Not that he stayed at home from school. Let no degenerate reader, the enfeebled victim of modern ideas, think that. The day of coddling had not yet dawned upon New England. There was no bell then to announce a full holiday, or “one session,” because of rain or snow. And as truly as “school kept,” so truly the boy was expected to be there. No alternative was so much as considered. But on such a morning as we now have in mind he went at full speed, looking neither to right nor left, and he thanked his stars when he came in sight of the village store. That, whether going or coming, he hailed as a refuge. Possibly he had a cent in his pocket, a real “copper,” and felt it in danger of burning through; but cent or no cent, he went in to warm his fingers and his ears, and incidentally to listen to the talk of the assembled loafers.
I can see them now, one perched upon a barrel-head, one on a pile of boxes, three or four occupying a long settee, and one, wearing a big light-colored overcoat, who came every day, sitting like a lord in the comfortable armchair in front of the cylinder stove. This last man was not rich; neither was he in any peculiar sense a social favorite; he said little and bought less; but he always had the chief seat. I used to wonder what would happen if some day he should come in and find it occupied. But on that point it was idle to speculate. As well expect a simple congressman to drop into the Speaker’s chair, leaving that functionary to dispose of his own corporeal dignity as best he could. Prescription, provided it be old enough, is the best of titles. What other has the new king of Great Britain and Ireland?
If it was shortly before schooltime, on one of those mornings when the weather seemed to be laying itself out to establish a record, the talk was likely to be of thermometers.
“My glass was down to nineteen below,” one man would say, by way of starting the ball.
“Mine touched twenty at half-past six,” the next one would remark.
And so the topic would go round, the mercury dropping steadily, notch by notch. As I said a week ago, winter was winter in those days. It may have occurred to me, sometimes, that the man who managed to speak last had a decided moral advantage over his rivals. He could save the honor of his thermometer at the least possible expense of veracity.
So far things were not very exciting, though on the whole rather more so, perhaps, than studying a geography lesson (as if it were anything to me which were the principal towns in Indiana!); but now, not unlikely, the conversation would shift to hunting exploits. This was more to the purpose. Wonderful game had been shot, first and last, down there in the Old Colony; almost everything, it seemed to a listening boy, except lions and elephants. If Mr. Roosevelt had lived in those times, he need not have gone to the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure.
I listened with both ears. There never was a boy who did not like to hear of doings with a gun. I remember still one of my very early excitements in that line. I was on my way home at noon when a flock of geese flew directly over the street, honking loudly. At that moment a shoemaker ran out of his little shop, gun in hand, and aiming straight upward, let go a charge. Nothing dropped, to my intense surprise and no small disappointment; but I had seen the shot fired, and that was something—as is plain from the fact that I remember it so vividly these many years afterward. The names of the principal towns of Indiana long ago folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away, but I can still see that shoemaker running out of his shop.
It was a common practice, I was to learn as I grew older, for shoemakers to keep a loaded gun standing in a corner, ready for such contingencies. There was a tradition in the town that a certain man (I have forgotten his name, or I would bracket it with Mr. Roosevelt’s) had once brought down a goose in this way. It is by no means impossible; for flocks of geese were an everyday sight in the season (I am sure I have seen twenty in an afternoon), and sometimes, in thick weather, they almost grazed the chimney-tops. Geese (of that kind) have grown sadly fewer since then, and perhaps have learned to fly higher.
After the hunting reminiscences would likely enough come a discussion of fast horses, Flora Temple and others—including “Mart” So-and-So’s of our village; or possibly (and this I liked best of all, I think), the conversation would flag, and old Jason Andcut would begin whistling softly to himself. Then I was all ears. Such a tone as he had, especially in the lower register! And such trills and bewitching turns of melody! Why, it was almost as good as the Weymouth Band, which in those days was every whit as famous as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is now. When it played the “Wood-up Quickstep” or “Departed Days,” the whole town was moved, and one boy that I knew was almost in heaven.