I always think of my school as my boyhood. Until I was big enough to swim the Missouri River my home was in a little Kansas town, and we boys lived in the woods and in the water all Summer, and in the woods and on the ice all Winter. We trapped and hunted, we rowed and fished,and built dams, and cut stick horses, and kept stick-horse livery stables where the grapevines hung, and where the paw-paws mellowed in the Fall. We made mud slides into our swimming hole, and we were artists in mud-tattoo, painting face and body with thin black mud and scraping white stripes from head to foot. We climbed the trees and cut our names, we sucked the sap of the box elder and squashed poke berries for war paint. We picked wild grapes and gooseberries, and made pop-guns to shoot green haws. In the Autumn we gathered walnuts, and in the Spring we greeted the johnny-jump-ups, and the sweet williams as they peered through the mold.
Always, we boys were out of doors, as it seems to me; and I did the chores. It is something to learn the toughness of hickory under the saw, how easily walnut splits, how mean elm is to handle: and a certain dexterity comes to a boy who teaches a calf to drink, or slops hogs without soiling his Sunday clothes in the evening. And the hay makes acrobats. In the loft a boy learns to turn flip-flops, and with a lariat rope he can make a trapeze. My rings were made by padding the iron rings from the hubs of a lumber wagon and swinging them from the rafters.
Bill, little Bethlehem Bill, has a better school than I had; the house and the things that go with it. Bill's teachers know more accurately what they are about than did my teachers in the old days out West half a century ago. And, of course, Bill is getting things from his school that I did not get. But he is growing up with a woefully distorted idea of life. What does Bill know about the woods and the flowers? Where in Bill's makeup is that which comes from browsing on berries and nuts and the rank paw paw, and roaming the woods like the Bander-log? And the crops, what does he know about them?
The silver-sides used to live in the pool under the limestone ledges by the old stone quarry where the snakes would sun themselves at noon. The wild rose, with its cinnamon-scented flower and curling leaves, used to bloom in May for me—for me and a little brown-eyed girl who found her ink-bottle filled with them when the school bell called us in from play. And on Saturdays we boys roamed over the prairies picking wild flowers, playing wild plays and dreaming wild dreams—children's dreams. Do you suppose that little Bill dreams such dreams in a fifty-foot lot with only his mother's flowers in the window pots to teach him the great mystery of life?
Bill has no barn. I doubt if he can skin a cat, and I am sure he cannot do the big drop from the trapeze. To turn a flip-flop would fill him with alarm, and yet Jim Betts, out in Kansas, used to turn a double flip-flop over a stack of barrels! And Jim Betts is a man to look at. He is built by the day. He has an educated body, and it is going into its fifties with health and strength that Bill will have to work for. And Jim Betts and I used to make our own kites and nigger-shooters and sleds and rabbit traps.
Bill's school seems real enough, but his play and his work seem rather empty. Of course Bill cannot have the fringe of a million square miles of wild buffalo range for his out-of-doors. No, Bill cannot have that. Never, again. And to imagine that Bill needs anything of the kind is to forget the magic of Bill's "make-believe!" A tree, a brook, a stretch of grass! What old-world things Bill's fancy can create there! What untold history repeat itself in Bill's most fragmentary play! Bill, is by nature, a conjuror. Give him but little and he will make a world for himself, and grow to be a man. Older people seem, however, to forget, and deprive Bill of the little that he needs; and it is worth while, therefore, to develop the contrast between Bill's school and that school of mine in the long-ago land of my boyhood out-of-doors.
The Land of Out-of-Doors! What irony there is in such glowing phrase to city boys like Bill! The supreme delight of my own boyhood days was to gather wild flowers in a wooded hollow, to reach which led across a sunny stretch of wild meadow rising to the sky; and I would have you know that I lived as a boy in a land where a weed never grew. [1] I wish that Bill might have access to the places where the wild flowers grow, and above all I wish that Bill might have more opportunity to see his father at work. A hundred years ago these things were within the reach of every boy and girl; but now, alas, Bill sees no other manual labor than the digging of a ditch in a cluttered street, or stunted in growth, he has almost become a part of the machine he daily tends, and Boyville has become a paved and guttered city, high-walled, desolate, and dirty; with here and there a vacant lot hideous with refuse in early Spring and overwhelmed with an increasing pestilence of weeds as the Summer days go by! And the strangest thing about it all is, that Bill accepts unquestioningly, and even with manifestations of joy, just any sort of a world, if only it is flooded with sunshine.
I remember how, in my boyhood, the rare advent of an old tin can in my favorite swimming hole used to offend me, while such a thing as a cast-off shoe was simply intolerable, and I wonder that Bill's unquenchable delight in outdoor life does not become an absolute rage in his indifference to the dreadful pollution of the streams and the universal pestilence of weeds and refuse in our thickly populated districts.
I cannot refrain from quoting an amusing poem of James Whitcomb Riley's, which expresses (more completely than anything I know) the delight of boys in outdoor life, where so many things happen and so many things lure; and you can easily catch in the swing of Riley's verse that wanton note which is ordinarily so fascinatingly boyish, but which may too easily turn to a raging indifference to everything that makes for purity in this troubled life of ours.
Three Jolly Hunters