Cape Cod Folks Part 9

"Stories mixed with other things," I insisted, gently; and was then compelled to wonder how many of those "other things" had found their way into the literary appointment of my trunk.

"I'll try," said Rebecca.

"Come to the Ark, after school, and look over the books I have. We will talk some more about it, and you shall select as you please, or I will select for you, if you desire," I said, looking at Rebecca with kindly though severe penetration.

"I'd rather you would," said Rebecca, obediently.

To inflict this particular sort of patronage was a delightfully new experience for me. The glaring inconsistencies which confronted me at every turn only gave a heightened zest to the pursuit.

When I went to the door to blow the horn I felt that Rebecca already regarded me as her patron, guide, and spiritual mentor, and I was seriously resolved to fill these positions hopefully for her and with credit to myself. With respect to the rest of my flock, I felt a different sort of interest--the wide-awake concern of one who finds himself suddenly perched on the back of a mettlesome, untried steed.

Any one member of that benighted corps, taken as the subject of pruning and cultivating effort, would have occupied, I believed, the faithful labors of a lifetime. Considered as a gloriously rampant ma.s.s, the aspect of the field was appalling.

I was especially impressed with this view of the case when I went to toot them in from those free and reckless diversions in, which their souls expanded and their bodies became as the winged creatures of the earth.

The horn was still an object of terror to me, though experience had made me wise enough to inst.i.tute, on all occasions, a careful preliminary search for b.u.t.tons.

Its blast, freighted with baleful meaning to the ears of sportive innocence, found a melancholy echo among the deeper woes of my own heart, and, if it chanced to be one of Aunt Lobelia's singing days, the "Dar' to be a Dan-yell! Dar' to be a Dan-yell!" which floated across the lane, had but a doubtfully inspiriting effect.

I felt, indeed, like a Daniel doomed to convocate my own lions, and lacking that faith in a preserving Providence which is believed to have cheered and elevated the spirit of the ancient prophet, I confidently expected, on the whole, to be devoured.

Gathered into their den, my lively herd gasped some moments as though suffering the last loud agony of expiring breath, and then, bethinking them of that only one of their free and native elements now obtainable, they sent up a universal cry for "water!"

Ah! what to do with them through the long hours of the day--beautiful creatures! by no means unlovable, with their bright, clear eyes, their restless, restless feet, their overflowing spirits; their bodies all alive, but with minds unfitted by birth, unskilled by domestic discipline, to any sort of earnest and prolonged effort. Long, weary hours, therefore, not of furnis.h.i.+ng instruction to the hungry and inquiring mind--ah, no!--but of a desperately sustained struggle in which, with every faculty on the alert to discover the truest expedients, with every nerve strained to the utmost, I strove for the mastery over this antic, untamed animal, until I could throw the reins loose at night, and drop my head down on my desk in the deserted school-room, tired, tired, tired!

The parents of the children "dropped in" often at the Ark, and savored the lively and varied flow of their discourse with choice dissertations on methods of discipline.

"I want my children whipped," said Mr. Randall Alden. "That's what they need. They git enough of it at home. It won't skeer 'em any--and I tell the folks if they'd all talk like that, they wouldn't be no trouble in the school."

"Ye can't drive Milton P.," said that hopeful's mother. "He's been drove so much that he don't take no notice of it. If coaxing won't fetch him, nothin' won't; and I tell 'em if they was all like that they wouldn't be no trouble in the school."

"Well," said Emily Gaskell, the matron of the painted house, a tall, angular woman, with the hectic of the orthodox Yankee consumption on her cheeks, and the orthodox Yankee twinkle in her eye; "ye can manage my boys whatever way ye please, teacher. I ain't pertickeler. They've been coaxed and they've been whipped, but they've always made out to mind by doin' pretty much as they was a mind to. They're smart boys, too," she added, with sincere pride; "but they don't take to larnin'. I never see sich boys. Ye can't git no larnin' into 'em no way. They'd rather be whipped than go to school. Sim had a man to work on our cranberry bog, and he found out that he was first-rate in 'rithmetic, this man was, and so Sim, says he,--I'll give ye the same ye git on the bog,' says he, 'to stay up to the house and larn my boys 'rithmetic,' says he; and the man, he tried it, and in the course of a day or two, he come around to Sim, and wanted to know if he couldn't go back to clarin' bog again."

Emily took in the broadly contemplative expression on Grandma Keeler's benign features, and then winked at me facetiously: "I tell 'em if they was all like that," said she; "and I guess they be, pretty much, they might as well be out o' doors as in, and less worryin' to the teacher."

It might have been the third day of my labors in Wallencamp that a man, having the appearance of a lame giant, entered the school-room, and advanced to meet me with an imposing dignity of mien. He held captive, with one powerful hand, a stubbornly speechless, violently struggling boy. I recognized the man as G.o.dfrey Cradlebow, the handsome fiddler's father, and the boy was none other than the imp whose eyes, scorching and defiant now, had first sent mocking glances back at me while their light-limbed owner kicked out a jaunty rigadoon from under the encircling folds of his sacerdotal vestments.

"Miss Hungerford, I beg your pardon," said the elder Cradlebow, with a distinct, refined enunciation foreign to the native element of Wallencamp, whose ordinary locution had something of a Hoosier accent "After a good deal of trouble in catching him, I have finally succeeded in bringing you in this--a--this little dev"--he made an impressive pause, patted his fiery offspring on the head with fatherly dignity, and eyed him, at once doubtfully and reflectively.

I was interested in observing the aspect of the two faces.

"The little boy resembles you, I think," I said.

The lame man struck his cane down hard upon the floor and laughed immoderately.

"If you knew what I had in my mind to say!" he exclaimed--"ah! that was well put, well put!--though but dubiously complimentary, but dubiously so, I a.s.sure you, either to father or son!"

The idea still continuing to tickle him, he laughed more gently, beating a sympathetic tattoo with his cane on the floor.

"To pursue directly the cause of my intrusion here," he went on, at length, "this little--well, for present purposes, we will call him the _Phenomenon_. I confess it is a name to which he is not totally unused.

This little phenomenon, whom you see before you, is the youngest but one in a flock of thirteen. Some of that beautiful band--" here Mr. Cradlebow raised a very shaky hand for an instant to his eyes, and although a fitting occasion for sentiment, I was compelled to think of what Grandpa Keeler had said about G.o.dfrey Cradlebow's "sprees"--"some of that beautiful band rest in the graveyard, yonder. Some of them already know what it is themselves to be parents. Some of them still linger in the poor old home nest. I see you have here, my Alvin, and my Wallace, and my youngest, the infant Sophronia. Well, you find them good children, I dare say. Ah! they have an estimable mother." Again, he lifted his hand to his eyes. "Mischievous enough, you find them, probably, but amenable--there it is, amenable--but this lad"--Mr. Cradlebow paused again, shaking his head with a meaning to which he gravely declined further expression.

"What is your name?" I inquired of the little boy, hopefully.

"Simmy B.," he answered revengefully in a tone of alarming hoa.r.s.eness.

"Such colds as that boy has!" exclaimed the paternal Cradlebow. "They're like all the rest of him--they're phenomenal. There are times when that boy appears to be nothing but one frightful, perambulating cold! Well,"

he sighed, "and yet it's a strange fact, that the more depraved and miserable a little devil is, the more his mother'll coddle him.

"Now there's this one and my Lute--Luther Larkin--a good boy, but lacking all capacity for rest--always lacking the capacity for rest--uneasy, both of them--always uneasy! but how the mother would give her own rest for them, and seem to love them the better for it! strange! They have always been her idols, too. Well, I have captured Simeon and brought him in. I hope you may keep him. The rest you must learn for yourself. The Lord help me!" he groaned, as he picked up his cane, with evident physical pain, and hobbled cut of the room.

Within the school-room, things resumed their customary, Niagara-like roar, until a lamentable voice rose above the others, and was straightway followed by another voice in indignant explanation.

"Teacher, can't Simmy B. stop? He's puttin' beans down Amber G.'s neck!"

"Simeon!" I exclaimed, in accents calculated to melt that youthful heart of stone, and then added; "I will speak with you a few moments alone, at recess."

Simeon looked no longer helplessly angry as when his father brought him in. He appeared, on the whole, well pleased, but I scanned his angelic features in vain for any trace of repentance.

There followed a few moments of comparative quiet. Then came a startling, sickening sound as of some one undergoing the tortures of strangulation.

Then, a long, convulsive gasp. I looked down upon a sea of round eyes and uplifted hands.

"Teacher, Simmy's swallered a slate-pencil! Simmy's swallered a slate-pencil!"

"He's swallered most a whole one!" cried the owner of one pair of protruding orbs.

"It wa'n't!" retorted Simeon, flaming with righteous indignation--"It wa'n't but harf a one!"

"He t-t-told me," cried a young scion of the stammering Vickery race, all breathless with excitement, "that he was going to p-p-put it into his m-m-mouth and t-t-take it out of his n-n-nose, and he did and it t-t-t--and it slip-p-ped!"

"Wall, jest you keep your eyes peeled and your ears c.o.c.ked," replied the st.u.r.dy Simeon, in hoa.r.s.e and jarring accents; "and see if I don't take it out of my nose, yet."

The signs of that painful struggle slowly faded out of Simeon's face and there was an unusual calm in the school-room.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour elapsed. I was thoughtfully engaged in hearing one of my cla.s.ses when startled by the sound of a window closed with a sharp bang. At the same time arose the universal voice:

"Simmy B.'s got out o' the winder! Simmy B.'s got out o' the winder!"

I looked out across the snowless fields, and there having already scaled two fences and put many a good rod between himself and the scene of his brief imprisonment, I beheld, borne as on the wings of the wind, the form of the retreating Simeon.

An incident at the close of my first week in Wallencamp was the visit of the "Turkey Mogul." Such was the name given by the Wallencampers to Mr.

Baxter, the superintendent of schools.

Mr. Baxter lived many miles away in Farmouth, and was, properly, the visitor of the schools in Farmouth County. Wallencamp was not in Farmouth County. Nevertheless, Mr. Baxter had charge of the Wallencamp school. I had been informed that he drove over at the beginning and close of each term, put the scholars through the most "dreadful examins," and gave an indiscriminate "blowin' up" to persons and things in the place. So I looked forward to his coming with a curiosity not unmingled with more doubtful emotions.

It was Friday, and so near the close of the afternoon session that I had quite dismissed from my mind the contemplation of any dread advent for that day. It was just at that trying hour of Friday afternoon when only the spelling-cla.s.ses remained to be heard, and teacher and scholars both were conscious, the one with a deep inward sense of relief, the others with many restless demonstrations of impatience, that the week was near its close; and that "to-morrow" would be Sat.u.r.day and a holiday.

Estella the raven-haired--familiarly known as the "Modoc," a long and ungainly creature, with arms and legs so seemingly profuse and unmanageable, that they reminded one of the tentacles of a cuttle-fish--Estella was "pa.s.sing around the water."