When he went to his breakfast at the tavern, one of the young Williamsburg
aristocrats was already there, pretending to eat; and hovering about the
table, brisk to appease his demands, the daughter of the taverner: she as
ruddy as a hollyhock and gaily flaunting her head from side to side with the
pleasure of denying him everything but his food, yet meaning to kiss him
when twilight came--once, and then to run.
Truly, it seemed that this day was to be given up to much pairing: as be
thought it rightly should be and that without delay. When he took his seat
in the school-room and looked out upon the children, they had never seemed
so small, so pitiful. It struck him that Nature is cruel not to fit us for
love and marriage as soon as we are born--cruel to make us wait twenty or
thirty years before she lets us really begin to live. He looked with eyes
more full of pity than usual at blear-eyed, delicate little Jennie, as to
whom he could never tell whether it was the multiplication-table that made
her deathly sick, or sickness that kept her from multiplying. His eye lit
upon a wee, chubby-cheeked urchin on the end of a high, hard bench, and he
fell to counting how many ages must pass before that unsuspicious grub would
grow his palpitating wings of flame. He felt like making them a little
speech and telling them how happy he was, and how happy they would all be
when they got old enough to deserve it.
And as for the lessons that day, what difference could it make whether ideas
sprouted or did not sprout in those useless brains? He answered all the hard
questions himself; and, indeed, so sunny and exhilarating was the weather of
his discipline that little Jennie, seeing how the rays fell and the wind
lay, gave up the multiplication-table altogether and fell to drawing
tomahawks.
A remarkable mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were
the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild, hardy
generation of the new people; and there were little folks from Virginia,
from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania and other
sources, huddled together, some uncouth, some gentle-born, and all starting
out to be formed into the men and women of Kentucky.
They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes under his guidance.
Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little
boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of
the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop
pieces of their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the
woods--it being the dead of night now and the little girls being bound to a
tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their smouldering
campfires--the rescuers would rush in and there would be whoops and shrieks
and the taking of scalps and a happy return. Or some settlers would be shut
up in their fort. The only water to be had was from a spring outside the
walls, and around this the enemy skulked in the corn and grass. But their
husbands and sweethearts must not perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a
tear, a final embrace, the little women marched out through the gates to the
spring in the very teeth of death and brought back water in their wooden
dinner-buckets.
Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running and pitching
quoits and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting, in a
house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting
beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.