The dwarf was a young cousin of William Henry’s (not Tommy), and he did his part well, whistling, bowing, dancing, sneezing, rising, sitting, with a perfectly sober face.
The showman then read the “Narrative,” adding thereto such ridiculous incidents, and such comical remarks, that the audience were convulsed with laughter, and the face of the dwarf twitched alarmingly. These twitchings, he (the showman) said, were not unusual, and were the effects of the sad occurrence then being narrated. The closing portions of the story were declaimed in a powerful voice. He “acted out” the “pole” and the “span,” and at the third line, “I must be measured by my soul,” laid his hand upon his heart in the most impressive manner, and remained in that position till the curtain fell.
After this “John Brown” was sung, and William Henry was permitted to roar out that “Glory Hallelujah” as loudly as he pleased.
The following letter must have been written some time after William Henry met with the affliction which was so touchingly alluded to by Uncle Jacob, as above related, and which that wretched youth felt could only be endured in the bosom of his family! In the interval it appears that he had been removed from the Crooked Pond School, and that Dorry had left also, to finish preparing himself for college in some higher seminary of learning.
William Henry’s Letter after leaving School.
Dear Dorry,—
I didn’t know I was going to come away from school so soon after you did, but there was a new High School begun in our town about a mile and a half off, and my father thought I could learn there, and learn to farm it some too. But I don’t think much of farming it. Course ’t is fun to see things grow, after you’ve planted the seeds, and then watched ’em all the way up. My grandmother says my father likes his corn so well, that he pities it in a dry time, and when a gale blows it down he pities it as much as if he’d been blown down himself. Weeds are enough to make a feller mad, coming up fast as you kill ’em and sucking all the goodness out of the ground that don’t belong to them. Suppose they think ’t is as much theirs as anybody’s.
I suppose you are studying away for college. I don’t know whether I wish I could go or not. I guess my head wouldn’t hold all ’t would have to be put into it before I went, and in all that four years too! Now I want to know if a feller can remember all that? I mean remember the beginning after all the other has been piled top of it? I don’t know what I shall be yet. For there is something bad about everything, Grandmother says, and I believe it. Now I don’t want to be a farmer, because ’t is hard work and poor pay,—in these parts. I guess I should like to go to Kansas. But there are the Indians after your scalp, and fever and ague, and grasshoppers, and potato-bugs, and bean-bugs, and army-worms to eat up everything, and droughts to dry up everything, and floods to wash it away, and hurricanes to blow it down, and Uncle Jacob says if a man comes through all these alive, with a few grains of corn, the man that wants to buy ’em is a hundred miles off! But my father says, what is a man good for that don’t dare to go to sail without ’t is on a mill-pond! For smooth water can’t make a sailor. And if a man is scared of lions, how will he get through the woods. So I don’t know yet what I shall be. What should you, if you did n’ go to college? Go into a store? I tell you, Dorry, that if I was a dry-goods clerk, fenced in behind a counter, I do believe I should ache to jump over and put for somewhere and go to doing something. But my father says you can’t always tell a man by what his business is. For you’ve got to allow for head work. And because he sells shoe-strings, ’t is no sign he hasn’t got anything in his head but shoe-strings; and because a man drives nails, ’t is no sign he hasn’t got anything but nails in his head. “Now suppose,” says he, “that a man sells dry goods all day, can’t he have some thoughts stowed away in his brains that he got out of books, or got up himself? And when he’s walking along home and back, and evenings, can’t he out with ’em and be thinking ’em over?” I s’pose ’t isn’t time for me to have thoughts yet, s’pose they’ll be dropping along in a year or two, “or three at the most,” as Lord Lovell said. One thing I mean to have, and that is a good house with all the fixings, and money to spend, and money to give away if I want to. So whatever I get started on, I mean to pitch in and shove up my sleeves, and go at it. Father says I must be thinking the matter over, and not make my mind up right off. They say going to sea is a dog’s life. I should like to go long enough to see what Spain looks like, and China, and other places. Maybe I shall learn a trade. Now, for instance, a carpenter’s. That don’t seem much of a trade. Mostly pounding. But they say if you keep on, and are smart at it, why, you get to taking houses, and then you are not a carpenter any longer, but a “builder,” and money comes in.