I do not remember that the whites ever hauled down their flag and surrendered voluntarily; but once or twice the fort was carried by storm and the garrison were massacred to a boy, and thrown out of the fortress, having been first scalped. To take a boy's cap was to scalp him, and after that he was dead, if he played fair. There were a great many hard hits given and taken, but always cheerfully, for it was in the cause of our early history. The history of Greece and Rome was stuff compared to this. And we had many boys in our school who could imitate the Indian war-whoop enough better than they could scan arma, virumque cano.
XII
THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE
The winter evenings of the farmer-boy in New England used not to be so gay as to tire him of the pleasures of life before he became of age. A remote farm-house, standing a little off the road, banked up with sawdust and earth to keep the frost out of the cellar, blockaded with snow, and flying a blue flag of smoke from its chimney, looks like a besieged fort. On cold and stormy winter nights, to the traveler wearily dragging along in his creaking sleigh, the light from its windows suggests a house of refuge and the cheer of a blazing fire. But it is no less a fort, into which the family retire when the New England winter on the hills really sets in.
The boy is an important part of the garrison. He is not only one of the best means of communicating with the outer world, but he furnishes half the entertainment and takes two thirds of the scolding of the family circle. A farm would come to grief without a boy on it, but it is impossible to think of a farm-house without a boy in it.
A REMOTE FARM-HOUSE