MUSIC LESSONS
[p 49]
It never happened again, dear Bob, and, please God, it never will!
Another trouble The Boy had in Red Hook was Dr. McNamee, a resident dentist, who operated upon The Boy, now and then. He was a little more gentle than was The Boy’s city dentist, Dr. Castle; but he hurt, for all that. Dr. Castle lived in Fourth Street, opposite Washington Parade Ground, and on the same block with Clarke and Fanning’s school. And to this day The Boy would go miles out of his way rather than pass Dr. Castle’s house. Personally Dr. Castle was a delightful man, who told The Boy amusing stories, which The Boy could not laugh at while his mouth was wide open. But professionally Dr. Castle was to The Boy an awful horror, of whom he always dreamed when his dreams were particularly bad. As he looks back upon his boyhood, with its frequent toothache and its long hours in the dentists’ chairs, The Boy sometimes thinks that if he had his life to live over again, and could not go through it without teeth, he would prefer not to be born at all!
It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. One old friend remembers nothing but his phenomenal capacity for [p 50]
the consumption of chicken pot-pie. Another old friend can recall the scrupulously clean white duck suits which he wore of afternoons, and also the blue-checked long apron which he was forced to wear in the mornings; both of them exceedingly distasteful to The Boy, because the apron was a girl’s garment, and because the duck suit meant “dress-up,” and only the mildest of genteel play; while Bob’s sister dwells chiefly now upon the wonderful valentine The Boy sent once to Zillah Crane. It was so large that it had to have an especial envelope made to fit it; and it was so magnificent, and so delicate, that, notwithstanding the envelope, it came in a box of its own. It had actual lace, and pinkish Cupids reclining on light-blue clouds; and in the centre of all was a compressible bird-cage, which, when it was pulled out, like an accordion, displayed not a dove merely, but a plain gold ring—a real ring, made of real gold. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in all Dutchess County; and it was seen and envied by every girl of Zillah’s age between Rhinebeck and Tivoli, between Barrytown and Pine Plains.
The Boy did an extensive business in the valentine line, in the days when February Fourteenth meant much more to boys than it does now. He sent sentimental valentines to Phœbe Hawkins and comic valentines to Ann Hughes, both of them written anonymously, and both directed in a disguised hand. [p 51]
But both recipients always knew from whom they came; and, in all probability, neither of them was much affected by the receipt. The Boy, as he has put on record elsewhere, never really, in his inmost heart, thought that comic valentines were so very comic, because those that came to him usually reflected upon his nose, or were illuminated with portraits of gentlemen of all ages adorned with supernaturally red hair.
In later years, when Bob and The Boy could swim—a little—and had learned to take care of themselves in water over their heads, the mill-pond at Red Hook played an important part in their daily life there. They sailed it, and fished it, and camped out on its banks, with Ed Curtis—before Ed went to West Point—and with Dick Hawley, Josie Briggs, and Frank Rodgers, all first-rate fellows. But that is another story.
The Boy was asked, a year or two ago, to write a paper upon “The Books of his Boyhood.” And when he came to think the matter over he discovered, to his surprise, that the Books of his Boyhood consisted of but one book! It was bound in two twelvemo
green cloth volumes; it bore the date of 1850, and it was filled with pictorial illustrations of “The Personal History and Experiences of David Copperfield, the Younger.” It was the first book The Boy ever read, and he thought then, and [p 52]
sometimes he thinks now, that it was the greatest book ever written. The traditional books of the childhood of other children came later to The Boy: “Robinson Crusoe,” and the celebrated “Swiss Family” of the same name; “The Desert Home,” of Mayne Reid; Marryat’s “Peter Simple”; “The Leather Stocking Tales”; “Rob Roy”; and “The Three Guardsmen” were well thumbed and well liked; but they were not The Boy’s first love in fiction, and they never usurped, in his affections, the place of the true account of David Copperfield. It was a queer book to have absorbed the time and attention of a boy of eight or nine, who had to skip the big words, who did not understand it all, but who cried, as he has cried but once since, whenever he came to that dreadful chapter which tells the story of the taking away of David’s mother, and of David’s utter, hopeless desolation over his loss.