“GOOD MORNING, BOYS”
After his North Moore Street experiences The Boy was sent to study under men teachers in boys’ schools; and he considered then that he was grown up.
The Boy, as has been said, was born without the sense of spell. The Rule of Three, it puzzled him, and fractions were as bad; and the proper placing of e and i, or i and e, the doubling of letters in the middle of words, and how to treat the addition of a suffix in “y” or “tion” “almost drove him mad,” from his childhood up. He hated to go to school, but he loved to play school; and when Johnny Robertson and he were not conducting a pompous, public funeral—a certain oblong hat-brush, with a rosewood back, studded with brass tacks, serving as a coffin, in which lay the body of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, or the Duke of Wellington, all of whom died when Johnny and The Boy were about eight years old—they were teaching each other the three [p 18]
immortal and exceedingly trying “R’s”—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—in a play-school. Their favorite spelling-book was a certain old cook-book, discarded by the head of the kitchen, and considered all that was necessary for their educational purpose. From this, one afternoon, Johnnie gave out “Dough-nut,” with the following surprising result. Conscious of the puzzling presence of certain silent consonants and vowels, The Boy thus set it down: “D-O, dough, N-O-U-G-H-T, nut—doughnut!” and he went up head in a class of one, neither teacher nor pupil perceiving the marvellous transposition.
All The Boy’s religious training was received at home, and almost his first text-book was “The Shorter Catechism,” which, he confesses, he hated with all his little might. He had to learn and recite the answers to those awful questions as soon as he could recite at all, and, for years, without the slightest comprehension as to what it was all about. Even to this day he cannot tell just what “Effectual Calling,” or “Justification,” is; and I am sure that he shed more tears over “Effectual Calling” than would blot out the record of any number of infantile sins. He made up his youthful mind that if he could not be saved without “Effectual Calling”—whatever that was—he did not want to be saved at all. But he has thought better of it since.
PLAYING “SCHOOL”
It is proper to affirm here that The Boy did not [p 19]
acquire his occasional swear-words from “The Shorter Catechism.” They were born in him, as a fragment of Original Sin; and they came out of him innocently and unwittingly, and only for purposes of proper emphasis, long before the days of “Justification,” and even before he knew his A, B, C’s.