Pennies and Pantalettes

I

THE Liberty Boys up around Westminster, Vermont, had nothing in particular against Judge Chandler, but since he was the legal representative of the English king they thought it might, be just as well to find out what he proposed to do at the Session of the Court of Common Pleas which he had set for the fourteenth of March, 1775. So they paid him a friendly call and received assurance that he would come unarmed and unattended. Disturbed later by a rumor that the Judge was about to violate his promise, they marched up the hill to a little log schoolhouse, conferred, armed themselves at a neighboring woodpile, then marched down again and took possession of the courthouse till their grievances should be heard.

In the meantime the Tories, headed by the sheriff, got wind of what was up, assembled at Norton’s Tavern, took a few drinks for loyalty’s sake, and attacked the Liberty Boys in their barricade. During the skirmish that followed, the ‘Westminster Massacre,’William French and Daniel Houghton were killed, eight others wounded, and the rest, some seventeen, thrown into jail. And all this before Lexington and Concord.

If those who drive down the Connecticut Valley on the Vermont side will take time to stop at the little burying ground in Westminster and search out the gravestone of William French, they will find this inscription: —

Now William French had a greatniece, Ann Elizabeth French. At eighteen she married a New Hampshire farm lad named Sidney Morse, a nephew, of some degree of greatness, of Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. They settled on the Ashuelot, and here, cupped in by a rim of mountains, lived their long, happy, and useful lives. Ann Elizabeth did her part toward rearing their three daughters, brought up a nephew, cared for aged parents, and made her home the delight of her grandchildren.

With it all she found time to cultivate her mind. She was New England to the core. She read widely. She could paint a passable picture. She wrote with ease.

Recently I happened upon a fortyyear-old manuscript written by her describing how school was kept nearly a century ago in a little schoolhouse very near where the Liberty Boys met on the eve of the first bloodshed of the Revolution. The piece is an idyll of the past and was probably written on the occasion of some neighborhood affair for the entertainment of a younger generation.

Here it is: —

II

‘Looking forward fifty years seems a long time. But looking backward it does not seem very long since I was a child trudging away to the old red schoolhouse on the hill. A quaint old building it was — square, with a hip roof and a cupola merely for ornament, as there was no bell. When it was time for school to begin or recess was over,

— which the boys and girls took separately, — the teacher rapped on the window with the heavy ruler, which was a potent influence in the preservation of order in the school. How plainly, after all these years, I can see that old schoolroom. It was square and

— as I first remember it — had a huge fireplace at one side in which roaring fires were kept in the winter. In the summer it was filled with green boughs. Although this huge fire kept the teacher, whose table was near it, uncomfortably warm, the scholars at the back side of the room suffered with the cold in severe weather.

‘Later a Franklin stove was placed in the centre of the room on a platform of brick. The scholars’ seats ranged against the sides of the room, with a low seat in front for the little ones. How cheerful that open fire made the old room in cold stormy weather and during the noon recess!

‘The broad hearth was frequently covered with apples to roast, and often when we found our bread and butter frozen the slices were placed on sharp sticks and toasted before the fire.

‘In the summer the school was small, — twenty to twenty-five scholars, — and we had a lady teacher who led us through the intricacies of Emerson and Colburn’s Arithmetic, taught the older ones to parse, and the little ones their a b ab’s. One term I remember our geography lessons were sublimated with map drawing.

’In the winter we always had a man teacher, for the big boys of the neighborhood who had been busy with the farm work in the summer went to the winter school to cipher, compute interest and make out taxes, and learn the Rule of Three. I do not remember that they ever studied anything else. The teacher’s time was devoted to them, and the little ones might as well have stayed at home.

‘These big boys usually spent their noon recess building snow forts and having mimic battles with snowballs for ammunition. The girls and the younger pupils felt as if they took their lives in their hands if they ventured outside the building.

‘But inside was the pleasant room, with its open fire, and we played games dear to childish hearts. We went round and round the mulberry bush. Little Sally Waters sat in the sun. The needle’s eye caught many a bonnie lass. We washed innumerable dishes and hung them on the bushes.

‘In summer the noon hour was a happy hour, for there was a delightful brook behind the schoolhouse, with lovely pebbles at the bottom. Some were shining white. Others were beautiful green or mottled with purple and brown. Trout inhabited the stream, and there were multitudes of shiners also which we caught in our dinner pails.

‘Across the little romantic bridge which spanned the brook was a small meadow where lilies bloomed in their season, red and yellow. The hillside beyond was covered with laurel. When this was in bloom the old schoolroom became a bower of beauty, for every window, the Franklin stove in the centre, and the old fireplace at the side were filled with the lovely blossoms. We hid the platform upon which the stove rested with a carpet of green moss.

‘Some little distance from the schoolhouse was the sand bank, where swallows built their nests in holes they made high up in the sides. This was a fascinating place, but as we could only reach their nests by climbing up the steep bank and slipping back and climbing and climbing and climbing again, it was a work of time. The noon hour was altogether too short and we were sometimes tardy at the afternoon session. As a repetition of this offense always brought its punishment, we never dared attempt it but once a year — when we had a new teacher.

‘Every winter we had evening spelling school when sleigh loads would drive in from the neighborhood districts. On these occasions the old schoolhouse would be brilliantly illuminated with tallow candles. Roaring fires were built and we thought it a gala scene.

‘Sometimes one school would be pitted against another and on such occasions the spellers would be chosen. As I had at that time what Horace Greeley used to call the prime requisites of a good speller, “a good memory and no judgment,” I usually held my own with those much older than myself and frequently was among the last to sit down. This caused my childish heart to swell with pride.

‘Sometimes at the close of the winter term we had an exhibition, when pieces were recited, songs sung, and dialogues spoken — ofttimes in costume. As I look back it seems as though we always had Farmer Old Style, who would come in in his farmer’s frock, ox whip in hand, and prove conclusively to every intelligent mind the absurdity of the idea that the earth is round and turns over every day. “For in that case all the water in my old mill pond would have been spilled out long ago.”

‘Fifty years ago no cars had penetrated so far inland, but there was an old stagecoach which made daily (or was it biweekly?) trips up and down the valley, a huge yellow coach drawn by four horses, with a driver perched high up on a seat in front holding a long whip which he would crack and throw out to tickle the ears of the forward horses. The old coach would plunge and rock in a manner which I am sure would now make me terribly seasick.

‘Children in those days were taught to “make their manners” when meeting people on the road. So when we saw the old coach coming we would range along beside the road, — ten or a dozen of us, a comical little row, — boys with bare feet and palm-leaf hats in all stages of dilapidation, girls in sunbonnets and pantalettes to their shoes. When the old stagecoach got abreast of us, the boys would duck their heads and the girls drop curtsies.

‘Our stage driver was a jolly sort of man. How every boy envied him and resolved in the depths of his heart that he would drive a coach some day and have six horses instead of four, and a whip longer than that whip! Our stage driver, as I have said before, was a jolly sort of man who always had a pleasant salutation for us, and often (what delight!) would throw down handfuls of peppermints to us. Sometimes the passengers would throw out pennies, and then what a scramble! Often the boys, and the girls too sometimes, would literally bite the dust in eagerness to secure the prizes.

‘Now, alas, the cars whiz up and down the valley several times a day near the old stage road. A commonplace modern schoolhouse has taken the place of the picturesque old structure. Other children troop in and out of its doors, but still the brook ripples over the pebbles, the lilies bloom in the meadow and the laurel on the hillside.

‘In the little cemetery near by peacefully repose the ashes of generations of my ancestors. The old homestead where I was born and passed my childhood still shelters the fifth generation who have borne the family name and made it their home.’

III

In the old school Eugene Field got a little learning. In this neighborhood many years later Larkin Mead discovered himself while shaping snow men in the village street. On a hill not far away Rudyard Kipling built himself a summer home, and with his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier, wrote the Naulahka.

The State of Vermont has erected a shaft to William French, and Brattleboro a monument to Jim Fisk of Wall Street, fame. The crooked paths of the old King’s Highway are being made straight. Cars of a different sort now whiz up and down the valley, not several times a day, but several times a minute.

Yet from above Hanover and Dartmouth, down by Ascutney Mountain, and on past the little Westminster burying ground, the grave of William French, and the site of the old school, the Connecticut still winds its tortuous and glassy way to the Sound through America’s grassiest valley.