Pandean Pastimes

THE old god of nature is not dead, as we have been told. Pan yet lives in the hearts of some children. They still do him reverence ; make shrines unto him, and place thereon their little offerings. They seek the willows by the river and the hickories on the upland, to make pipes with which they salute the early spring. Spring is youth’s own time ; summer and autumn belong quite as much to grown people, but the child has an especial hold on the awakening year.

Ah, the blessed lawlessness of the strolling country boy ! He seeks not always, but he is sure to find, in his intuitive wanderings. Brook or creek, running full after the going of the ice, may call him thither, bearing rod and line, both perhaps of some improvised fashion, a bent pin answering as hook. But the angling is of small moment. Besides the few small fishes the boy brings home with him unknown treasures. The real delights of the day, to be remembered in far-away years, are the rambling stroll to and from the stream, and the long reveries, as,, lulled by the babble of the water and the low undertone of awakening life, he lies, face down, silently watching the sunlit ripples and little swarms of minnows at play above the yellow and brown sands. Such a young dreamer seems unconscious of his surroundings, yet in some way he must be sensible of every detail of the scene ; else how, a score of years after, can he recall the flutter of white when a yellowhammer flew from the dead limb of an old apple-tree in a neighboring orchard, or still see the meadow lark perched on a tall fence-stake in prolonged fakir-like meditation, while the child lay on the upspringing meadow grass ? How else remember the very insects hovering above the brook, whose shadows startled the minnows and “ silver-sides ? And the whole sweet picture may be brought back by a bluebird’s note, by crows cawing in the distance, or by the odor of a freshly broken willow twig.

What a delightsome succession of outof-door plays and labors make busy, for the country child, the months, from the first hint of the wondrous glowing haze of the maples’ bloom until the nuts are garnered ! Numberless traditional diversions, bits of childish artisanship, including the fabrication of playthings, weapons, even musical instruments, fill up the too swiftly passing days.

Children are as fond as savages of beads, and of playing with them. How fascinating little girls find the tedious employment of stringing glass beads for their own adorning or that of their dolls ! How much of the pleasure depends upon the love of color, or how much upon being provided with something to do, it is impossible to say, but the taste is very general. They are quick to utilize as beads any berries, fruits, blossoms, or stems which they find in their path. Will reflection from plate-glass mirror of a white throat set off with necklace of Etruscan gold, or perchance of sparkling jewels, ever give the enjoyable vanity of looking well that irradiated the face of the little girl who, after throwing over her shoulders her necklace of scarlet rose-hips, Eve-like sought the margin of some quietwater, to gaze long at the sun-kissed face and neck decked with the splendid rosary ? Visions of dryads and fairies, of noble ladies risen from low degree, flit through the child’s mind, the mingled impressions that are left from fairy-tales, and she half fancies that somehow, some day, these dreams may come true in her own real life. Ah, that limpid brown water, overshadowed with bending boughs, must have been a magic looking-glass, the face it reflected was so satisfied, so glad, so full of hope !

More graceful and more classic than the adornments of bright berries are the wreaths woven from forest leaves, usually those of the oak or maple. How easily secured are the light crowns of interlaced stalks of bedstraw (Galium), which, childish tradition says, have a magical power of curing headache ! Many little shoulders have gracefully borne the gentle freight of a necklace made by stringing the small flowers that compose the great plumes of the homely old purple lilacs. Another favorite ornament is the slender chain with such patience fashioned from pine needles. I know a little city-reared maid who is fond of stringing bracelets for her lady friends from the cheerful red - and - white four - o’clocks. Her doll’s spring bonnet is a violet leaf with a blossom fastened in the crown. A grass - plat in the back yard, where chickweed, clover, and dandelions generously bloom, is her “ little wild garden.”

Children on the eastern shore of Maryland have a saying that in the meat of every persimmon seed there is a little tree, and they amuse themselves by cracking open the brown seeds to find the miniature image of a tree which they fancy the plumule to resemble. This is no recent notion, for Cotton Mather says, in a pseudo-scientific treatise : “ [Leeuwenhoek] will give us to see, a small particle no bigger than a sand, contain the plant, and all belonging to it, all actually in that little seed ; yea in the nux vomica it appears even to the naked eye in an astonishing elegance.” The seeds of the wild balsam are not always allowed to bide their time, and to be scattered, when ripe, by their own ingenious device for that purpose; for what child can pass a clump of these jeweled plants and resist nipping the translucent green seed-pods, to see them pop out their freightage ? The velvety capsules of the garden balsam afford the same amusement. In some places little girls use the lune-shaped parts of the latter as earrings, for their own elasticity will fasten them for a time to the ear, after they are once put in position.

Some of us, thank Grod, will never become old enough to outgrow the pleasure of popping rose petals on the forehead. Petals of the peony, and perhaps those of other flowers, are sometimes used in this way; but nothing equals the soft, fragrant petals of roses for puckering up between the thumb and finger into the tiny bag that bursts with a whiff of perfume when violently struck against one’s brow. Were it in a palace garden, could one ever pass morning-glory vines without wishing, for the sake of old times, to gather and burst, one after another, the withering blossoms, whose trumpet mouths the sun has so quickly closed ? A pink or purple morning-glory never fails to bring to me remembrances of farmhouse windows curtained with Aurora’s chosen flowers, which made graceful tracery on whitewashed walls within ; and at the thought of the vine-draped windows there comes back a medley of beloved sights and sounds and odors beyond them, - dewy fields, umbrageous orchards, the breath of cinnamon roses, sweet strains from some sparrow’s matins, and robins caroling as if their hearts would burst just because it was day. In those days we too adored the dawn.

I have heard of a play among the children in a village in central Illinois that I never chanced to meet with elsewhere. On a veritable hand-loom, in which the fingers act as warping-bars, long grasses are woven into loose baskets, which the children call rabbits’ nests, and which they put in secluded places to receive the eggs of the wild rabbits (hares).

Children find many nature-made playthings ready to hand. There are various sorts of rattle-boxes, notably small ripened gourds, whose light seeds are easily shaken against the shell. Where the splendor of the American lotus lights up Western rivers and ponds, its great flattened receptacle, when ripe, is also gathered for a rattle-box. And I have often seen the cows driven home for milking to the patter of the dry seeds in their rounded pods, scattered along the wandlike racemes of what we called rattlesnake weed (Cimicifuga).

Many kinds of seeds are used as toys. The lavender - tinted Job’s - tears, the castor-oil bean with its wondrous resemblance to a shining beetle, the polished gray lens-shaped seeds of the Kentucky coffee-tree, of alluvial river valleys, and others of peculiar coloring or markings attract the attention of observant children. The ripened seeds of the garden lupine bear a strangely close likeness to the head and face of a small wizened monkey ; hence, in our part of the country the plant was somewhat generally known by the name of “ monkey-faces.” Japanese boys and girls have a game something like our jackstones, which they play with the seeds of the camellia and the lotus. The “ twin turtle-doves ” in the columbine, beloved by little folks in England, are less familiar to our children, though Miss Ingelow’s reference to the pretty fancy has led many schoolgirls to seek and find the cooing pair both in our graceful scarlet-and-yellow wild species and in the cultivated garden varieties. A quaint little Hindu man in full trousers may be fashioned out of a flower of the pink-and-white garden dicentra.

A favorite toy in many parts of the country is made by running a common pin through a green currant or gooseberry. Equal lengths of the pin are left projecting from the berry ; the point of the pin is then placed in one end of a clay pipestem held in a vertical position. By blowing through the other end of the pipestem the tiny figure will be made to dance in the air, just above the end of the stem. In Boston the schoolchildren have used the fruits of the linden to fashion the manikin, which, while dancing, may easily be imagined to resemble a monkey. It has recently been suggested to me that this child’s play may have given rise to the Boston name of “monkey-nut ” for the linden fruit.

What delightful memories are awakened by the word “ playhouse ” ! It was a dear imaginative little world by itself, whither one could swiftly flee from the trying practicalities of everv-day life, such as drying dishes, gathering chips for the kitchen fire, or watching a slow kettle boil. It was all one’s own, and within it as nowhere else was free play for individual taste and fancy. There one could he busy, or dream, or even indulge in breaking and destroying, if seized by an iconoclastic mood. At will our tiny world was desolate or peopled. Besides real dolls there were within the playhouse various kinds of little folks, such as the fine ladies fashioned from gay poppies or from the tawny flowers of the old-fashioned day-lilies. Poor marionettes, some of such ephemeral lives ! What busy lives they led us ! What opportunities for invention were afforded by the furnishing of their rooms and the storing of their larders! In addition to the ordinary house duties there was the preparation of manifold confections : some genuine delicacies, others as purely for show as were the gayly painted plaster-of-Paris fruit baskets that often used to form the central ornament on the parlor tables of country homes. Then the joyous trips to the woods to gather velvety moss for carpets and bright berries for decorations ; for children, like the bower-birds, enjoy a bit of color in their surroundings. But it would make too long a story here to recall the hundred-and-one glad happenings connected with this interesting part of the makebelieve side of child-life.

The playhouse was not by any means monopolized by girls, and many a bearded man is now glad to remember his own part in playhouse life. The playhouse was, I think, less of a fairyland, may I say less of a temple, to boys than to girls, but they enjoyed all the practical part of it, — the seizure of a suitable spot, the carpentry, and especially the primitive masonry involved in the making of a fireplace. The real feasting, too, they were ready to enter into ; leaving. for the most part, to the girls and dolls the Barmecide feasts of mud pies, cakes, and like dainties, announced by the soundless ringing of the rose-ofSharon dinner-bell. But there is, beyond the playhouse, much sylvan handicraft that keeps boys happily exploring wood and pasture. Now it is to select a good piece of ash, hickory, or hemlock for a bow ; again, hornbeam or hickory for hockeys, otherwise known as shinny sticks. The city boy, who goes with his half-dollar to buy a machine-made polo stick, or with several times the sum to get a varnished lancewood bow, wots not how he is cheated of his own. He has not simply lost the choosing from numberless growing saplings or shoots one shapely enough for a bow, or grubbing about their roots to find one suitably curved for a shinny, meantime marking others for future working. There is the going through bramble-lined lanes to the woods, tasting and chewing at this and that, as the country boy saunters along, darting off to quench his thirst at a brook or spring, where he draws up the water through a tall stem of meadow rue or flower-stalk of dandelion; or, if spring and lily - pond chance to neighbor, he must needs seek the latter to get the painted stem of a lily-pad for a drinkingtube. He may be turned aside from the nominal quest of the day by any one of a score of casual allurements, varying according to the time of year. It may be to chase a chipmunk; to follow the martial call of a bluejay ; to club a chestnut-tree, whose frost-opened burrs display tantalizing peeps at browning fruits within. Long vines of the wild grape must be selected for skipping-ropes, and the same may serve as rope for harness. Western lads have found that good string can be made from the tough-barked slender twigs of the pawpaw.

To the boy’s mind it is even worth while to take pains in selecting the sticks which they sharpen at one end, and from which, either simply as an amusement or in petty warfare, they delight to hurl crab-apples or potato-balls. I have heard described a real Homeric play of boys living on the bluffs overlooking an Illinois creek-valley. Each chose with care a good supply of spears from the thickets of giant ragweed (Ambrosia), then armed himself with a buckler made from a flour-barrel head, to which were tacked stout leather straps through which the arm could be thrust. Thus equipped, the young heroes rushed to the fray.

Various innocent divinations are handed down from generation to generation of children.

It is an interesting bit of psychology that it is chiefly the girls, great or small, who practice charms or ceremonies intended to reveal one’s fate, notably as regards marriage. It is they, mostly, who will patiently hunt for a four-leaved clover to tuck inside shoe or gown as a lovecharm or as a luck-bringer. Yet boys do not wholly despise talismans or distrust their virtues, for in eastern New England they are much given to carrying in their pockets a lucky-stone, as they call the little white serrated bone found in the codfish’s head, and I am pretty sure that somewhat of talismanic power is attributed to the horse-chestnut, or double or peculiarly shaped nut, or grotesque root that frequently forms a part of the furnishings of a boy’s pocket. I have heard one say, caressingly touching such a pocket-piece, “ I have carried that two years,” or so many months or years. An amusing custom is found among the peasant children in the neighborhood of Skibbereen, Ireland. If, on their way to school, they linger along the ditches and roadsides gathering their “ fairy thimbles” (the flowers of the foxglove), or peering among the grass to catch sight of a skylark’s nest, or engaging in some other happy idling, as they approach the schoolhouse they seek for a plant which they call I’n-ge-na-blame,” to secure a bit to secrete in their pockets, to act as a charm against punishment for tardiness. I fancy their colloquial name for the plant is a corruption for “ I ’ll get no blame,” from their faith in its potency to save them from merited reproof.

Don’t you remember hurrying out before breakfast to where the sunflowers grew, at the back of the garden or in some waste bit of land behind the house, to see if each great yellow-rayed disk had turned during the night so that it might face the east? Our half-reverential watching throughout the day to see the gradual following of the sun’s course was akin to the spirit of the sun-worship. We had been told that sunflowers slowly turned as the sun moved, and we believed it, and were interested to behold the miraculous behavior of the stately plants. We liked to tell younger children of the wonder, and to point out the changed position of the blossoms; and our faith never wavered, however many times some perverse flower failed to follow the ritual. And again, in the late autumn, as we separated the ripened, metallic-looking seeds from the chaff, to put them away as food for the fowls, we recalled the mysterious power of orientation possessed by our sunflowers. For by this time the happy credulity of childhood had quite wiped from our memories the exceptions, so many times exceeding the cases in which our supposed law had been obeyed. The imagination of a child is a rather conscienceless faculty, I suppose, but were it otherwise, of what would not only childhood, but the world be robbed, that we would not have eliminated!

The lilliputian baskets which schoolboys carve out of peach, plum, and even cherry stones are sometimes really works of art, and when such a little ornament, given as keepsake a generation ago by some deft-fingered schoolfellow, turns up, in clearing out a bureau drawer or an old box, there are brought to mind a host of associations of the old-fashioned district school, where one learned much of greater value than book-lore. There come back the morning walks to school along dewy roadsides ; the noon-times in the adjacent woods ; the swings made by interweaving low-hanging beech boughs ; the going, at the call of school, with one’s particular comrade to some well or spring to bring a pail of fresh water. What teacher with a heart might not be placated by a nosegay of wild flowers, if the water - carriers did take their own time ! From the opening of the first bloodroot, how sweet we made the bare schoolroom with flowers from garden, roadside, and woods! The teacher’s desk overflowed with them, and empty ink-bottles served the girls as vases for their desks. When the petals fell from poppy or peony, or fragrant rose, it was a rest from partial payments or the meaningless chant of “ I write, thou writest, he writes,” and so on, to put them to press inside a book. The dried leaves, petals, wreaths, or what-not, of no herbarium worth, had a value of their own to us young things ; they were the symbols of what youth sought, ever will seek, and ever should find, — the bloom, the color, the perfume of life. To-day, when on opening a long-disused book one chances upon them, grown brown with the lapse of years, one feels like kissing them and the discolored pages. Dear ashes of roses!

One of the last of the long pageant of out-of-door amusements was the making of pumpkin lanterns, in early autumn. We counted it a great frolic to carve out the grotesque faces, without the knowledge of the elders of the family ; then, after nightfall, to steal out, light the candle within each head, and suddenly hold the grinning hobgoblin, with its fiery eyes and mouth, in front of the window of a room where sat some of those who were not in our secret. Oftentimes we decorated the top of each post of the front gate with one of the flame-eyed monsters. After the home fun was over, perhaps we might dance off, carrying our illuminations to some of the neighbors. Then home at last, with pulses all a-tingle, to go to bed in an unconscious rapture over the soft darkness, full of nameless autumnal scents, that we had just left, to lie building air-castles, while through the now half - sere morning-glory vines crept in the entrancing pathos of the music of myriads of crickets ; starting now and then, as slumber stole on, when an apple fell to earth with a dull thud.

Thus waned the sylvan year. The long evenings came, when we sat about the home fireside, playing morris or foxand-geese, with red and white grains of corn for men : cracking nuts ; eating apples and counting their seeds, while we repeated the old divination rhymes ; telling oft-told riddles; between whiles recalling the good times of the past season, planning new ones for next year, and reckoning the months until the opening spring should begin another round of rural pastimes.

Fanny D. Bergen.