Twenty Years Ago

I HAVE just hunted up an old Reader. It was Cleo’s story that prompted it. Cleo is thirteen, and has taken her pen in hand to compose a romance which she has brought to me for criticism.

It is a sad story, naturally, for light-hearted youth loves tears. A young girl, betrothed to one of her own age, is compelled by her cruel parents to wed an old man for his gold. She consents, and the young man, starting in search of a career to fill the aching void in his heart, sees through his tears, held back with difficulty, the old man, wrinkled, gray-bearded, tottering up the steps to greet his bride-to-be.

Two years pass, and the youth has won fame and fortune abroad in Art (kind not specified) and sails for home. On landing, a newspaper is brought him in which he reads of the death of his beloved’s husband. ‘Died, on November 12, B. B., at the age of forty-two.’

Forty-two! And two years before, gray-bearded and tottering, he had wedded the young girl.

I am forty-five, quite sprightly, and with no trace of gray hair. This was what sent me to the old Reader, the one that immediately succeeded McGuffey’s in the schools of our middlewestern state. I had a dim recollection of a poem which I used to read, illustrated by a picture I much admired, just thirty-five years ago. A feeble gray-bearded man was seated on the river-bank, under a willow tree; there was a churchyard in the distance, and near by, a village green on which school boys were playing. The lines were headed, ‘Twenty Years Ago,’ and in them, the graybeard was apostrophizing an absent school friend named Tom, —

He goes on to recount how he had visited the village green on which the youngsters were playing; the old schoolhouse, sadly changed now, with its new benches; the spring, bubbling from beneath the elm; and the river bank, overshadowed by the willows. They were all there, but alas! gone was almost all the band of merry youngsters who had gamboled on the green, coasted on the hillside, swung in the grapevine swing, and played the game —

Not gone from this place to some other, in search of a career, but dead, and dead from old age, presumably, since there is no mention of a plague having swept through the village. Almost all the ‘ band ’ ‘ were in the churchyard laid,’ though ‘some sleep beneath the sea; but few are left of our old class excepting you and me.’ The graybeard’s lids have long been dry, he says, but he confesses that they were filled with tears as he rose feebly and tottered to the churchyard to strew flowers upon the graves of those he had loved some twenty years ago.

Judging from internal evidence, the sports in which he and Tom were engaged, — barefoot boys, remember! — mumble-peg (hypocrite! I could never believe he had really forgotten the name!), coasting, tree-carving, and so forth, they must have been at that time some twelve or fifteen years old, and therefore, at the time of his visit, twenty years later, he and the decrepit Tom must have been all of thirty-two or thirty-five years of age, as were also those companions so untimely sleeping in the churchyard or beneath the sea!

It is all very funny, now, and I was glad, as I re-read it, that I had preserved the old Reader along with my mother’s Mitchell’s Geography and Kirkham’s Grammar. But when I read it in school it was my favorite selection, I being at that time, as Cleo is now, a sentimentalist; and never a thought of its absurdity entered my mind, any more than the absurdity of having a hero old enough to die at forty-two has entered the mind of Cleo. Indeed, I could picture myself returning some twenty years hence, feeble and gray-haired, to sit under the beech trees of our school grounds, trying to recall the names of our old games, beanbag and hop-scotch and skip-the-rope —hop-scotch I loved so passionately that I knew I should never forget it. And our teacher! She was a young girl, probably not yet twenty, and I remember well with what feeling her voice dwelt on the lines as she read them first to show us where ‘to lay the stress’ and what ‘pitch of voice’ to take, according to the instructions in the notes. The editor, too, must have been young, for while he diligently put in all the acute and grave accents in the first stanzas, that we might know where to lift our voices up and where to bring them down (they were mostly downs in this), — ‘It’s music just the same, dear Tom,’ —he was evidently so overcome by the sadness of the last three stanzas, where the speaker’s long-dry lids moistened as he visited the churchyard, that he omitted them altogether.

I shall not call Cleo’s attention to it, after all. It might lead to some troublesome questions, and twenty years from now she will need no explanations.