The bashful athlete, as if by mere chance, takes hold of the rope just opposite to the pretty girl of the party, I mean to one of the pretty girls of the party, whose ear he wishes to command. As the boys owned the sleds, the spirit of gallantry greatly promoted proprietorship, in a double runner, which was vital to the social spirit of the sport. One that could fly was the ideal aimed at. It seemed animate. It was well shod. A heavy load gave momentum. It was guided with rare judgment, watched, compared with others, improved, made to look better, until its associated owners prided themselves in it, as a thing of life and beauty and speed, as mariners do in a ship. Some people have to go abroad to find folks who seem eager for an excuse to get out, to even take their meals in the open air. The European seems chafed in his own house. He takes his supper with his family in the face of all the world, and enjoys the publicity. He walks about to see how other families are faring, and they do not resent it. It would not disturb him to take his dinner on the side-walk on Broadway. So in Southern California, nobody shuts a door. The weather, being about like our April, the barber shops and restaurants have no heat and often a strong current of air, that the natives would enjoy, came streaming in through wide-open doors and windows.
The Open-door Policy
Book stores were not warmed at all. One morning at breakfast I rose and put on my overcoat, and a visitor at the next table, at the conclusion of the meal said, What part of the country do you come from, that you have to put on your overcoat? The reason those people put their doctors out of business is not alone in the climate but in their becoming accustomed to living in God's great and good out-of-doors. We could live much colder than we do, and live more largely out of doors, and reap at least some of the benefits that people gain by going abroad.
In looking over the familiar places, when revisiting the earth, that were once the haunts of the idlers of the town, I was struck by the entire absence of whittling in which they formerly engaged. Who could reckon their indebtedness to the pine, which supplied the favorite material? Each man kept in pretty good order, if he owned nothing else, a fine piece of cutlery, with a history which he had made familiar to the minds of his easy-going associates. To whittle with an edgeless knife is dull sport, hence at intervals, each loafer would lay his right foot upon his left knee, and upon the leather of his heavy boot characteristic of that day, would strop the blunt blade until he had put it again on edge.
Our Knives Confiscated by Teachers
Every loss is thought to have its compensation. If whittling is out of vogue, the benches before the boys at school are, for that reason, better preserved. A common present to a boy in that day was a pretty good knife. Boys are very imitative. They sought to whittle and would notch the school desks until their edges were serried into a semblance of a cross-cut saw. As the term of school wore on the teacher had made himself the custodian of most of the fancy hardware owned by the ingenious scholars. Not remote from the school-house door we turn aside and stand over the identical spot where we sat, with our heels wide apart, facing a chum, and played mumble-the-peg, or mumblety-peg, as the boys pronounced it.
"The boys were playing some old game, beneath that same old tree;
I have forgot the name just now,—you've played the same with me,
On that same spot; 'twas played with knives, by throwing so and so;
The loser had a task to do,—there, twenty years ago."
As the knives were thrown from a series of positions, the winner would show himself something of the savage still, for when the loser failed to make the knife blade stick in the ground, he would, with the heavy handle of the knife, drive a peg into the ground, by a certain number of blows, which the loser was compelled to draw out with his teeth. The severity of the penalty was not in using a long peg, like a wooden tooth-pick, but a short one that could still be struck a blow or two after it was below the surface of the soil. Thus the unskillful player had to root for it, while the boys, being called together, encircled him and jeered.
Happy Hours by Living Streams
The appearance and needs of this dirty-faced boy caused the whole bunch to hie away to the swimming-hole. The Romans seem always to have been looking out for places to bathe and always finding them. So with boys. Where is the boy that did not strive to get to the water? Who is there that did not, in his youth, love some stream? Here is the landscape toward which the mind, during the interval of a generation, has fondly turned. Last summer I followed the same old path to exactly the same square foot of ground on the willow-lined shore from which I had a hundred times stepped into the stream. I could locate exactly the spot where a bigger boy, who wanted to race, raised an oar and told me to jump over to lighten the boat, which I had to do, and there in deep water, as it was sink or swim, survive or perish, I paddled the best I could and learned to swim in one short, self-taught lesson.