FullReads

“Poor mother!” said Old Hundred. “Remember the marble rakes we used to make? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered ’em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concrete sidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles from the curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for the owner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went into the kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences of gambling.”

“I know,” said I. “It was almost as terrible as sending ‘comic valentines.’ Remember the ‘comics’? They were horribly colored lithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought ’em at Damon’s drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles wouldn’t sell ’em.”

“Emily Ruggles’s!” exclaimed Old Hundred. “Shall you ever forget Emily Ruggles’s? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a flight of steps–a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it was just Emily Ruggles’s. It was full of marbles, tops, ‘scholars’ companions,’ air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, ‘Which side, young man?’ Yet her store was a kid’s paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn’t, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for all her forbidding manner.”

“Of course she loved us,” said I. “She loved her country, too. Don’t you remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil War, because she couldn’t go to the front and fight herself? Poor woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us. She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see such shops anymore. I don’t know whether there are any tops and marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important any longer.”

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a hill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun. Old Hundred sat down on a stone.

“I’m weary,” he said, “and my muscles ache, and I’m stiff and sore and forty-five. Bill, you’re getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You look ridiculous.”

“Shut up,” said I, “and don’t get maudlin just because you can’t chin yourself ten times. Remember, it’s because you’re out of practice!”

“Out of practice, out of practice!” he said viciously. “A year at Muldoon’s wouldn’t bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game, would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, or following a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling ‘Daddy on the castle, Daddy on the castle!’ while we jumped on Frank Swain’s veranda and off again into his mother’s flower-bed!”

“I trust not,” said I. “Just what are you getting at?”

“This,” answered Old Hundred: “that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive–usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right.”