A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and, before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was demanded—a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the father’s own sense of the ridiculous.
When the father returned, at dinner-time, he carried the brick, enveloped in many series of papers, beginning with the coarsest kind and ending with the finest kind; and each of the wrappers was fastened with its own particular bit of cord or ribbon, all of them tied in the hardest of hard knots. The process of disentanglement was long and laborious, but it was [p 8]
persistently performed; and when the brick was revealed, lo! it was just a brick—not of maple sugar, but a plain, ordinary, red-clay, building brick which he had taken from some pile of similar bricks on his way up town. The disappointment was not very bitter, for The Boy knew that something else was coming; and he realized that it was the First of April and that he had been April-fooled! The something else, he remembers, was that most amusing of all amusing books, Phœnixiana, then just published, and over it he forgot his toothache, but not his maple sugar. All this happened when he was about twelve years of age, and he has ever since associated “Squibob” with the sweet sap of the maple, never with raging teeth.
It was necessary, however, to get even with the father, not an easy matter, as The Boy well knew; and he consulted his uncle John, who advised patient waiting. The father, he said, was absolutely devoted to The Commercial Advertiser, which he read every day from frontispiece to end, market reports, book notices, obituary notices, advertisements, and all; and if The Boy could hold himself in for a whole year his uncle John thought it would be worth it. The Commercial Advertiser of that date was put safely away for a twelvemonth, and on the First of April next it was produced, carefully folded and properly dampened, and was placed by the side [p 9]
of the father’s plate; the mother and the son making no remark, but eagerly awaiting the result. The journal was vigorously scanned; no item of news or of business import was missed until the reader came to the funeral announcements on the third page. Then he looked at the top of the paper, through his spectacles, and then he looked, over his spectacles, at The Boy; and he made but one observation. The subject was never referred to afterwards between them. But he looked at the date of the paper, and he looked at The Boy; and he said: “My son, I see that old Dr. McPherson is dead again!”
THE BOY’S UNCLE JOHN
The Boy was red-headed and long-nosed, even from the beginning—a shy, introspective, self-conscious little boy, made peculiarly familiar with his personal defects by constant remarks that his hair was red and that his nose was long. At school, for years, he was known familiarly as “Rufus,” “Red-Head,” “Carrot-Top,” or “Nosey,” and at home it was almost as bad.
His mother, married at nineteen, was the eldest of a family of nine children, and many of The Boy’s aunts and uncles were but a few years his senior, and were his daily, familiar companions. He was the only member of his own generation for a long time. There was a constant fear, upon the part of the elders, that he was likely to be spoiled, and consequently the rod of verbal castigation was rarely spared. He was never praised, nor petted, nor coddled; and he was [p 10]
taught to look upon himself as a youth hairily and nasally deformed and mentally of but little wit. He was always falling down, or dropping things. He was always getting into the way, and he could not learn to spell correctly or to cipher at all. He was never in his mother’s way, however, and he was never made to feel so. But nobody except The Boy knows of the agony which the rest of the family, unconsciously, and with no thought of hurting his feelings, caused him by the fun they poked at his nose, at his fiery locks, and at his unhandiness. He fancied that passers-by pitied him as he walked or played in the streets, and he sincerely pitied himself as a youth destined to grow up into an awkward, tactless, stupid man, at whom the world would laugh so long as his life lasted.
An unusual and unfortunate accident to his nose when he was eight or ten years old served to accentuate his unhappiness. The young people were making molasses candy one night in the kitchen of his maternal grandfather’s house—the aunts and the uncles, some of the neighbors’ children, and The Boy—and the half of a lemon, used for flavoring purposes, was dropped as it was squeezed by careless hands—very likely The Boy’s own—into the boiling syrup. It was fished out and put, still full of the syrup, upon a convenient saucer, where it remained, an exceedingly fragrant object. After the odor had [p 11]
been inhaled by one or two of the party, The Boy was tempted to “take a smell of it”; when an uncle, boylike, ducked the luckless nose into the still simmering lemonful. The result was terrible. Red-hot sealing-wax could not have done more damage to the tender, sensitive feature.