The Choir Invisible

When he went to his breakfast at the tavern, one of the young Williamsburg

aristocrats was already there, pretending to eat; and hovering about the

table, brisk to appease his demands, the daughter of the taverner: she as

ruddy as a hollyhock and gaily flaunting her head from side to side with the

pleasure of denying him everything but his food, yet meaning to kiss him

when twilight came--once, and then to run.

Truly, it seemed that this day was to be given up to much pairing: as be

thought it rightly should be and that without delay. When he took his seat

in the school-room and looked out upon the children, they had never seemed

so small, so pitiful. It struck him that Nature is cruel not to fit us for

love and marriage as soon as we are born--cruel to make us wait twenty or

thirty years before she lets us really begin to live. He looked with eyes

more full of pity than usual at blear-eyed, delicate little Jennie, as to

whom he could never tell whether it was the multiplication-table that made

her deathly sick, or sickness that kept her from multiplying. His eye lit

upon a wee, chubby-cheeked urchin on the end of a high, hard bench, and he

fell to counting how many ages must pass before that unsuspicious grub would

grow his palpitating wings of flame. He felt like making them a little

speech and telling them how happy he was, and how happy they would all be

when they got old enough to deserve it.

And as for the lessons that day, what difference could it make whether ideas

sprouted or did not sprout in those useless brains? He answered all the hard

questions himself; and, indeed, so sunny and exhilarating was the weather of

his discipline that little Jennie, seeing how the rays fell and the wind

lay, gave up the multiplication-table altogether and fell to drawing

tomahawks.

A remarkable mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were

the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild, hardy

generation of the new people; and there were little folks from Virginia,

from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania and other

sources, huddled together, some uncouth, some gentle-born, and all starting

out to be formed into the men and women of Kentucky.

They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes under his guidance.

Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little

boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of

the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop

pieces of their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the

woods--it being the dead of night now and the little girls being bound to a

tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their smouldering

campfires--the rescuers would rush in and there would be whoops and shrieks

and the taking of scalps and a happy return. Or some settlers would be shut

up in their fort. The only water to be had was from a spring outside the

walls, and around this the enemy skulked in the corn and grass. But their

husbands and sweethearts must not perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a

tear, a final embrace, the little women marched out through the gates to the

spring in the very teeth of death and brought back water in their wooden

dinner-buckets.

Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running and pitching

quoits and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting, in a

house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting

beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.