A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher - Scoville Samuel

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written by his sister, February 1, 1817:

      “… Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school with him.”

      This was in the winter when he was past three years old.

      Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing some day. Who knows?

      At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to school, with her as his companion and guardian.

      He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children.

      In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and sister, and tells us:

      “I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along, holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his head off.’ ”

      As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he considered that his manhood had now commenced.”

      That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized:

      Der Sister

       WE AR AL WEL

       MA HAZ A BABY

       THE OLD SOW HAZ SIX PIGS

      One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is ludicrously prophetic:

      “I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’ ”

      From Widow Kilbourne’s he graduated into the district school, which was a few rods north of the parsonage, and was attended by all the children of quite a large farming district. Like the other children, he carried sewing and knitting, and the sister tells us that “this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons.”

      His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin school, has long since subsided, and given place to an unusual dislike for his whole district-school experience, as appears from reminiscences which he wrote in after-years:

      “It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. It was a little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon the highway, without a tree for shade or sight near it; without bush, yard, fence, or circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, hateful look. Before the door, in winter, was the pile of wood for fuel, and in summer there were all the chips of the winter’s wood. In winter we were squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an education. There were the great scholars—the school in winter was for them, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which did happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still. And a time we always had of it! Our shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being ‘educated.’ All of our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he would cry, ‘Silence in that corner!’ It would last for a few minutes; but little boys’ memories are not capacious. Moreover, some of the boys had mischief, and some had mirthfulness, and some had both together. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to laugh we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could have vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible in our little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to woo each other. So we would hold on and fill up; and others would hold on and fill up too; till by and by the weakest would let go a mere whiffet of a laugh, and then down went all the precautions, and one went off, and another, and another, touching the others off like a pack of fire-crackers! It was in vain to deny it. But as the process of snapping our heads and pulling our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each in turn, with tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared ‘we didn’t mean to,’ and that was true; and that ‘we wouldn’t do so any more,’ and that was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do just so again, and that about once an hour all day long.

      “Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great box iron stove, red-hot. There was one great event of horror and two of pleasure: the first was the act of going to school, comprehending the leaving off play, the face-washing and clothes-inspecting, the temporary play-spell before the master came, the outcry, ‘There he is! the master is coming!’ the hurly-burly rush, and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other two events of pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear! can there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active little boy than going to a winter district school? Yes—going to a summer district school! There is no comparison. The one is the Miltonic depth, below the deepest depth.

      “A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, keen, and untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys doubtless her ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter the house; the sun beat down on the shingles and clapboards till the pine knots shed pitchy tears, and the air was redolent of hot pine-wood smell. The benches were slabs with legs in them. The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked, scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its predecessor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three inches deep. But if we cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one look of her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one nip of her fingers was equal to a jab of a pin; for we had tried both.

      “We envied the flies—merry fellows! bouncing about, tasting that apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread; now out the window, then in again; on your nose, on your neighbor’s cheek, off to the very schoolma’am’s lips; dodging her slap, and then letting off a real round and round buzz, up, down, this way, that way, and every way. Oh! we envied the flies more than anything, except the birds. The windows were so high that we could not see the grassy meadows; but we could see the tops of distant trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew the robins; there went the blue-birds:

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