About a hundred rods from the village, in an orchard, our two friends came across a company of larger boys, who were playing ball. Here they encountered another temptation. The ball-players were treating themselves to a kind of liquor, which, in those parts, bore the name of egg-nog. Some of the boys and girls who read this story, or hear it read, will no doubt laugh at this unmusical and out-of-the-way name; and I confess the word looked to me so strange and barbarous, after I had written it down, that I had a great mind to dash my pen across it, and hunt up some other name for it. However, I concluded I would go straight to Webster's large dictionary, and see whether he had taken notice of the word. I made up my mind that, if I found it in the dictionary, I would hold on to it, and that if it were missing there, I would let it stay in the society where it was born, christened and brought up. I went to the dictionary, and there I found the word, looking, for all the world, as if it were vastly at home.
"Egg-nog," says Doctor Webster, "a drink used in America, consisting of the yelks of eggs beaten up with sugar, and the whites of eggs whipped, with the addition of wine or spirits." The addition which Webster speaks of, and which consisted of spirits when I was a boy, and not of wine, you will please to take notice, was considered a very important addition, without which the liquor would be worthless.
Well, Samuel and Frederick, though they were strongly urged to "taste of the nice egg-nog," and though they almost wished that they might so far gratify their curiosity as to taste of it, succeeded in resisting the temptation, and letting the stuff alone. Neither of them drank a drop of it; though I should not wonder if they found it rather hard work to refuse.
My young friend, perhaps you think these facts are hardly worth noticing. But I look upon them in a very different light. These boys, in my opinion, gained great victories that day—victories quite as worthy of praise and honor as those of Alexander and Cæsar. They had the courage to do right, when they were tempted to do wrong. They did right. And they had their reward, no doubt, when they heard the voice of conscience in their own bosoms, whispering, "Well done."
CHAP. IX.[ToC]
PATRIOTISM AND POWDER.
It was more than six months after the thanksgiving festival, before the factory boys had another holiday. Time, who never stands still a moment, went on, and by and by, the Fourth of July came round. Samuel and Frederick were companions on that day, as well as on the preceding thanksgiving festival. The first thing they did, after they got up in the morning—for they were wakened very early by the ringing of all the bells in Meadville, not excepting the one on the factory, which was keyed on a very high note, and was cracked in the bargain, though it made up in zeal and earnestness what it lacked in depth and sweetness—the first thing they did was to climb the hill that overlooked the village, where the men were firing a salute in honor of the day. There seems to be something in the smell of gunpowder, and the sound of a huge-mouthed cannon, which wakes up a good deal of patriot feeling in the breast of a child.