 | EARLY TWIG-ERY.
NO. I. Sporting scenes and sundry sketches |  |
DEDICATED, WITHOUT PERMISSION, TO SYLVANUS MILLER, ESQ.
“Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined,
Youth straightest stands with whip well plied behind.”
—Pope.
Norswoldwoof, the celebrated Kamschatkan scholiast, in
his “Philosophical Laconisms,” which made so much noise
at the time of their first publication, registered, at least, one
good remark, which was rendered in Blackwood's Magazine,
in strict pursuance of the original idiom—“Times is'nt as they
used to was.” Christopher North fully appreciated the originality
and beauty of the sentiment, and bestowed half a
column of commendation upon its axiomatic composition.
Feeling a deep impression upon my own heart of the mingled
truth and pathos of the thought, I was impelled with strong
desire to study what Christopher called the untranslatable
original. The only copy, however, to be found in the
country was in possession of the New York Historical
Society,—and as to getting any book off the shelves of
that institution, by a person who is not President or Secretary,
or one of the Trustees; you might as well try to get your
note discounted at a bank without being one of the directors;
or perch yourself upon a high hill, with a long rake, and
oyster for stars in the milky way. I tried to get elected a
shillings towards my initiation fee; but I found that there
were no meetings, and that the books were stored away for
the benefit of future ages, or else laid with well-studied carelessness
upon the book-tables of the literary—qu.? litterery
brokers—qu.? breakers—men profound in books—muslin,
and well printed—calico; and who ought, therefore, to be
able to appreciate such writers as Norswoldwoof—who had
paid their entrance money of one hundred or five hundred dollars
to buy the glory of being published in a book as gentle-men!
who had got beyond b-a—k-e-r in their spelling books, and were
patrons! of the fine arts! Heaven forgive me if I wrong
them! The heaviest affliction that I wish them is, that they
will, in some moment of unnatural wisdom, pile up their
hoarded cases in the park, and make a bonfire; and re-supply
their shelves with Parley's Magazine, Murray's Grammar,
and Bennet's Book-keeping. Two parties will be gainers by
that operation. The thirsty student, tantalized with hot thirst
for the sealed-up fountains of sparkling knowledge which he
grasps at in vain, may look on and see the ethereal essence of
soul ascend in a curling flame, like the prophet of old, to the
Heaven from which it came; and when the burning thoughts
have left the mortal scroll upon which they were impressed,
he may gather and in-urn their ashes, and stellate them
among his household-gods. The other party referred to will
derive an advantage better appreciated by them, because more
substantial. They will learn “reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Does any one doubt that these extensive acquirements
are matters of use and adornment, of which a trader in opium,
calomel, and raw-hides ought to be proud?—Look back
twenty years and tell us how many men signed their own
names. Go into the register's and surrogate's offices and
rich. Why, a Dutchman who could WRITE was looked upon
as an astrologer or necromancer; and a stray Yankee schoolmaster
snooping out a village where he might teach young
ideas how to shoot in the day-time, and the rich farmers'
buxom daughters how to spell “crucifix” at night, besides
keeping singing-school Saturday evening, and leading the
choir in “Mear,” “Wells,” and “Old Hundred,” on the next
day, was convicted by all such young gentlemen as Abraham
Bones [whose life and experience are so happily illustrated
by Diedrich Knickerbocker] as no better than a juggler or an
obtainer of other people's chattels under false pretences.
There is a manuscript history of New York which gives an
account of a justice of the peace, before whom all the causes
in Duchess county were tried, who knew no touch of quillgraphy,
but held his court in the woods, where the soil was
loamy; and, by the aid of his cane and certain sticks which
he would set up, made his notes of the testimony, and invariably
came to a correct conclusion.
But, alas! “times isn't as they used to was;” there is too
much learning abroad. People know too much. They have
studied hard names and are conceited. They carry out the
advice given by our belles-lettres professor in college, and
commit to memory the names of books they never read, and
cannot be made to understand. Everybody can read. Even
your Irish cook, unless she has just left her cabin in Limerick,
can spell out her missal. They have got beyond “ac”—“ac”
—“tion”—“shion”—“town-shun,” and are travelling into
the “ologies.” the country is in danger of being ruined by
too much “light and knowledge.” These two last mentioned
ambiguous names have been cracked up by all the tract and
moral reform societies as being highly preferable to bread
sin? Have they multiplied virtue? Are public exhibitions
upon the stage of reality in Broadway, or of imitation at the
Olympic, less gross and pernicious than of old? Are the
morals of the city purified? Are we less or more like Sodom
and Gomorrah than we were when I was a boy? Men
that are thirty years of age, think. Think, I say, and curse
the men that taught Vice, that they might cure it, and be accounted
saints;—who first breathed into the virgin innocence
of the ears of their happily ignorant wives and girls that
there was such a thing as “guilt;”—who like the serpent
seducing Eve, gave Sin a name and called it “Knowledge,”
promising infinite happiness, while the price of the information
was everlasting Hell-fire! How smooth-tongued Belial
must gloat over the idiots!
No,—“times isn't as they used to was.” That's a beauty
of a sentence. It has a present past, and a past present mingling
in labyrinthic harmony, that fill me with rapturous pluperfection.
I mount, I fly.
I am a pretty good democrat, and love the largest liberty;
but I am inclined to think that I am a little antidemonexagotheatic.
I think Yankee schoolmasters ought to be taken up
as vagrants. Cyphering I would permit; but I would let no
one go beyond the “rule of three.” The use of hard words
shall be prohibited by statute. Dictionaries are so common
that boys buy them at book-auctions, and study the definitions
as they carry home your marketing, and the next day you
find them editors of a penny paper upon the strength of their
knowing the meaning of “liberty, equality, and tergiversation.”
The silliest attempt at an aphorism is “the Schoolmaster
abroad.” How easy to answer it. An old settler
he goes by the orchard—are them onions all tuk up?”
“Renovare dolorem,” as my friend Ritchie says, in French,
“Times isn't as they used to was.” We squatted, settled,
builded meeting-houses, murdered the “Six Nations,”—multiplied
by twelve,—without knowing arithmetic, killed the Quakers,
burned the witches, drained the meadows, cut down the
trees, excommunicated the swearers, baptized the infants,
courted Saturday night, kissed our wives every day but Sab,
bath consecrating ourlips to singing what the minister read to
us upon that festival—two lines at a time,—had no hymn books
—cushions neither—drew wood for the minister, tightened the
cords of his bedstead, sent our boys and girls six miles to the
school-house with apple-pie and plain cake according, and a
rose for the school master; ploughed, trapped skunks and
buried them till they got sweet; pigeons! lord, fifty at a shot
were nothing—rabbits, don't mention how they criticised the
cabbages; partridges! we used to burn premature sulpher
under the apple trees to save the buds! Then we had no
schools for astronomy, chemistry and French. Every boy
knew the pointers and the North Star, and he felt, moreover,
when he planted his quiet little cettage, fronting the South,
with his milk and cheese dairy deep in the hill side, five
yards from the kitchen, that his own best-loved Katrina would
have things handy.—Were not these people virtuous, good,
and happy? Yet they could not write—they could not read.
Some of them, however, occasionally could spell. But of
what use was reading and writing to them. Their Domine
and the Squire could write their testaments and guide their
timorous faith. The old Doctor could sew up their scythe-cuts
and set their dislocated bones; and the news of stirring
incidents were purely, truly brought by neighbor to confiding
Herald,” or “Exhibitions of New York as it is,” into the
bosoms of those ignorant lilies of innocence? Would the God
of Heaven permit Satan to spit venom upon his own radiation
of beauty?
“Times isn't as they used to was.”—By-the-by,—I
have been beating over ground that I did not intend to travel
on—boggy—muddy,—but my dog is wild, and sometimes
makes false points and wont come in. The illustration of
Norswoldwoof's sentiment I intended to confine to scholastics,
or the accomplishment of scholars. I can not do better
than to give a touch of my own experience.
Before I begin, I want to ask a favor. I will give eighteen
pence—specie—to any individual who will deliver, for me,
to the Editor of the “Spirit of the Times,” a copy of “Webster's
Spelling-book.” Don't send me the kakosyllabic monstrosity
which he calls a dictionary; I mean the old thing
which he wrote before he forgot what he learned at school,
and invented a new alphabet. I want the old book with the
story about the green milkmaid, and of the landlord of the
apple-tree stoning a boy, and the Justice deciding that Dr.
Johnson's dictionary was an ox, and Noah's a Cape Cod bull
—cash down.
If a gentleman of leisure were to make up his mind—
that is a ridiculous expression, and I stop. Your chambermaid
may “make up” your bed, after you had been beseeching
multiplied pillows to give you one hour's quiet respite from a
headache. Penny-liars may “make up” at a moments'
warning a drowned man, a burglary, or a Corlear's-hookerism;
but mind has nothing to do with manufacture. Mind thinks,
radiates. It is impulsic. It rides with the lightning before
the wind. It flashes, and you feel the vivid flagration in your
your trembling ear.
Of all the modern inventions that have brought sin and
death into the world, next to Madame Lecompte's legs and
Colman's engravings, the holy church doth especially anathematize
Sunday Schools. They teach snotty-nosed little
scarecrows what A is, truly; and the sweet infants reward
the pious zeal of their pedagogues in lisping complimentary
anthems, and in committing to memory the interesting detail
of the processes by which the venerable Jacob made money,
and the still more pure history of the loves of David and
Solomon. That is the doctrine of the Pope. You may call
it his “bull,” but it is not Irish only. I am Roman on this
subject, and agree with the fathers that the book ought
to be sealed, or else only wisely interpreted by a consecrated
priest. None but a Levite should approach the altar, much
less intrude into the Penetralia. Yet how is the fact in this
boasted land of equal rights and equal wisdom? Why
every bastard blasphemer who can read a sentence, lays
hold of the horns of the sanctuary, and butchers with impious
knife his bloody victim. Walter Scott was of my opinion,
when he said out of the mouth of one of his friends, “I tell
thee, Elspeth, the word killeth.” The literal unexplained
text, whose metaphors and allegories no old women in the
land can circumvent may reduce to misery the wretched soul
whom it was written to beckon to salvation. The heart of
diamond may be within its rough exterior, but give it unpolished,
untranslated by the wise, and it will be a millstone
about the neck of the outside speculator. Pope had this
rivulet of thought running through his head when he wrote,
“A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.”
Are we any happier for being able to read and write?
Are we stronger, healthier, handsomer, taller, honester, than
our grandsires? Can we beard wolves in their den, and ride
down perpendicularities better than old General Put? Can
we fight better than the boys did at Bunker Hill? Can we
pray more zealously and successfully than people did when
every pulpit, weekly, uplifted its voice to Heaven, and obsecrated
the sore smiting of the Hessians? Will any person
write a Declaration of Independence, and dare Tom Jefferson's
ghost to bet and “leave it to men” which is the best.
Is there any militia colonel who will accept a pair of silver
pitchers for his laborious struggles through the mud of Broadway,
and try to rival General Washington's address? Yet
these were the times when a man who could read and write
was a great scholar. The locusts of the printing press had
not yet blighted the land. The dragon's teeth of type had
not been sown. If an old newspaper got, by accident, into
a peaceful village, the fact was known forthwith, and the
Squire engaged to investigate and read it. The sheet was
looked upon suspiciously, and more thoughts dwelt upon the
devil than upon the printer. The “Arabian Nights” would
have had equal credence. That was not the way the Revolutionists
got their news. Few could read, but all could distrust
an Editor's solemn leader, because “it was in the paper.”
Who believed in Chatham? Who trusted Duane? No! when
there was a robbery, or a riot, a strike for liberty, or a row,
Fame carried the report in her mouth, holding hard on a running
horse. The lads rode and ran. Ah! well! the race
of Dutch horses in extinct. “Times isn't as they used to
was.”
This random prologue, written “ad mulcendos animos” of
of the jewelry of knowledge stampers, from the apex of the
of the Common School fund, now restores my boiler to the
proper thinness of pressure. I have let off steam enough,
and go ahead.
The first school I went to was a Madam's. I forget her
name. She kept her brainpan in John street, opposite Dutch
place. All I remember of my own acquirements is—first,
the experience of a dark coal hole, under the stairway—secondly,
biting pins crooked and putting them, point up, where
the girls sat and wiggled,—not attending to their lessons,—
and thirdly and lastly, going up before the whole school and
asking the old lady, while I held tight on my posterior tegument,
“Ma'am please to let me go out?”
Next, aunt Platt tried to teach me the humanities. A
good soul was she, sixty odd, fat, pious, kind, benevolent, a
lover and excuser of child-faultery. Mother she never was,
but to the romping rascalities that other people sent her to
adopt. And she did adopt them. She looked upon a school
of thirty, and called them “MY CHILDREN.” Happy labor
was thine, dear aunt, for the very kindness of thy gentle
punishment of looking into our eyes and speaking one word
—our christian name—with those lips threatening to open,
but at the same time promising not to burst apart—that little
lock of oh! too soon! grey hair swelling out beneath the cap
that we put in a penny a-piece to buy for thee—the gentle
pressure of thy left hand, while the dexter lifted, in threat
only, the smooth-shaven ferrule. No man can doubt that
woman died happy. It is a solemn fact that her first bridal
was her burial. She was too good for men, and slept in Heaven.
She died in Dr. Spring's session room, singing,
Let me to thy bosom fly.”
By this time I had acquired the alphabet, and could read.
Women's schools then began to get into bad repute, unless
they had gentlemen professors. Taste grew collegiate.
Grescom lectured on chemistry, and taught children how to
make soft soap. Tammany Hall was whitewashed, and
several sachems sent their girls to French boarding institutes.
Then commenced reform. The phrase “he can't write his
name” came into acceptation. Albums and book-tables glittered
in the parlors of good society. People who couldn't
address a letter to their wives without excruciating valuable
words, affixed their certificates to reports of the West Point
examinations, vouching for the accuracy of the details, and
the supreme perfection of the students. Gammon governed
and flourished. Blessed discrimination and honesty of the
appointing power! how the retired gin-distiller, and the one
thousand per cent mixers of rhubarb and magnesia swelled
and looked wise!
In treating of Twiggery, I ought, perhaps, to order all and
classify the genera and species. I would do so, but for my
certain conviction, that no man will read this excursion who
has not, in some “pliant hour,” been “licked.” Every body
knows what a twig is. It is built of hickory—willow,
—that's poor, and breaks easy,—cowhide, dressed leather,
twisted eel-skin, or plaited horse-hair;—enough—enough—
my back bites the tender stripes of yet unfilled-up reminiscences.
After aunt Platt was taken away, I first began to
know the modifications of twiggery. When the old woman
went to Heaven, I was sent to Picket. It was considered
necessary that my growing intellect should have some of his
manure upon me, and that he should plough and harrow my
temper. He kept his menagerie—true name, for the boys
were treated like wild beasts—in Chamber-street, near Hudson.
were “Dii minores.” The old man was Jupiter, and allowed
nobody else to thunder. Grim, coarse, whiskered,
belly-protruding, slow of foot, quick of eye, he strode between
the benches of trembling defaulters, who knew not
what to call their offence, the Arbaces of heartless pedagogues.
He never laughed but once. That was when he
called the whole school around his throne, and announced
that he had just come from the Marine Court, and had nonsuited
the father of one of the little boys down stairs, in
room No. 1, in an action brought against him for pummelling
the infant to death. [The plaintiff's pleader made a
mistake, and put in “death” in his declaration instead of
“almost to death.”] Then the master laughed; and when
he got through, he ordered three cheers for discipline, which
the boys, as they had nothing else to be cheerful about, gave
clear and strong. Then the master grinned. I see his sardonic
smile in my mind's eye now.
What I learned at this institute is more than I can tell.
My memory goes to the cutting northeasters that rushed upon
me as I turned the corner of Chamber street, and to the systematic
ingenuity of the strange inventions of Picket's cruelty
—“ecce signum!” “John Amos! come up here. I saw you,
sir. Lie down.” And the victim would lie upon the dirty
floor at extended length, like a self-immolator before the
wheels of Juggernaut. “Shorts, down.” That made two
sides of a square; to make it equilateral and complete, he
would pick out boys of similar size, so that if Amos and
Shorts were called down, every boy knew that Jim Cobble
and Earnest Fustian were to go next. When the substratum
was laid, the old man began to pile; and the human hecatombs
that we sometimes made ought to be illustrated for the
with further dissertations upon the pyramids of Egypt.
Another quaint branch of twiggery for which this old gentleman
was peculiar was his military distribution of discipline.
When he became tired of seeing and smelling the prostrate
group of culprits, squeezing the very wind out of each other
at his feet, he would order up a cohort of fresh boys, and tell
them to recite the lesson which they began to study five minutes
before. Of course they didn't know it. A licensed
butcher would have said in one of those moments “What a
lovely sight!” and as he looked upon a dozen hands stretched
out in a long row, after the order “right dress”—“present
arms,” ready to receive the broad slap of the heavy ball-bat,
taken from some “base” player, who ought to have known
too much to carry it to school! How the old man's countenance
would light up and burn with almost Mosaic fire as he
reviewed the line, firing his own feu de joies slap! slam!
spank!
But I cannot help thinking that the most ingenious twiggery
for which the old man is to be praised, he inflicted upon
me miserable. It was a refinement that has made him an
honorary member of the Holy Inquisition in Rome already,
and will certainly ordain him as the cunningest cardinal in
Avernus evermore. What the offence was for my life I cannot
tell—I sincerely believe there was none, and if I did admit
guilt, it was only because the tyrant frightened me. No
matter now. Only mark his twiggery. I was ordered down
stairs—the school was dismissed, not a lad remained but poor
I. “John” was despatched for “that door.” It was brought,
a veritable antique of continental times, blown off its hinges.
It was laid over the tops of the settees and desks. I was invited
to mount it, and lie upon my back in the figure of a
old man. “Don't stir. John the ropes and some coarse salt.'
They left me. Two—they seemed two hundred—long hours
did I wait for my torturers. They went in to tea, and forgot
me. Night closed around the empty benches, and some floor-scourer
came with a lamp, and starting as at a thief, inquired
“what I was doing there?” I fled—fear winged my feet—
desperation gave me courage. I pleaded and remonstrated
with my father. I was picketed never more.
Next I went to Morse's, in Nassau street. My blessings
rest upon that amiable, affectionate man. He was too mild
for a schoolmaster, as that name is commonly “interpreted.”
Father—friend—brother—would be better. He accomplished
by kindness what Picket could not get out by twiggery. He
made us love him, for he was kind, he made us look up to
him, for he was good, he made us obey him, for he was just.
I never saw him in a passion. He treated children as reasonable
beings, and I think he would rather have knelt at the feet
of a wayward miscreant, and pleaded to him to be dutiful, than
box his ears, or compass his trowsers,—which process, I regret
to admit, with some misbegotten brats is sometimes indispensible.—I
learned a good deal here for a boy. The
greatest discovery I made was in animal physics. I learned
that I had a heart—I fell in love—I never told her—with
Eliza—something—not to be mentioned—who was always
head of her class, and got the highest rewards of worthy commendation.
I have seen her several times since the old school
was broken up and it always put me in mind of Adam's grammar,
and “amo, amare, amari, amatum.” Schoolboy dreams;
—spring lightning—meteors.
I don't precisely recollect what calamity dissolved my last
referred-to apprenticeship, and consigned me to other twiggery;
ridge, in New Jersey, boarding with old squire Lewis, in company
with six or eight exurbened candidates for literary glory,
under the care of the excellent and reverend Doctor Finlay
and his man Friday—man-every-day, I ought to say—Leek.
The Doctor was a good-natured creature, and his sternness
was affected—he was a hypocrite only in pretending to be
cross. Monday mornings he regularly marched into school
with a bunch of hickory twigs, that would have adorned the
the most provident lictor in Italia. Hum ceased as the pace
began—solemn quiet looked between stealthy eyelashes. Of
whom Mr. Leek complained nobody knew. The last night's
report was quite as uncertain as the name of the next cashier
who is to be found out. Yet somebody had to be twigged, and
that we all knew. Whether it would be owing to the spiteful
malice of Leek, or to the Doctor's firm adherence to the maxim
of “spare the whip and spoil the child,” we all knew that
“whack” had to come. The old man was moderate, though,
and soon lost his strength, and broke his whips intentionally,
and then went home and wrote his sermon for next Sunday,
leaving us in the care of Leek. That Leek!—Medusa is
painted with grinning snakes snapping at you from her forehead.
What a husband she would have had in that usher,
with his cat-o'-sixty-nine-tails swinging from his long, lean,
foul-nailed fingers! The personification of famine, consumption,
bitterness, and spite, conglomerated and condensed!
To pull a boy's ear who was startled from his book by a flock
of pigeons skirring near the window—to catch some unfortunate
in the act of laughing at an adventurous mouse intruding
into the repository of Baskenridge learning—to get a sly crack
at any boy's bottom!—that put Leek into heaven. I don't
know what salary he got, but his personal appearance was as
false shirt-bosom, but he stank of that horrid disease of want
of waterism. He was a decided loafer. He mistook his
vocation, and should have established himself in the calamus
pond near the school-house, and watered with the bloodsuckers.
He might have thus avoided the prospective reputation
which Ovid wrote for him, referring to his pulling juvenile
hair, and scraping for rare love in monkeys' heads, and finding
none but of the entomological species—
“Unguibus et raras veilentem dentibus herbes.”
I gathered here, however, more than I learned in any
eighteen months before. Principal, was wickedness, and
secondary, smooth-faced falsehood. The one followed the
other, as Lucifer's tail courses—no, streams—sticks—arrowpointed
hisses after its master's hands—“heads!”—“after”
—not so. I found that I was a simple goose when my father
left me, and drove back, leaving me his paternal blessing, with
a shilling to buy fish-hooks, and that I “didn't know nothing.”
I was no scholar, and the whole lot of boys was on me with
tricks, practices, and levies innumerable and scandalous. I
stood it until my eyes got opened, and then I fought. It was
a Philadelphia boy; let him deny it. I did do it—and the
whole school saw it—Jim Black stood by.—Poor Jim's dead.
But it was effectual—my reputation was established, and
nobody dared to follow my tracks, and let down my figure—y
—4's in the great swamp, or the parsonage woods, or touch
my reed-pole floating for catfish in Doty's pond. Leek was
the only enemy that could smite me. His inflictions I took
as a matter of duty, or perhaps habit, just as I now take sugar
to my coffee, and salt to my beefsteak. The frolics and the
mimic deviltry of that school after I got into “the cabinet,” I
have not time to record now. Wisdom crowned my forehead,
diadem.
With such acquisitions, I was brought home and sent to
blind Joe Nelson to prepare for college. I looked at Joe, and
Joe felt me. He had his instrument of twiggery in his hand
at the time, consisting of a thong of leather, between which
and his hand there was an electrical sympathy; and with
that he seemed to feel the condition of my flesh, and estimate
what possible twiggery it could bear. His blue, bright, lightless
eyes knew nothing; but his whip saw. Certain it is, its
accurate stripes made delinquents wish they had a lightning-rod
to carry the fiery streak down from their non-conducting
shoulders, and precipitate into the earth their hot sufferance
of random vengeance. John Walsh, the junior partner, or
head clerk, looked on with both his foreheads, and all his
chins, and grinned his satisfaction. Then we all studied out
aloud. “Double, double, toil and trouble,” snakes, witchcraft,
Greek, and algebra were all studied at together. The
essence of the sound, if condensed by a curious chemist,
would have been a mixture to be named. We were examined
and admitted as freshmen in Columbia. I laid my cheek upon
the bosom of Alma.
I must rest now, I am upon holy ground. Discuss we this
new culture of twiggery with solemn awfulness. I am exalted
to the upper air. Base cuffs, vanish!
| EARLY TWIG-ERY.
NO. I. Sporting scenes and sundry sketches | |