A New England Boyhood

NOTE. — The Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, having observed the interest with which Miss Larcom’s A New England Girlhood was received, asked Mr. Hale if he would bring together some of his memories of the same period in a series of papers on a New England boyhood, with special reference to the conditions of life in Boston in the early part ot the second quarter of this century. The chapters which follow form the first number of this series.

I.

’T IS SEVENTY YEARS SINCE.

THE reader and I ought not to begin without my reminding him that the Boston of which I am to write was very different from the Boston of to-day. In 1825 Boston was still a large country town. I think some one has called it a city of gardens; but that some one may have been I. As late as 1817, in a description of Boston which accompanied a show which a Frenchman had made by carving and painting the separate houses, it was said, with some triumph, that there were nine blocks of buildings in the town. This means that every other building stood with windows or doors on each of the four sides, and in most instances with trees, or perhaps Little lanes, between. To people in this neighborhood to-day, I may say that the upper part of the main street in Charlestown gives a very good idea of what the whole of Washington Street south of Winter Street was then. And, by the way, Washington Street was much more often called Main Street than by its longer name.

The reader must imagine, therefore,a large, pretty country town, where stagecoaches still clattered in from the country, and brought all the strangers who did not ride in their own chaises. Large stables, always of wood, I think, provided for the horses thus needed. I remember, as I write, Niles’s stable in School Street, a large stable in Bromfield Street, afterwards Streeter’s, the stables of the Marlborough Hotel in Washington Street, and what seemed to us very large stables in Hawley Street, — all in the very heart of the town, and on a tract which cannot be more than twelve acres. When, in 1829, it was reported that the new Tremont House was to have no special stables for its guests, the announcement excited surprise almost universal; and to us children the statement that there was to be a tavern, or a hotel, without a sign was still more extraordinary. We were used to seeing swinging signs on posts in front of the taverns. Thus I remember “The Indian Queen ” in Bromfield Street, “The Bunch of Grapes ” in State Street, “The Lamb” I think where the Adams House now is, “The Lion” where the Boston Theatre is, and nearly opposite these the Lafayette Tavern. This means that large pictures of an Indian queen, a bunch of grapes, a lamb, a lion, and of Lafayette swung backward and forward in the wind. There was a sign in front of the Marlborough Tavern, and one nearly opposite, south of Milk Street, but I do not remember what these were. All these inns would now be thought small. They were then called taverns, and to New Englanders seemed very large. Of course they were large enough for their purpose. When I was nine or ten years old, my father, who was thought to be a fanatic as a railroad prophet, offered in Faneuil Hall the suggestion that if people could come from Springfield to Boston in five hours, an average of nine people would come every day. This prophecy was then considered extravagant. When he came to Boston for the first time, in 1805, the Northampton passengers joined the Springfield passengers at Brookfield. There was room in the carriage for six only. He therefore gave up his seat to a lady who had pressing duties, and waited in Brookfield twenty-four hours to take his chances for the next stage.

The more important business streets of this little town were paved in the middle with round stones from the neighboring beaches, then as now called cobblestones,— I do not know why; but an accomplished friend, who reads this in manuscript, says that the lapstone on which a cobbler stretches his leather is a cobblestone. I recommend this etymology to Dr. Murray and Dr. Whitney. The use of bricks for sidewalks was just coming in, but generally the sidewalks were laid with the flat slates or shales from the neighborhood, which were put down in any shape they happened to take in splitting, without being squared at the corners. Bromfield Street, Winter Street, Summer Street, and Washington Street (old Marlborough Street) between School and Winter seem to us now to be narrow streets, but they have all been widened considerably within my memory. Bromfield Street was called Bromfield’s Lane.

On the other hand, so far as I remember the houses themselves and the life in them, everything was quite as elegant and finished as it is now. Furniture was stately, solid, and expensive. Carpets, then of English make, covered the whole floor, and were of what we should call perfect quality. In summer, by the way, in all houses of which I knew anything, these carpets were always taken up, and India mattings substituted in the “living-rooms. ” Observe that very few houses were closed in summer. Dress was certainly as elegant and costly as it is now; so were porcelain, glass, table linen, and all table furniture. In the earlier days of which I write, a decanter of wine would invariably have stood on a sideboard in every parlor, so that a glass of wine could readily be offered at any moment to any guest. All through my boyhood, it would have been matter of remark if, when a visitor made an evening call, something to eat or drink was not produced at nine o’clock. It might be crackers and cheese, it might be mince pie, it might be oysters or cold chicken. But something would appear, as certainly as there would be a fire on the hearth in winter. Every house, by the way, was warmed by open fires; and in every kitchen cooking was done by an open fire. I doubt if I ever saw a stove in my boyhood, except in a school or an office. Anthracite coal was first tried in 1824. Gas was introduced about the same time. I was taken as a little hoy to see it burning in the shops in Washington Street, and to wonder at an elephant, a tortoise, and a cow, which spouted burning gas in the windows. Gas was not introduced into dwellinghouses until Pemberton Square was built by the Lowells, Jacksons, and their friends, in the years 1835, 1836, and later. It was a surprise to every one when Papanti introduced it in his new Papanti’s Hall.

A handsome parlor then differed from a handsome parlor now mostly in the minor matters of decoration. The pictures on the walls were few, and were mostly portraits. For the rest, mirrors were large and handsome. You would see some copies from well-known paintings in European galleries, and any one who had an Allston would be glad to show it. But I mean that most walls were bare. In good houses, if modern, the walls of parlors would invariably be painted; but in older houses there would be paper hangings, perhaps of landscape patterns. The furniture of a parlor would generally be twelve decorous heavy chairs, probably hairseated, with their backs against the walls; a sofa which matched them, also with its back against the wall; and a heavy, perhaps marble - topped centre table. There might be a rocking-chair in the room, also; but, so far as I remember, other easy-chairs, scattered as one chose about a room, were unknown.

Try to recall, dear reader, or to imagine, the conditions of a town without any railroads, and without any steam navigation beyond fifteen miles. The first steamboat in Boston harbor went to Nahant and back again, about 1826. The first steam railway ran trains to Newton, nine miles, in 1833, Please to remember, then, that everybody lived in Boston the year round, excepting a handful of rich people who had country places in Dorchester, Roxbury, Newton, Brookline, Watertown, Waltham, Brighton, Cambridge, Charlestown, or Medford, accessible by a horse and chaise. What we call buggies were unknown, and a gentleman and lady would certainly ride in a chaise, which was not the English chaise, but a two-wheeled covered vehicle, hung on C-springs. In such a town, the supplies of food, unless brought from the immediate neighborhood, came from the seaboard or the Western rivers, in sloops or schooners. We drew our flour from points as far south as Richmond. I remember more than one winter, when my grandmother, in Westhampton, had sent us a keg or two of home apple-sauce, that the sloop which brought the treasure was frozen up below Hartford, so that it was four or five months before we hungry children enjoyed her present. Great wagons with large teams of horses brought from the interior such products as did not come in this way. For these horses and wagons there were, on “the Neck ” and beyond,great sheds and stables. The country teamster left his horses and his load there while he came into town to make sure where it was to be delivered. To pick up the stray corn which was scattered in these sheds great flocks of pigeons congregated, of whom a wretched handful survive to this day. I mention these little details to give some idea of the country fashion of our lives. Two or three weeks out of town in summer was a large allowance of vacation. Nobody dreamed of closing a church in summer. The school vacation was a fortnight and three days in August, to which, in later days, was added first one week, and then two weeks, in June. The summer break-up which now divides everybody’s Boston year was then wholly unknown.

II.

SCHOOL LIFE.

After studying with great care Mr. Howells’s A Boy’s Town and Miss Larcom’s A New England Girlhood, I have determined not to follow a strict order of time. For better, for worse, I will throw in together in one chapter a set of school memories which range from about 1825 for ten years. At my own imprudent, request, not to say urgency, I was sent to school with two sisters and a brother, older than I, when I was reckoned as about two years old. The school was in an old-fashioned wooden house which fronted on a little court which led off Summer Street. We went up one flight of narrow stairs, and here the northern room of the two bedrooms of the house was occupied by Miss Susan Whitney for her school, and the southern room, which had windows on Summer Street, by Miss Ayres, of whom Miss Whitney had formerly been an assistant. Miss Whitney afterwards educated more than one generation of the children of Boston families. I supposed her to be one of the most aged, and certainly the most learned, women of her time. I believe she was a kind-hearted, intelligent girl of seventeen when I first knew her. I also supposed the room to be a large hall, though I knew it was not nearly so large as our own parlors at home. It may have been eighteen feet square. The floor was sanded with clean sand every Thursday and Saturday afternoon. This was a matter of practical importance to us, because with the sand, using our feet as tools, we made sand pies. You gather the sand with the inside edge of either shoe from a greater or less distance, as the size of the pie requires. As you gain skill, the heap which you make is more and more round. When it is well rounded, you flatten it by a careful pressure of one foot from above. Here it will be seen that full success depends on your keeping the sole of the shoe exactly parallel with the plane of the floor. If you find you have succeeded when you withdraw the shoe, you prick the pie with a pin or a broom splint provided for the purpose, pricking it in whatever pattern you like. The skill of a good pie-maker is measured largely by these patterns. It will readily be seen that the pie is better if the sand is a little moist. But beggars cannot be choosers, and while we preferred the sand on Mondays and Fridays, when it was fresh, we took it as it came.

I dwell on this detail at length because it is one instance as good as a hundred of the way in which we adapted ourselves to the conditions of our times. Children now have carpets on their kindergarten floors, where sand is unknown; so we have to provide clay for them to model with, and put a heap of sand in the back yard. Miss Whitney provided for the same needs by a simpler device, which I dare say is as old as King Alfred .

I cannot tell how we were taught to read, for I cannot remember the time when I could not read as well as I can now. There was a little spelling-book called The New York Spelling-Book, printed by Mahlon Day. When, afterwards, I came to read about Mahlon in the book of Ruth, my notion of him was of a man who had the same name as the man who published the spelling-book. My grandfather had made a spellingbook which we had at home. Privately, I knew that, because he made it, it must be better than the book at school, but I was far too proud to explain this to Miss Whitney. I accepted her spelling-book in the same spirit in which I have often acted since, falling in with what I saw was the general drift, because the matter was of no great consequence. For reading-books, we had Mrs. Barbauld’s First Lessons, “Come hither, Charles, come to mamma;” and we had Popular Lessons, by Miss Robbins, which would be a good book to revive now, but I have not seen it for sixty years.

The school must have been a very much “go-as-you-please ” sort of place. So far it conformed to the highest ideals of the best modern systems. But it had rewards and punishments. I have now a life of William Tell which was given me as a prize. My brother Nathan had Rasselas for a prize, and my sister Sarah had a silver medal, “To the most amiable,” which I am sure she deserved though the competition extended to the whole world.

But these were the great prizes. In an old desk, of which the cover had been broken off, in the closet at the left of the fireplace, were a number of bows, made of yellow, pink, and blue ribbon. When Saturday came, every child who had been good through the week was permitted to select one of these bows, choosing his own color, and to have it pinned on his clothes, under his chin, to wear home. If, on the other hand, he had been very bad, he had a black bow affixed, willy nilly. I hardly dare to soil this page with the tale, but there was an awful story that a boy, whom I will call Charles Waters, unpinned his black bow and trod it in the dirt of the street. But I hasten to add that in that innocent community no one believed this dreadful story. Indeed, it was whispered from one to another rather as an index of what terrible stories were afloat in the world than with any feeling that it could possibly be true.

It is certainly a little queer that in after years one remembers such trifles as this, and forgets absolutely the weightier matters of the law: how he learned to read and write; how he fought with the angel of vulgar fractions and compelled him to grant a blessing; how, in a word, one learned anything of importance. But so it is, and thus, as I have said, I have no memory of any time when I could not read as well as I can now. Perhaps that is the reason why I am too apt to rank teachers of elocution with dancing-masters and fencingmasters, and other professors of deportment. Dear Miss Whitney must have taught us well, or we should have remembered the process more sadly.

If this is a book of confessions, I ought to tell my crimes, and one sin I certainly committed at Miss Whitney’s school. But alas, I do not know what it was, and I never did. Only this I know. We were all too small to go home through Main Street alone. Fullum came for us at twelve, and again at five in the afternoon. Who Fullum was shall appear by and by. One day, when Fullum came at noon, he found me seated in a large yellow chair in the middle of the schoolroom. I was reading a book with perfect satisfaction. So soon as Fullum appeared I was lifted From the chair and my “things” were put on. When we were in the street, Fullum said, “ What have you been doing that was naughty, Doctor ?” I told him, with perfect sincerity, that I had done nothing wrong. But this he did not believe. He reminded me of what I then recollected, that that yellow chair was always a seat of punishment. I had certainly never seen any one in it before — unless it were Miss Whitney herself — excepting the sinners of the school, placed there for punishment. But alas, it had not occurred to any one to tell me why I was put there; and as my own conscience was clear, I have not known from that day to this what my offense was.

I could probably, without much difficulty, make a volume on Miss Whitney’s school, and the various aspects of life as they there presented themselves to me. But these papers must be severely condensed, and I omit such details. To me personally they have a little value, as bearing on the question how far back our memory really runs. There is a Frenchman who says that he recollects the relief produced on his eyes when he was a baby, thirty-six hours old, and a nurse lowered a curtain to screen him from the light. I am not able to fix any facts as early as this; but I am interested in the observation that, among these early recollections of Miss Whitney, there is not included the slightest memory of my first interviews with her. I had a brother and two sisters older than myself, who were my home playmates. I saw them go to school from day to day, and I finally cried because I wanted to go with them. Miss Whitney was therefore persuaded to receive a pupil two years old at the school. It speaks well for her, I think, that she found it possible to adapt such a young gentleman to the exercises of the academy. That makes me think, as I have said, that those exercises must have been conducted on the individual plan. But my chief memories of the school are of conducting observations, similar to Tyndall’s, on the effect produced by sunlight upon dust floating in the air. Such luxuries as window shades or blinds were unknown ; if the sun shone in on the south side of the room, you shut an inside shutter. This reminds me that inside shutters are almost wholly unknown to the rising generation, but then every house of which I knew anything had them. At the top of this shutter, which was of paneled wood, a heart was cut, so as to let a little light into the room when the shutters were closed. It will readily be seen that this heart made very curious forms on the floating dust in the schoolroom. What with the manufacture of sand pies and other enterprises going on, there must have been a good deal of dust in the schoolroom, and I remember far better the aspects of this dust, as the sun lighted it and as it floated in different currents, than I do any single lesson which I acquired from books.

It will give some idea of the simplicity of manners and of the quietness of the little town if I tell how “we four ” — by which I mean the four oldest children of my father’s family — went to school and returned, in the winter.

In winter, Fulllum put my two sisters, my brother, and myself into a little green sleigh which he had had made, in which he dragged us over the snow to school. I believe that if any Fullum of to-day should start from the upper door of the Parker House, and drag four little children down School Street, through Washington Street, to Summer Street, and stop at a door opposite Hovey’s, he would attract a fair share of attention. But there was room enough for all then. The “main street ” was what the chief street of a good country town would be now, and this equipage seemed strange to nobody.

School kept only in the morning on Saturday, and Thursday afternoon was always a holiday, in memory of the “Thursday lecture.” But as the lecture was delivered at eleven o’clock in the morning, and every school kept until twelve, there was, of course, no real connection between the holiday and the lecture. The half-holiday was changed to Wednesday, a few years later than the time I am speaking of. It is on this account that Wednesday and Saturday appear to me, to this moment, the happiest days of the week. For I may as well say, first as last, that school was always a bore to me. I did not so much hate it as dislike it, as a necessary nuisance. I think all my teachers regarded it as such; I am sure they made me so regard it.

Just before I was six years old I was transferred from Miss Whitney’s school to another school which was in the immediate neighborhood, being in the basement of the First Church, which was then in Chauncy Street. It stood, I think, just where Coleman & Mead’s great store is to-day. There were three or four large rooms under the church, which were rented as schoolrooms; and it being thought that I was large enough to go to a man’s school, I was sent there, to my great delight, with my friend Edward Webster. We were very intimate from days earlier than this, of which I will speak in another chapter, and it was a great pleasure to us that we could go to school together. There was no thought of sending me to a public school.

My father and mother had both very decided, and I have a right to say very advanced, views on matters of education; and advanced education was then a matter everywhere in the air. The Boston Latin School had been made a first-rate school for preparing boys for college, under the eye and care of Benjamin Apthorp Gould, some ten years before. But there was no public school of any lower grade to which my father would have sent me, any more than he would have sent me to jail. Since that time I have heard my contemporaries talk of the common school training of the day, and I do not wonder at my father’s decision. The masters, so far as I know, were all inferior men ; there was constant talk of “hiding” and “cowhides ” and “ ferules ” and “ thrashing,” and I should say, indeed, that the only recollections of my contemporaries about those schooldays were of one constant low conflict with men of a very low type. So soon as a boy was sent to the Latin School — and he was sent there at nine years of age — all this was changed into the life of a civilized place. Why the Boston people tolerated such brutality as went on in their other public schools I do not know, and never have known; but no change came for some years after.

For the next three years, the only object, so far as I was concerned, was to have me live along and get ready for the Latin School. I have always been glad that I was sent where I was, — to a school without any plan or machinery, very much on the go-as-you-please principle, and where there was no strain put upon the pupil. I disliked it, as I disliked all schools; but here, again, I regarded the whole arrangement as one of those necessary nuisances which society imposes on the individual, and which the individual would be foolish if he quarreled with, when he did not have it in his power to abolish it. I had no such power, and therefore went and came as I was bidden, only eager every day to exchange the monotonies of school life for the more varied and larger enterprises of the playroom or of the Common.

I have said that advanced education was in the air. It will be hard to make boys and girls of the present day understand how much was then expected from reforms in education. Dr. Channing was at his best then, and all that he had to say about culture and self-culture impressed people intensely, — more intensely, I think, than was good for them. There were rumors from Europe of Fellenberg’s school at Hofwyl. At Northampton, the Round Hill School was started on somewhat similar plans. In England, Lord Brougham and the set of people around him were discussing the “march of intellect, ” and had established a Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, whose name has lived after it. Mr. Webster, Mr. Edward Everett, my father, and other gentlemen in their position established a society in Boston, which did the same thing. The reign of Lyceums and Mechanics’ Institutes had begun. Briefly, there was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in by teaching people what were the relations of acids to alkalies, and what was the derivation of the word “cordwainer.” If we only knew enough, it was thought, we should be wise enough to keep out of the fire, and we should not be burned.

So it was that any novelty, when it was presented at a schoolroom door, was even more apt to be accepted than it is now; and, as every reader of these lines knows, such things are accepted pretty willingly now. So I remember that I was taught “geometry ” when I was six years old, —or that I thought I was, — from a little book called The Elements of Geometry. I could rattle off about isosceles triangles when I was six as well as I can now. And I had other queer smattering bits of knowledge, useful or useless, which were picked up in the same way.

At school there was a school library, from which we borrowed books, because we liked the mechanism of it. We had much better books at home; but of course it was good fun to have your name entered on a book, and to return them once a week, and so on.

My father was one of the best teachers I ever knew, and had broken into life, as most educated young men in those days did, first as a private tutor in the city of Troy, and afterwards as teacher of mathematics in Exeter Academy. When he had a moment, therefore, from other affairs, to give to our education, it was always well used ; and we doubtless owed a great deal to him which we afterwards did not know how to account for. Among other such benefactions, I owe it that for these three or four years, when really I had nothing to do but to grow physically, I was placed with a simple, foolish man for a teacher, and not with one of the drivers, who had plans and would want to make much of us. Among other notions of my father, right or wrong as the case may be, was this, that a boy could pick up the rudiments of language quite early in life. So the master was told that Edward Webster and I, and perhaps some other boys, were to be taught the paradigms of the Latin grammar at once. We also had given to us little Latin books, which we spelled away upon. One was a translation of the German version of Robinson Crusoe into Latin. It was thought that the interest of the book would induce us to learn the meaning of the words. But the truth was, we were familiar with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and regarded this as a low and foolish imitation, of which we made a great deal of fun. All the same, the agony with which some boys remember their first studies of “amo, amas, amat,” is wholly unknown to me. I drifted into those things simply, and by the time I was sent to the Latin School the point had been gained, and I knew my “penna, pennæ, pennæ, ” and my “amo, amas, amat, ” as well as if I had been born to them.

The Latin School stood, at that time, where the lower part of Parker’s Hotel is now, in School Street. School Street received its name from this school. At the beginning the school was on the other side of the street, where the Franklin statue now stands. But when the King’s Chapel people had increased so much that they wanted to enlarge their little wooden tabernacle and carry their church farther down the street, about the middle of the last century, they applied to the town for the use of the schoolhouse lot. I rather think the matter became a battle between the Episcopalians and their “liberal” allies on the one side, and the old-line Puritans on the other. It was very much battled in town meeting, and the order for the change prevailed only by a very few votes. The King’s Chapel people had to build a schoolhouse on the south side of the street. That schoolhouse was well remembered in my day, but the building was enlarged, I think, in 1814. It had been only one story high, and it was then made three stories, with a granite front and a cupola on the top. In this cupola was a bell with a cross on it, about which we boys told many lies. I believe, in truth, it had been the bell on the Huguenot church, lower down on the same street.

I entered the school in 1831, being then nine years old. That was the minimum for the entrance of boys at that time, and the course was five years. I saw Mr. Leverett, who was the principal when I was admitted, but in the course of a few weeks he left the school to the charge of Mr. Charles Knapp Dillaway, who is well remembered by every one who has had anything to do with education in Boston for the last sixty years. I may say in passing that I was permitted to speak at his funeral, and I could not but remember then that, from the time when he entered the Latin School, in 1818, till he died, in 1889, he had been personally connected, more or less distinctly, with our system of public education. He had therefore seen the working of that system for more than a quarter part of the period since it was established by Winthrop and his companions, in 1635.

The system of the school was rigid, but I do not think boys object to rigidity. It carried to the extreme the cultivation of verbal memory. We had a very bad Latin grammar, which I suppose was the best there was, made by Mr. Gould himself from Principal Adam’s Latin Grammar, which was used in all English schools. “Principal Adam ” is the Edinburgh Adam of whom you read in Walter Scott and such books. The late Joseph Gardner, laughing about such things a few years ago, Said to me, “I can remember the block on which I was standing, in the Place Vendôme in Paris, when, as by a revelation, it occurred to me that Andrews and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar was made from the Latin language, and that the Latin language was not made from Andrews and Stoddard’s Grammar, as up till that moment I had always supposed.”

I am quite clear that I went well through the Latin School with the distinct feeling that that grammar stated the eternal truth with regard to language, and that Cicero and the rest of them had had to adapt themselves to it. I cannot think that the masters thought so, but certainly they left that impression on the minds of the pupils. The first year of the little boys was spent in committing the words of this grammar to memory. Unless a boy was singularly advanced, he had no schoolbook in hand from September to the next. August excepting this Latin grammar. I cannot conceive of any system more disposed to make him hate the language; and in fact about half the boys withdrew from the school, as not having “a gift for language,” before they had been there two years. These were generally the boys of quick and bright minds, who went off “into business,” as it was called, because they were not fit to be scholars. The professional lines of life lost those who would have been ornaments in whatever profession they had chosen, simply because those lads had not the verbal memory to remember and recall long lists of words, which Adam had noticed, which had or had not an i before um in the genitive plural.

But I do not propose to go into the niceties of education in these papers. Thanks to the prescience of my father, of which I have spoken, I was put in with the ten-year-old boys, who had ground through this mill. Till this moment I am their inferior in certain details of the words to which I have referred, but I enjoyed life at school a great deal better than they did.

The “march of intellect ” fad had not swept over Boston without bringing in the German notions about gymnasiums. Dr. Lieber arrived, an exile from Germany, with Dr. Beck, who Was also an exile, and they established a swimming-school where Brimmer Street is now, and a gymnasium in Tremont Street, — then called Common Street,— at the corner of West Street. That place was then called the “Washington Gardens.” Mr. Hartwell, in his recent interesting essay on gymnastics in Boston, says that the first year Lieber’s gymnasium in the Washington Gardens had two hundred pupils, which increased to four hundred in the second, and in the third year he had four pupils. These figures show only too fatally what was the fall of the athletic thermometer. More learned people than I must say whether the system of gymnastics carried on by fixed machinery ever maintains its popularity for a long time, unless it is seconded by athletics such as we now class under that name, and by a certain rivalry.

My brother Nathan, to whom I owe most of what I am and have been in the world, was entered as one of the pupils in the Washington Gardens gymnasium. It must have been in the year 1827, or possibly 1828, that he took me with him there. All that I remember about it is my terror when I had climbed up a ladder and cut off my retreat. I had seen the other boys climb between the rounds and slide down the pole which supported the ladder, and I wished to do this. I got through the rounds, and then was afraid to slide. But a competent teacher came up, instructed me in the business, and I won the high courage by which to loosen my feet from the rounds and slide safely down. I went home to tell this story with delight, but never repeated the experiment.

At the same time — and I think this shows the courage with which our education was carried on—I made my first essays in riding on horseback. My father owned a handsome horse, with which he took our mother and some one of the children out to ride on halfholidays. On some occasions, another horse, which was called the “Workbench ” from his quiet habits, — white, I recollect, — was taken with us, saddled. This was that “we boys” might learn to ride. We were not permitted to ride in the streets in town, and father would ride the horse out so far, while my mother drove the chaise. But once in the country, we mounted, and followed the chaise for the afternoon tour. At five years old I was so small that my feet would not reach the stirrups, and I rode with my feet in the straps which sustained the stirrups. All went well till, in South Boston, as we came home, some boys stoned my horse, and he ran and I was thrown. I remember repeating the experiment, with the same success and failure, and it ended in my poor father having to ride the “Workbench” home, while I ignominiously returned in the chaise, as I had started.

The drift for athletics had swept over the Latin School, also, and the square yard behind the school, which seemed immense, but must have been only thirty feet in each measurement, was fitted up with a vaulting-horse, parallel bars, and so on. But as the fad wore itself out the boys were permitted to destroy these things, and when I entered the school, in 1831, there were only the vaulting-horse and perhaps a pair of parallel bars left; and these gradually disappeared from the curriculum. This playground was the only playground of the school, and was accessible only to the boys in the lowest room. Upstairs, we were confined to a very limited passageway, I might call it, at recess, in which we used to play “tug-of-war,” though we never called it by that name. Practically, the recesses were very short, for the simple reason that they did not like to have us in the street.

Earlier than this, I can remember, when I was only four or five years old, that we looked from the windows of the house out upon the street, to see the sports of the boys there, when rather more liberty was granted them. I think it will amuse the schoolboys of the present day to know that in summer all boys then wore calico gowns during the hot months, cut exactly as a minister’s gown is cut now, though without the large sleeves. But this custom had gone by before I was a pupil at the school. I remember distinctly, however, seeing the boys kick their pails to pieces at the end of the school term. They would subscribe for pails in which to keep the water which they wanted to drink in the hot days; and when the term was done, not wishing to leave their pails to their successors, they kicked them about the sidewalk and street until they were ruined.

To this school we repaired at eight o’clock in the morning for the months between April and October, and at nine o’clock from the first of October to the first of April. School lasted till twelve o’clock, excepting for the little boys, who, in the latter part of my time, were “let out ” at eleven o’clock. School began again at three, and lasted, in winter as long as there was light, and in summer till six o’clock. I remember the bitter terror which we had one summer afternoon, which must have been in May, 1833, when we were to go and see Fanny Kemble in the evening. As it happened, the school committee chose to come that afternoon for an examination, and we were kept in for the completion of the examination after six o’clock. We sat there terrified, for fear the examination would last until the play began in the Tremont Theatre, hard by. I am afraid the boys of to-day would consider it rather hard lines if they were ever kept at school till the beginning of their theatrical entertainment.

In Mr. Freeman Clarke’s autobiography there is a charming passage about his stay at this school. He does not in the least overstate the admirable democratic effect of the whole thing. We were side by side with the sons of the richest and most prominent men in Boston; we were side by side with the sons of day laborers, I suppose. The odd thing about it is that we did not know, and we did not care, whose sons they were. They were all dressed alike, they spoke equally good English, their hands were equally clean, and all we knew of them was that one fellow was at the head of the class, and one was not. I wish I knew now what was the family or origin of a charming boy named Carleton, — Charles Muzzey Carleton, — who was at the head of my class. He was a pure, manly, upright, gentlemanly fellow, a much better boy than any of the rest of us were, and we therefore chose to nickname him “Piety Carleton.” I am afraid we made him very unhappy by the nickname, but he bore himself in just as manly a way in spite of it. If these words happen to fall under the eye of anybody who remembers that boy, I wish I might be told what was his after career.

It was a queer transition time for schools. The present murderous and absurd system of “examinations ” was wholly unknown. Each master got along as well as he could with his boys, and the boys got along as well as they could with the master. There was one head - master, a sub-master, and two others, who were called ushers on the printed catalogue, but were never so called by the boys. Whatever the age of these gentlemen, they were always called “old.” It was “old Dillaway,” “old Gardner, ” “old Streeter,” or “old Benjamin.” I now know that the oldest of them was not thirty-five, and that most of them were not twenty-five.

We were changed from room to room, seldom staying in one room more than three months, but the highest class was always with the head - master. I remember one occasion — I was about ten years old — when, to our delight, we were ordered upstairs from the “English room.” We were pleased because it was known that the new master there was very easy, and that the “fellows did as they chose.” It was so, indeed. I recollect my amazement when I saw Hancock cross the room without leave, make a snowball from the snow in a pail, and carry it back ostentatiously to place it on the front of his desk. The snow was provided for use on the stove. From this he then made little snowballs with which to pelt the other boys, all without interruption from the master. But other things went on with the same freedom, which were of more import. I was seated next to Hayward, whom I then met for the first time, and who has since been a lifelong friend. They were reading Cicero’s orations. He asked me what I knew about Cicero; and when I told him I knew nothing, he kindly went into a somewhat elaborate history of his life and analysis of his character as they appeared to a boy of his age. He has forgotten this, but I remember it perfectly. It seems to me that this extempore private lecture must have lasted the whole afternoon. The poolmaster made no sort of interference with it, probably glad if two of his scholars were doing nothing worse than talking.

But alas, and alas! this paradise of King Log came to an end in a day or two. This amiable gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, was removed, and Francis Gardner was put in his place. For forty years after, he was master in that school, and is now well known as a distinguished classical teacher and editor. That was his baptism in a schoolmaster’s life, and a baptism of fire it was. We were afterwards intimate friends, and he told me once that his first month, when he was bringing those wild-cat boys into order, was the hardest experience of his life.

In the English room, according to the absurd theory of many schools, the whole class was kept together, without any reference to what they knew of the subject. That is to say, we were classed for our knowledge of Latin, and nobody seemed to care how much or how little we knew of arithmetic. I used to do “the sums” and write down the numerical answers in advance, so far as my slate would hold them. I was fond of arithmetic, and so I would be days ahead of the class, which was also the case with Richard Stores Willis, the eminent musician, who sat by me. He brought to school Kettell’s Specimens of American Poetry, a book of that time, in three closely printed octavo volumes. We read the three volumes through, and a deal of trash there is in them. Still, it was better than doing nothing ; and so I suppose the master thought, for he never interfered.

To me this was all a curious double life. I was on perfect terms of companionship with the fellows in school, in recess and in the few minutes before school. But as soon as school was over I rushed home, without these companions, to join my brother Nathan, who has been spoken of, for the occupations vastly more important, which I will describe in another chapter. The other fellows would urge us to go down on the wharves, as they did. The fathers of most of them were in mercantile life, for Boston was still largely a shipping town. I can remember asking one of them what we should do on the wharves, with a horrified feeling which I have to this day about any vague future entertainment of which the lines are not indicated. He said, “Oh, we can go about the vessels, we can talk with the men.” Perhaps they would be landing molasses, and we could dip straws in the bungholes; or once a cask had broken open, and the fellows had gathered up brown sugar in their hands. To this day, when I hear of persons going abroad or anywhere else in search of an undefined amusement, I imagine them dipping straws into casks of West India molasses, and then drawing those Straws through their mouths.

For me and my brother such temptations were idle. Till the last year of my school life we had more attractive work at home. In that year, Edward Renouf, afterward the well-known preacher, told us that he had access to the wood wharves on Front Street, about where the United States Hotel now stands. He said there were no other fellows there. For some reason not known to me, there were no wharfingers or other attendants. With him, and possibly with Atkins, we used to spend hours on those wharves. The Boston reader will please observe that Beach Street means a street on the beach, and that Harrison Avenue, then called Front Street, was the front of that part of the town. Why there were no keepers on those wharves I never asked, and do not know. Whether what we did were right or wrong in the view of magistrates I do not know. I do know that it was morally and eternally right, because we thought it was. That is one of the queer things about a boy’s conscience. I do not remember that, till the time when I dictate these words, for nearly sixty years, it has once occurred to me to ask whose was the property we used on these occasions, or what the owners would have said to our use of it. But they did not suffer much, it at all. There were great stacks of hemlock bark, which was then coming into use in winter as kindling for anthracite coal. You could take one of these pieces of bark, three or four feet long, bore three holes for masts, and fit this hull with three masts made from shingles or laths. Stiff wrapping-paper made good sails, and writing-books were big enough for topsails. Then you could sail them from wharf to wharf, on voyages much more satisfactory than the shorter voyages of the Frog Pond. I do not know but that, with a favorable western wind, one might come out at Sallee, on the coast of Morocco, with the location of which we were familiar from the experience of Robinson Crusoe and Xury.

But this is an excursus which belongs rather to the chapter on amusements. The home rule was absolute, and always obeyed, that we must report at home as soon as school was done. This rule undoubtedly interfered with excursions to the wharves, which, indeed, had my father been a shipping merchant, might have been more frequent. School life of itself had little to relieve it of its awful monotony. Saturday was better than the other days, because we all went upstairs into the master’s room to hear the declamations. Every boy spoke from the stage once a month. And here I have heard William Evarts, Fletcher Webster, Mayor Prince, Thomas Dawes, — ah! and many others who have been distinguished since as orators. Phillips, Hillard, Sumner, and the Emersons were a little before my time, but I have seen the prize exercises of all of them among the treasures of the school.

I remember perfectly the first time I spoke. It must have been in September, 1831. At my mother’s instigation, I spoke a little poem by Tom Moore, long since forgotten by everybody else, which I had learned and spoken at the other school. It is a sort of ode, in which Moore abuses some poor Neapolitan wretches because they had made nothing of a rebellion against the Austrians. As Tom Moore was himself an Irish patriot who had never exposed a finger-nail to be hurt for the Irish cause, I have since thought that his passion was all blatherskite. However that may be, I stepped on the stage, frightened, but willing to do as I had been told, made my bow, and began.

I had been told that I must stamp my foot at the words “down to the dust with them,” and I did, though I hated to, and was sore afraid. Naturally enough, all the other boys, one hundred and fifty of them, laughed at such an exhibition of passion from one of the smallest of their number. All the same. I plodded on; but alas, I came inevitably to the other line,

and here I had to stamp again, as much to the boys’ amusement as before. I did not get a “good mark ” for speaking then, and I never did afterwards. But the exercise did what it was meant to do; that is, it taught us not to be afraid of the audience. And this, so far as I know, is all of elocution that can be taught, or need be tried for. In college, it was often very droll when the time came for one of the Southern braggarts to speak at an exhibition. For we saw then the same young man who had always blown his own trumpet loudly, and been cock of the walk in his own estimation, — we saw him with his knees shaking under him on the college platform, because he had to speak in the presence of two hundred people. I owe to the public school and to this now despised exercise of declamation that ease before an audience which I share with most New Englanders. This is to say that I owe to it the great pleasure of public speaking when there is anything to say. I think most public men will agree with me that this is one of the most exquisite pleasures of life.

Edward Everett Hale.