a good marble, or a regimental button with a sound eye, that could
be strung, was rank foolishness to me until that day on the bridge.

And now I shall have to recross it after all, to tell who and what
we were, that we may start fair. I shall have to go slow, too,
for back of that day everything seems very indistinct and strange.
A few things stand out more clearly than the rest. The day, for
instance, when I was first dragged off to school by an avenging
housemaid and thrust howling into an empty hogshead by the ogre of
a schoolmarm, who, when she had put the lid on, gnashed her yellow
teeth at the bunghole and told me that so bad boys were dealt with
in school. At recess she had me up to the pig-pen in the yard as a
further warning. The pig had a slit in the ear. It was for being
lazy, she explained, and showed me the shears. Boys were no better
than pigs. Some were worse; then--a jab at the air with the scissors
told the rest. Poor father! He was a schoolmaster, too; how much
sorrow it might have spared him had he known of this! But we were
too scared to tell, I suppose. He had set his heart upon my taking
up his calling, and I hated the school from the day I first saw
it. Small wonder. The only study he succeeded in interesting me in
was English, because Charles Dickens's paper, _All the Year Round_,
came to the house with stories ever so much more alluring than the
tedious grammar. He was of the old dispensation, wedded to the
old ways. But the short cut I took to knowledge in that branch I
think opened his eyes to some things ahead of his time. Their day
had not yet come. He lived to see it dawn and was glad. I know how
he felt about it. I myself have lived down the day of the hogshead
in the child-life of New York. Some of the schools our women made
an end of a few years ago weren't much better. To help clean them
out was like getting square with the ogre that plagued my childhood.