Chapter X.
Life In Vacation.
How well I remember my last vacation! I knew it was my last, and I did not lose one instant of it. Six weeks of unalloyed!
True, after school days are over, people have what are called vacations. Your father takes his at the store, and Uncle William has the "long vacation," when the Court does not sit. But a man's vacation, or a woman's, is as nothing when it is compared with a child's or a young man's or a young woman's home from school. For papa and Uncle William are carrying about a set of cares with them all the time. They cannot help it, and they carry them bravely, but they carry them all the same. So you see a vacation for men and women is generally a vacation with its weight of responsibility. But your vacations, while you are at school, though they have their responsibilities, indeed, have none under which you ought not to walk off as cheerfully as Gretchen, there, walks down the road with that pail of milk upon her head. I hope you will learn to do that some day, my dear Fanchon.
Hear, then, the essential laws of vacation:--
First of all,
Do Not Get Into Other People's Way.
Horace and Enoch would not have made such a mess of it last summer, and got so utterly into disgrace, if they could only have kept this rule in mind. But, from mere thoughtlessness, they were making people wish they were at the North Pole all the time, and it ended in their wishing that they were there themselves.
Thus, the very first morning after they had come home from Leicester Academy,--and, indeed, they had been welcomed with all the honors only the night before,--when Margaret, the servant, came down into the kitchen, she found her fire lighted, indeed, but there were no thanks to Master Enoch for that. The boys were going out gunning that morning, and they had taken it into their heads that the two old fowling-pieces needed to be thoroughly washed out, and with hot water. So they had got up, really at half past four; had made the kitchen fire themselves; had put on ten times as much water as they wanted, so it took an age to boil; had got tired waiting, and raked out some coals and put on some more water in a skillet; had upset this over the hearth, and tried to wipe it up with the cloth that lay over Margaret's bread-cakes as they were rising; had meanwhile taken the guns to pieces, and laid the pieces on the kitchen table; had piled up their oily cloths on the settle and on the chairs; had spilled oil from the lamp-filler, in trying to drop some into one of the ramrod sockets, and thus, by the time Margaret did come down, her kitchen and her breakfast both were in a very bad way.
Horace said, when he was arraigned, that he had thought they should be all through before half past five; that then they would have "cleared up," and have been well across the pasture, out of Margaret's way. Horace did not know that watched pots are "mighty unsartin" in their times of boiling.