V.
THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS.--OLD RIVER.
THERE were two branches of the Hydraulic: one followed the course of theMiami, from some unknown point to the northward, on the level of itshigh bank, and joined the other where it emptied into the river justabove the bridge. This last came down what had been a street, and itmust have been very pretty to have these two swift streams of clearwater rushing through the little town, under the culverts, and betweenthe stone walls of its banks. But what a boy mainly cares for in a thingis _use_, and the boys tried to make some use of the Hydraulic, since itwas there to find what they could do with it. Of course they were awareof the mills dotted along its course, and they knew that it ran them;but I do not believe any of them thought that it was built merely to runflour-mills and saw-mills and cotton-mills. They did what they could tofind out its real use, but they could make very little of it. Thecurrent was so rapid that it would not freeze in winter, and in summerthey could not go in swimming in it by day, because it was so public,and at night the Basin had more attractions. There was danger of cuttingyour feet on the broken glass and crockery which people threw into theHydraulic, and though the edges of the culverts were good for jumpingoff of, the boys did not find them of much practical value. Sometimesyou could catch sunfish in the Hydraulic, but it was generally tooswift, and the only thing you could depend upon was catching crawfish.These abounded so that if you dropped a string with a bit of meat on itinto the water anywhere, you could pull it up again with two or threecrawfish hanging to it. The boys could not begin to use them all forbait, which was the only use their Creator seemed to have designed themfor; but they had vaguely understood that people somewhere ate them, orsomething like them, though they had never known even the name oflobsters; and they always intended to get their mothers to have themcooked for them. None of them ever did.
They could sometimes, under high favor of fortune, push a dog into theHydraulic, or get him to jump in after a stick; and then have theexcitement of following him from one culvert to another, till he found afoothold and scrambled out. Once my boy saw a chicken cock sailingserenely down the currant; he was told that he had been given brandy,and that brandy would enable a chicken to swim; but probably this wasnot true. Another time, a tremendous time, a boy was standing at thebrink of a culvert, when one of his mates dared another to push him in.In those days the boys attached peculiar ideas of dishonor to taking adare. They said, and in some sort they believed, that a boy who wouldtake a dare would steal sheep. I do not now see why this should follow.In this case, the high spirit who was challenged felt nothing base inrunning up behind his unsuspecting friend and popping him into thewater, and I have no doubt the victim considered the affair in the rightlight when he found that it was a dare. He drifted under the culvert,and when he came out he swiftly scaled the wall below, and took afterthe boy who had pushed him in; of course this one had the start. Nogreat harm was done; everybody could swim, and a boy's summer costume inthat hot climate was made up of a shirt and trousers and a straw hat; noboy who had any regard for his social standing wore shoes or stockings,and as they were all pretty proud, they all went barefoot from Apriltill October.
The custom of going barefoot must have come from the South, where itused to be so common, and also from the primitive pioneer times whichwere so near my boy's time, fifty years ago. The South characterized thethinking and feeling of the Boy's Town, far more than the North. Most ofthe people were of Southern extraction, from Kentucky or Virginia, whenthey were not from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. There might have beenother New England families, but the boys only knew of one--that of theblacksmith whose shop they liked to haunt. His children were heard todispute about an animal they had seen, and one of them said, "Tell ye'twa'n't a squeerrel; 'twas a maouse;" and the boys had that for aby-word. They despised Yankees as a mean-spirited race, who were stingyand would cheat; and would not hit you if you told them they lied. Aperson must always hit a person who told him he lied; but even if youcalled a Yankee a _fighting_ liar (the worst form of this insult), hewould not hit you, but just call you a liar back. My boy long acceptedthese ideas of New England as truly representative of the sectionalcharacter. Perhaps they were as fair as some ideas of the West which heafterwards found entertained in New England; but they were false andstupid all the same.
If the boys could do little with the Hydraulic, they were at no loss inregard to the Reservoirs, into which its feeding waters were gatheredand held in reserve, I suppose, against a time of drought. There was theLittle Reservoir first, and then a mile beyond it the Big Reservoir, andthere was nearly always a large flat boat on each which was used forrepairing the banks, but which the boys employed as a pleasure-barge. Itseemed in some natural way to belong to them, and yet they had a feelingof something clandestine in pushing out on the Reservoir in it. Oncethey filled its broad, shallow hold with straw from a neighboringoatfield, and spent a long golden afternoon in simply lying under thehot September sun, in the middle of the Reservoir, and telling stories.My boy then learned, for the first time, that there was such a book asthe "Arabian Nights;" one of the other boys told stories out of it, andhe inferred that the sole copy in existence belonged to this boy. Heknew that they all had school-books alike, but it did not occur to himthat a book which was not a Reader or a Speller was ever duplicated.They did nothing with their boat except loll in it and tell stories, andas there was no current in the Reservoir, they must have remained prettymuch in the same place; but they had a sense of the wildest adventure,which mounted to frenzy, when some men rose out of the earth on theshore, and shouted at them, "Hello, there! What are you doing with thatboat?" They must have had an oar; at any rate, they got to the oppositebank, and, springing to land, fled somewhere into the vaguest past.
The boys went in swimming in the Little Reservoir when they were not inthe River or the Basin; and they fished in the Big Reservoir, where thesunfish bit eagerly. There were large trees standing in the hollow whichbecame the bed of the Reservoir, and these died when the water was letin around them, and gave the stretch of quiet waters a strange, weirdlook; about their bases was the best kind of place for sunfish, and evenfor bass. Of course the boys never caught any bass; that honor wasreserved for men of the kind I have mentioned. It was several yearsbefore the catfish got in, and then they were mud-cats; but the boys hadgreat luck with sunfish there and in the pools about the flood-gates,where there was always some leakage, and where my boy once caught awhole string of live fish which had got away from some other boy,perhaps weeks before; they were all swimming about, in a lively way, andthe largest hungrily took his bait. The great pleasure of fishing inthese pools was that the waters were so clear you could see the fat,gleaming fellows at the bottom, nosing round your hook, and going offand coming back several times before they made up their minds to bite.It seems now impossible that my boy could ever have taken pleasure inthe capture of these poor creatures. I know that there are grown people,and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, andvalue themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only inboys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probablethat any lower organism
"In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great As when a giant dies,"
but still, I believe that even a fish knows a dumb agony from the barbsof the hook which would take somewhat from the captor's joy if he couldbut realize it.
"THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVEMENTIONED."]
There was, of course, a time when the Hydraulic and the Reservoirs werenot where they afterwards appeared always to have been. My boy coulddimly recall the day when the water was first let into the Hydraulic,and the little fellows ran along its sides to keep abreast of thecurrent, as they easily could; and he could see more vividly the tumultwhich a break in the embankment of the Little Reservoir caused. Thewhole town rushed to the spot, or at least all the boys in it did, and agreat force of men besides, with shovels and wheelbarrows, and bundl
esof brush and straw, and heavy logs, and heaped them into the crevasse,and piled earth on them. The men threw off their coats and all joined inthe work; a great local politician led off in his shirt-sleeves; and itwas as if my boy should now see the Emperor of Germany in hisshirt-sleeves pushing a wheelbarrow, so high above all other men hadthat exalted Whig always been to him. But the Hydraulic, I believe, wasa town work, and everybody felt himself an owner in it, and hoped toshare in the prosperity which it should bring to all. It made the peopleso far one family, as every public work which they own in common alwaysdoes; it made them brothers and equals, as private property never does.
Of course the boys rose to no such conception of the fact before theireyes. I suspect that in their secret hearts they would have been glad tohave seen that whole embankment washed away, for the excitement's sake,and for the hope of catching the fish that would be left flopping at thebottom of the Reservoir when the waters were drained out, I think thatthese waters were brought somehow from Old River, but I am not surehow. Old River was very far away, and my boy was never there much, andknew little of the weird region it bounded. Once he went in swimming init, but the still, clear waters were strangely cold, and not like thoseof the friendly Miami. Once, also, when the boys had gone into the vastwoods of that measureless continent which they called the Island, forpawpaws or for hickory-nuts, or maybe buckeyes, they got lost; and whilethey ran about in terror, they heard the distant lowing and bellowing ofcattle. They knew somehow, as boys know everything, that the leader ofthe herd, which ranged those woods in a half-savage freedom, was avicious bull, and as the lowing and bellowing sounded nearer, theyhuddled together in the wildest dismay. Some were for running, some forgetting over a fence near by; but they could not tell which side of thefence the herd was on. In the primitive piety of childhood my boysuggested prayer as something that had served people in extremity, andhe believed that it was the only hope left. Another boy laughed, andbegan to climb a tree; the rest, who had received my boy's suggestionfavorably, instantly followed his example; in fact, he climbed a treehimself. The herd came slowly up, and when they reached the boys' refugethey behaved with all the fury that could have been expected--theytrampled and tossed the bags that held the pawpaws or buckeyes orhickory-nuts; they gored the trees where the boys hung trembling; theypawed and tossed the soft earth below; and then they must have goneaway, and given them up as hopeless. My boy never had the least notionhow he got home; and I dare say he was very young when he began theseexcursions to the woods.
In some places Old River was a stagnant pool, covered with thick greenscum, and filled with frogs. The son of one of the tavern-keepers wasskilled in catching them, and I fancy supplied them to his father'stable; the important fact was his taking them, which he did by baiting acluster of three hooks with red flannel, and dropping them at the end ofa fish-line before a frog. The fated croaker plunged at the brilliantbait, and was caught in the breast; even as a small boy, my boy thoughtit a cruel sight. The boys pretended that the old frogs said, wheneverthis frog-catching boy came in sight, "Here comes Hawkins!--here comesHawkins! Look out!--look out!" and a row of boys, perched on a log inthe water, would sound this warning in mockery of the frogs or theirfoe, and plump one after another in the depths, as frogs follow theirleader in swift succession. They had nothing against Hawkins. They allliked him, for he was a droll, good-natured fellow, always up to somepleasantry. One day he laughed out in school. "Was that you laughed,Henry?" asked the teacher, with unerring suspicion. "I was only smiling,Mr. Slack." "The next time, see that you don't smile so loud," said Mr.Slack, and forgave him, as any one who saw his honest face must havewished to do. They called him Old Hawkins, for fondness; and while myboy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love withhim for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially withthe little boys.
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