Hostilities would sometimes threaten between the school and the village boys; but they usually passed off with such loud and harmless explosions as belong to the wars of our small politicians. The village champions were a hatter’s apprentice, and a thickset fellow who worked in a tannery. We prided ourselves especially on one stout boy, who wore a sailor’s monkey jacket. I can not but think how jaunty that stout boy looked in that jacket; and what an Ajax cast there was to his countenance! It certainly did occur to me to compare him with William Wallace (Miss Porter’s William Wallace) and I thought how I would have liked to have seen a tussle between them. Of course, we who were small boys, limited ourselves to indignant remark, and thought “we should like to see them do it;” and prepared clubs from the wood-shed, after a model suggested by a New York boy, who had seen the clubs of the policemen.
There was one scholar, poor Leslie, who had friends in some foreign country, and who occasionally received letters bearing a foreign post-mark: what an extraordinary boy that was—what astonishing letters, what extraordinary parents! I wondered if I should ever receive a letter from “foreign parts?” I wondered if I should ever write one; but this was too much—too absurd! As if I, Paul, wearing a blue jacket with gilt buttons, and number four boots, should ever visit those countries spoken of in the geographies, and by learned travelers! No, no; this was too extravagant; but I knew what I would do, if I lived to come of age; and I vowed that I would—I would go to New York!
Number seven was the hospital, and forbidden ground; we had all of us a sort of horror of number seven. A boy died there once, and oh, how he moaned; and what a time there was when the father came!
A scholar by the name of Tom Belton, who wore linsey gray, made a dam across a little brook by the school, and whittled out a saw-mill that actually sawed; he had genius. I expected to see him before now at the head of American mechanics; but I learn with pain that he is keeping a grocery store.
At the close of all the terms we had exhibitions, to which all the townspeople came, and among them the black-eyed Jane, and the pretty Sophia with fur around her hat. My great triumph was when I had the part of one of Pizarro’s chieftains, the evening before I left the school. How I did look!
I had a mustache put on with burned cork, and whiskers very bushy indeed; and I had the militia coat of an ensign in the town company, with the skirts pinned up, and a short sword very dull, and crooked, which belonged to an old gentleman who was said to have got it from some privateer, who was said to have taken it from some great British admiral in the old wars; and the way I carried that sword upon the platform and the way I jerked it out when it came to my turn to say—“Battle! battle! then death to the armed, and chains for the defenseless!”—was tremendous!
The morning after, in our dramatic hats—black felt, with turkey feathers—we took our place upon the top of the coach to leave the school. The head master, in green spectacles, came out to shake hands with us—a very awful shaking of hands.
Poor gentleman!—he is in his grave now.
We gave three loud hurrahs “for the old school,” as the coach started; and upon the top of the hill that overlooks the village, we gave another round—and still another for the crabbed old fellow whose apples we had so often stolen. I wonder if old Bulkeley is living yet?
As we got on under the pine trees, I recalled the image of the black-eyed Jane, and of the other little girl in the corner pew—and thought how I would come back after the college days were over—a man, with a beaver hat, and a cane, and with a splendid barouche, and how I would take the best chamber at the inn, and astonish the old schoolmaster by giving him a familiar tap on the shoulder; and how I would be the admiration, and the wonder of the pretty girl in the fur-trimmed hat! Alas, how our thoughts outrun our deeds!