At any rate, in the domestic crisis just alluded to, I rebelled against authority whose insignia were fasces of disagreeable beech-whips, and, at the mature age of eleven years, took a solemn vow that I would have nothing more to do with the people of my home circle in Buffalo, or with any whatsoever of my relatives, some of whom had placed me there;—and I ran away.
CHAPTER III.
A FUGITIVE.
ESCAPING from the house at night, I did not have time or presence of mind to take anything with me but what I carried on my back.
One of my school-fellows, who had been forewarned of my design, met me by appointment on the neighboring corner, and smuggled me into his father’s stable. Here, it had been agreed, I was to lodge on the hay.
My friend was a doughty, reassuring sort of hero, who was a great comfort to me at that nervous moment when I entered the darkness of the hay-mow. I would not for the world have betrayed any fraction of the fear which his swaggering manner may have failed to dispel. He would assuredly have laughed at me; and I believe now, moreover, he would have taken that, or any shadow of an excuse, for joining me in my flight.
So strong, indeed, was the romantic instinct upon that young gentleman that he lingered long about the spot where I had crawled into the hay and covered up my head, before he could prevail upon himself to go back to the house and to his regular bed. He had assured me before we came into the stable, out of the pleasant moonlight of that late spring evening, that he envied me very much, as I was going to have lots of fun; he only wished he had a good reason to run away from home too; but then, he added thoughtfully, as he looked up at the lights in the window of the family sitting-room, his mother was so “derned kind,” and his father so “blamed good,” that he didn’t see how he could leave them just now.
The next morning my friend found me sleeping very comfortably, with my head and one arm protruding limply out of the hay. Awaking me, he proceeded to draw from his trousers pocket several pieces of bread-and-butter for my breakfast; which was none the less toothsome from its somewhat dishevelled state, consequent upon the manner of its previous stowage.
While munching that surreptitious meal, my thoughts very naturally wandered to the breakfast-table, where I should that morning probably be missed for the first time by the people from whom I had fled; and I amused myself, as well as my romantic caterer, with what we both of us, no doubt, considered a highly humorous account of the grievous commotion which would ensue at that ordinarily so solemn victualling.
Emboldened by the lively appreciation of my school-fellow, and by the reviving influence of the bread-and-butter, I grew imaginative and grotesque in my daring pleasantry. I went so far as to describe the scene at that breakfast-table when Bridget came to the dining-room door with wild eyes, and the announcement that my room had not been occupied on the night before; how the pater-familias, at that dramatic moment, had dropped a surprised spoon into the splattering gravy of the stewed meat; and how his wife opposite, then in the act of pouring chiccory, had—whether in dismay at the overwhelming news or at the sudden soiling of her tablecloth—upset the coffee-pot.
These and many more very brilliant and mirth-provoking feats of boyish humor—very brilliant and mirth-provoking, of course, I mean, to my friend and myself—did I perform that morning in the hay-mow; all bearing upon the assumed utter discomfiture of the bereaved people about that breakfast-table. But, alas! even a precocious autobiographer, with his mouth full of bread-and-butter, may make the mistake, so common to the adult of his species, of over-estimating his own importance. I have since learned that there was no sensation of any consequence at the breakfast-table in question, and that my subsequent permanent loss was taken with remarkable equanimity and resignation.