and, said he—“I guess she leads her husband a devil of a life!”
I felt cured of her, too, but I pitied the husband.
One of my old teachers was in the church; I could have sworn to his face; he was a precise man; and now I thought he looked rather roughly at my old shooting jacket. But I let him look, and scowled at him a little, for I remembered that he had feruled me once. I thought it was not probable that he would ever do it again.
There was a bustling little lawyer in the village who lived in a large house, and who was the great man of that town and country—he had scarce changed at all; and he stepped into the church as briskly and promptly as he did ten years ago. But what struck me most was the change in a couple of pretty little white-haired girls that at the time I left were of that uncertain age when the mother lifts them on a Sunday and pounces them down one after the other upon the seat of the pew; these were now grown into blooming young ladies. And they swept by me in the vestibule of the church, with a flutter of robes and a grace of motion that fairly made my heart twitter in my bosom. I know nothing that brings home upon a man so quick the consciousness of increasing years as to find the little prattling girls, that were almost babies in his boyhood, become dashing ladies, and to find those whom he used to look on patronizingly and compassionately, thinking they were little girls, grown to such maturity that the mere rustle of their silk dresses will give him a twinge, and their eyes, if he looks at them, make him unaccountably shy.
After service I strolled up by the school buildings; I traced the names that we had cut upon the fence; but the fence had grown brown with age, and was nearly rotted away. Upon the beech tree in the hollow behind the school the carvings were all overgrown. It must have been vacation, if indeed there was any school at all; for I could see only one old woman about the premises, and she was hanging out a dishcloth to dry in the sun. I passed on up the hill, beyond the buildings, where in the boy-days we built stone forts with bastions and turrets; but the farmers had put the bastions and turrets into their cobblestone walls. At the orchard fence I stopped and looked—from force, I believe, of old habit—to see if any one were watching—and then leaped over, and found my way to the early-apple tree; but the fruit had gone by. It seemed very daring in me, even then, to walk so boldly in the forbidden ground.
But the old head-master who forbade it was dead, and Russell and Burgess, and I know not how many others, who in other times were culprits with me, were dead, too. When I passed back by the school I lingered to look up at the windows of that corner room, where I had slept the sound, healthful sleep of boyhood—and where, too, I had passed many, many wakeful hours, thinking of the absent Bella, and of my home.
—How small, seemed now, the great griefs of boyhood! Light floating clouds will obscure the sun that is but half risen; but let him be up—mid-heaven, and the cloud that then darkens the land must be thick and heavy indeed.
—The tears started from my eyes—was not such a cloud over me now?
