Foundations of Simplicity

ONCE at a luncheon I sat next to a lady who told breathlessly of an experience she had had the previous summer. It seemed that she had taken board in a house where there were no bells in any of the rooms; ‘And you can’t think,’ she said, ‘what a queer feeling it gave one.’ ‘Dear me!’ assented another of the guests, ‘I should think so!’ It was plain to see that both ladies regarded it as a decidedly tremendous occurrence. A flicker of amusement danced across my mind, and I was tempted to rise up and say, ‘My dear ladies, I went to school in a log schoolhouse, and it requires more than the mere absence of bell-buttons in my room to excite me I’

Yes, I take an infinite pride in the fact of my log-schoolhouse days. I fear I am even a little snobbish about it, and am sometimes inclined to look down on those unfortunate people whose education has centred only in prosaic city edifices. But after all, I humble myself at such times with the remembrance that my school itself was in its way somewhat conventional, having as it did a board floor, real benches, and the customary windows of glass. I have a friend who attended a school where the windows were just openings left for that purpose between the logs; where the floor was of dirt, and the benches were logs flattened on one side, with pegs driven in on the other for legs. It is as well that I did not go there, — I know I should have been too proud of it. And failing such a really primitive one, my own simple school is very good indeed to remember, and the recollection of it will, I am sure, keep me from feeling the absence of bell-buttons too acutely.

It was just a little one-room building of gray logs, with strips of white daubing between, giving to the whole the appearance of being clad in an honest gray-and-white hickory shirt, where the children of the neighborhood congregated through the long winter months, and where, outside, the mountains in their serene naturalness went up to the heaven-blue of the sky above. It was known as the Big Draft schoolhouse — draft in that part of the world meaning a narrow valley. In the same district there are other schools with no less delightful and suggestive names. There is, for instance, the Blue Swamp schoolhouse, and the one at the Wild Meadows. Wild Meadows! It presents to my mind a series of small meadows that have jauntily flung off the yoke of cultivation to return to a charmingly unkempt state — a rich tangle of weeds and flowers and swamp grass. Having escaped from the hand of man, they are no longer forced to entertain just the one prosaic crop, like wheat or corn, with possibly the more exciting round of buckwheat with all its attendant bees, but may now spread their hospitable bosoms to any little seed-tramp that may elect to accept board and lodging from them for the summer — and what delightfully unexpected visitors the wind must bring!

Then too there is the Hard Scrabble schoolhouse, another name in which my soul delights. For take it how you will, whether between logs, or between bricks, to the average child education is a hard scrabble, so why not be frank and say so at once? I regret to find that the would-be sophisticated ladies who teach there now like to ignore its real name, and say primly, ‘I’m conducting the school this year on the Covington Road’; thereby delivering themselves up to the unfortunate modern tendency to gloss things over, and try to pretend that they are easy when everybody knows that they are n’t. To these ladies I always say quite firmly, ‘Oh, yes, the Hard Scrabble school, you mean.’ For the putting on of airs is something which, if one has attended a log schoolhouse in the right spirit, one must inevitably detest. And if now, in the conventional city surroundings in which I occasionally find myself, I am tempted to pretend an irritation, which in reality I do not feel, over some little hitch in luxury, such as the having to wait for one’s carriage, or the not being able to secure just the seats one could have wished for the opera, I see suddenly before me the picture of a little girl sitting in a log schoolhouse, very proud of a nice new slate pencil, — the teacher was the only person in the whole building who possessed a lead pencil, and even she had only one, —and it comes over me with a rush of laughter and of gladness, that while others may complain of crumpled rose-leaves, that doubtful privilege is never for me; the foundations of my being were laid too deep and sure in simplicity, for I went to school in a log schoolhouse.