But I have gone far afield from the household economics of the Old Town. They were intended to make both ends meet on a scale of small incomes with need, often enough, of the closest figuring. Large families were the rule rather than the exception. Not till my father was long in his grave and I was looking over his old papers and accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the fight he waged those forty years and to what straits he was put. To turn a coat when the right side was worn threadbare was a common expedient in those days of honest cloth, but Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him over an evil time. As for us boys, we didn’t have any half the time. I remember the winter when, being in such case and making a virtue of bald necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society among my schoolmates, the corner-stone of which was contempt of overcoats as plain mollycoddling. As a means of attracting the boys there were secret passwords and an initiation that had to be worked at dusk in the moat by the Castle Hill and was supposed to be very grewsome. It took for a while, until the mothers put a stop to it. I believe one of them who had read Æsop’s fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried to persuade the other foxes that it was the latest fashion, saw through my dodge. At any rate the long woollen muffler which the society allowed, I being possessed of one, went out of vogue and the overcoats came back. It must have been at that time that my father bought at a salvage sale of the cargo of a wrecked ship a roll of really fine cloth of a peculiar sea-green color. It was a good investment, for it made not only a suit for Father that had lots of wear in it, but all the family were clad in green while it lasted, which was a long while. I hate to think what the boys of to-day would have nicknamed us. They were not so bright then, and I doubt if we would have cared. We boys were quite able to defend the family honor, and quite ready too.
Father had a fancy for numbering his children in Latin. The sixth was called Sextus, the ninth Nonus. In grim jest, he proposed to name the twelfth Duodecimus, but agreed with his fellow-teachers that the luckless child would be forever miscalled “dozen.” They had a good laugh over it. Father was very far from being a book-worm. Though he was very learned, he had a keen sense of humor, and, for all the heavy burdens he carried, he was the life of the company always.
The dead languages were his task in the Latin School, the living his pleasure and recreation. I doubt if there was any modern tongue in which he was not more or less proficient. And so it was natural that when a wrecked ship’s crew came to the Old Town he should be the interpreter; or when, as happened every now and then, a bottle was cast ashore on one of the islands with a message from some ship in peril on the deep, that it should be brought to him to be deciphered. There was a fixed fee for this,—a “specie,” which was two daler in the case of a bottle,—and it was most welcome. Yet there was always an element of the deeply tragic in it. We children stood with bated breath and looked on while Father unfolded the piece of crumpled paper, polished his spectacles, and read with husky voice some such message as this:
“We are sinking. Jesus, Maria, save us!”
Then the name of the vessel, its home port, and the latitude, if they knew it. I think I am quoting literally one which I have never forgotten. It was a Portuguese vessel and it got somehow mixed up in my childish imagination with the Lisbon earthquake. That had happened a long while before, but news lasted longer than nowadays. There was not a fresh horror every day, and the illustrated papers kept the earthquake in stock until the siege of Sebastopol came and gave us all a change. That in its turn lasted, I think, quite a dozen years, down to our own war of ’64.
“I threw the last pebble.”
I cannot stop without recording here the great and awful tragedy of my childhood. It was when I had become possessed, by some unheard-of streak of luck, of a silver four-skilling that was all my own, to spend as I pleased, with no string to it. It was a grave responsibility, for I perceived that with this immeasurable wealth I might buy practically anything, and what it was to be, with the shops of the Old Town simply crammed with things that were all desirable, was not to be decided lightly. So I betook myself to the Long Bridge, where I could be alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths of which reposed the miraculous coin, filled with pebbles to punctuate my ideas withal. I stood on one of the arches and threw them in, watching the rings they made in the water, and as they widened till they reached from shore to shore and I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until, all unknowing, I threw the last pebble and, as it sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was my four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a little splash I can hear yet, and I saw its silver sheen as it turned and sank. I did not weep. The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb, then went home and told no one. Darkness had settled upon my life with a sorrow so great that I felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a vast and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even now laugh at it. It was too terrible to ever quite forget.
CHAPTER VI
