THE BOY IN KILTS
The Boy carried his nose in a sling for many weeks, and the bandage, naturally, twisted the nose to one side. It did not recover its natural tint for a long time, and the poor little heart was nearly broken at the thought of the fresh disfigurement. The Boy felt that he had not only an unusually long nose, but a nose that was crooked and would always be as red as his hair.
He does not remember what was done to his uncle. But the uncle was for half a century The Boy’s best and most faithful of friends. And The Boy forgave him long, long ago.
The Boy’s first act of self-reliance and of conscious self-dependence was a very happy moment in his young life; and it consisted in his being able to step over the nursery fender, all alone, and to toast his own shins thereby, without falling into the fire. His first realization of “getting big” came to him about the same time, and with a mingled shock of pain and pleasure, when he discovered that he could not walk under the high kitchen-table without bumping his head. He tried it very often before he learned [p 12]
to go around that article of furniture, on his way from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he camped out on rainy days, to the sink, which was his oasis in the desert of the basement floor. This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences. Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain “Miss Netticoat,” who wore a white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that “the longer she stands the shorter she grows.” The Boy always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss Netticoat and himself.
As he was all boy in his games, he would never cherish anything but a boy-doll, generally a Highlander, in kilts and with a glengarry, that came off! And although he became foreman of a juvenile hook-and-ladder company before he was five, and would not play with girls at all, he had one peculiar feminine weakness. His grand passion was washing and ironing. And Ann Hughes used to let him do all the laundry-work connected with the wash-rags and his own pocket-handkerchiefs, into which, regularly, every Wednesday, he burned little brown holes with the toy flat-iron, which would get too hot. But [p 13]
Johnny Robertson and Joe Stuart and the other boys, and even the uncles and the aunts, never knew anything about that—unless Ann Hughes gave it away!
THE BOY PROMOTED TO TROUSERS
The Boy seems to have developed, very early in life, a fondness for new clothes—a fondness which his wife sometimes thinks he has quite outgrown. It is recorded that almost his first plainly spoken words were “Coat and hat,” uttered upon his promotion into a more boyish apparel than the caps and frocks of his infancy. And he remembers very distinctly his first pair of long trousers, and the impression they made upon him, in more ways than one. They were a black-and-white check, and to them was attached that especially manly article, the suspender. They were originally worn in celebration of the birth of the New Year, in 1848 or 1849, and The Boy went to his father’s store in Hudson Street, New York, to exhibit them on the next business-day thereafter. Naturally they excited much comment, and were the subject of sincere congratulation. And two young clerks of his father, The Boy’s uncles, amused themselves, and The Boy, by playing with him a then popular game called “Squails.” They put The Boy, seated, on a long counter, and they slid him, backward and forward between them, with great skill and no little force. But, before the championship was decided, The Boy’s mother broke [p 14]
up the game, boxed the ears of the players, and carried the human disk home in disgrace; pressing as she went, and not very gently, the seat of The Boy’s trousers with the palm of her hand!