IT is a good thing to have children in the country. Children in the country are regular old-fashioned boys and girls, not pocket editions of men and women as they are in town. In the metropolis there is no representation of our species in the tadpole state. The word “lad” has become obsolete. Fast young men and fast young women repudiate the existence of that respectable, antique institution, childhood. It is different in the country. My eldest does not call me “Governor,” but simply “Father;” and although in his ninth year, still treats his mother with some show of respect.
Our next boy (turned seven) has prematurely given up smoking ratan; and our four-year-old girl is destitute both of affectation and dyspepsia. As for the present baby, his character is not yet 53 fully developed, but having observed no symptoms of incipient depravity in him up to this time, we begin to believe the country is a good place for children. One thing about it is certain, children in the country get an immense deal of open-air-training that is utterly impracticable in town. A boy or girl, brought up “under glass” (to use a horticultural phrase) is apt to “blow” prematurely; but, although it is rather rough culture, still I think the influence of rocks, rivers, leaves, trees, buds, blossoms, birds, fresh air, and blue sky, better, for the undeveloped mind of a child, than that of a French nurse, no matter how experienced she may be. I think so, and so does Mrs. Sparrowgrass.
There is one thing, however, that is mortifying about it. When our friends come up from town with their young ones, our boys and girl look so fat and gross beside them, that we have to blush at the visible contrast. Mrs. Peppergrass, our respected relative, brought up her little girl the other day, a perfect French rainbow so far as dress went, and there they sat — the petite, pale Parisienne of four years, and the broad-chested, chubby, red-cheeked rustic of the same age, with a frock only diversified 54 by the holes scratched in it, and a clean dimity apron just put on, with a gorget of fruit marks on the breast that spoke plainly of last summer — there they sat, side by side, cousins both, and who would have known it. “My dear,” said I, to Mrs. Sparrowgrass, after our respected relative had departed, “did you observe the difference between those children? one was a perfect little lady, and the other” — “Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “I did; and if I had had a child behave in that way, I would be ashamed to go anywhere. That child did nothing but fret, and tease her mother for cake, from the time she came into our house till she went out of it. Yes, indeed, our Louise was, as you say, a real little lady beside her.”
Finding I had been misunderstood, I kept silent. I do not know anything so sure to prevent controversy as silence — especially in the country.
There is one institution, which, in a child’s-eye point of view, possesses a majesty and beauty in the country altogether unappreciable in a large city. I allude to the Menagerie! For weeks, 55 juvenile curiosity has been stimulated by pictorial representations at the Dépôt and Post-Office. There is the likeness of the man who goes into the cage with the wild beasts, holding out two immense lions at arms’ length. There is the giraffe with his neck reaching above a lofty palm tee, and the boa constrictor with a yawning tiger in his convoluted embrace. If you observe the countenances of the small fry collected in front of a bill of this description in the rural districts, you will see in each and all, a remarkable enlargement of the eye, expressive of wonder.
Finding the discussion was likely to be violent upon this point, I retired, with some suspicions of having been slightly swindled. When I got home, Mrs. S. asked me “if we had seen the elephant?” I told her the whole story. “Well,” said she, “that’s just the way I thought it would be. I’m glad I did not go in.”
It seems to me the country is marvellously beautiful in winter time. The number of bright days and moonlight nights is surprising. The sky is not less blue in January than in June, nor is a winter landscape without its charms. The lost verdure of the woods is compensated by the fine frost-work woven in the delicate tracery of the trees. To see a noble forest wreathed in icy gems, is one of the transcendental glories of creation. You look through long arcades of iridescent light, and the vision has an awful majesty, compared with which the most 59 brilliant cathedral windows pale their ineffectual fires. It is the crystal palace of Jehovah! Within its sounding aisles a thought even of the city seems irreverent. We begin to love the country more and more.
Here you begin to apprehend the wonderful order of creation, the lengthening days after the winter solstice; all the phenomena of meteoric machinery, every change in the wind, every change in the temperature; in the leafless trees you see a surprising variety of forms. The maple, the oak, the chestnut, the hickory, the beech, have each an architecture as distinct as those of the five orders. Then the spring is tardy in town, but if you have a hot-bed in the country, you see its young green firstlings bursting from the rich mould long before the city has shaken off the thraldom of winter.
60One day in the month of March, I heard there was to be some sport on the Nepperhan in the way of fishing, so I took my young ones to see it. The Nepperhan is an historical river — the Tiber of Yonkers. It runs in a straight line for about forty yards from the Hudson, then proudly turns to the right, then curves to the left, and in fact exhibits all the peculiarities of the Mississippi without its turbulence and monotony. It was a cold day in spring, the air was chill, the sky grey, the Palisades still ribbed with snow. As we approached the stream we saw that a crowd had collected on the deck of a wrecked coal-barge moored close to the bank, and on the side of the bank opposite to the barge, a man was standing, with one foot in the water, holding up the end of a net stretched across the tide. The other end of the net was fastened to the barge, and the bight, as the sailors say, was in the water. In the middle of the crowd there stood upright a fair, portly-looking man of good presence. His face looked like a weather-beaten, sign-board portrait of General Washington with white whiskers. He was looking up the stream, which from this point made a rush for the south for about one hundred feet, then gave it up, 61 and turned off due east, around a clump of bushes. What particular animosity General Washington had to this part of the stream I could not imagine, but he was damning that clump of bushes with a zeal worthy of a better cause. I never heard such imprecations. The oaths flew from his lips, up stream, as the sparks fly from an express locomotive at midnight. Dr. Slop’s remarks concerning the knots in the string of the green bag of surgical instruments, beside them, was like tender pity. Such ill-natured, uncharitable, unamiable, mordacious, malignant, pitiless, ruthless, fell, cruel, ferocious, proscriptive, sanguinary, unkind execrations were never fulminated against a clump of bushes before. By-and-by a flat-boat, filled with men, turned the corner and came broadside down stream. The men were splashing the water on every side of the flat-boat to drive the fish towards the net! They had oars, sticks, boards, boughs, and branches. Then I understood General Washington. He had been offended because the flat-boat was behind time.
Now it was all right: I saw a placid expression spreading over his weather-beaten countenance, as a drop of oil will spread over rough water, and mollify its turbulent features. The flat-boat, or 62 scow, was long enough to stretch almost from shore to shore. The shouts and splashes were frightening the fish, and below us, in the water, we could occasionally see a spectral sucker darting hither and thither. I looked again at General Washington. He had untied the end of the net, and was holding it in his hand. His face expressed intense inward satisfaction — deep — not vain-glorious. Near and nearer swept the broadside of the boat, down stream was the net, between both were the accumulating fish. General Washington’s hand trembled — he was getting excited. Here it comes, close upon us, and then — by the whiskers of the Great Mogul! one end of the scow grounded on the opposite bank, the bow rounded to, and cat-fish, perch, bull-head, and sucker, darted through the gap, and made tracks for the most secluded parts of the Nepperhan! But he who held the net was equal to the emergency — he cursed the boat out at right angles in an instant — a small minority of the fish still remained, and these were driven into the net. General Washington, with an impulse like that of a Titan rooting up an oak, pulled up his end of the net — the fish were fairly above the water — a smile gleamed out of his weather-beaten 63 face like a flash from a cannon — and then — then it was — just then — the treacherous mesh split! and like a thread of silver fire, the finny prey disappeared through the rent, and made a bee-line for the Hudson.
“Nary fish!” said an innocent bystander. General Washington turned an eye upon him that was like a Drummond light, dropped the net, took off his hat, and then proceeded to give that individual such an account of his birth, parentage and family connections, from the earliest settlement of Westchester county to the present time, that a parental regard for the ears of the young Sparrowgrassii, induced me to hurry them off the coal-barge in the quickest kind of time. But long after the scene was out of sight, I could hear, rolling along the face of the rocky Palisades, the reverberations of the big oaths, the resonant shadows of the huge anathemas, that had been the running accompaniments to the sucker fishing on the Nepperhan!
* Aleph, a play on the word Elephant, is the letter A, the beginning, of the Hebrew alphabet. — Elf.Ed