The Choir Invisible

Sometimes it was not Indian warfare but civil strife. One morning as many

as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at

once there was a dreadful fight to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel.

This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be: the one, Simon

Kenton; the other, General George Rogers Clark.

And there was another game of history--more practical in its bearings--which

he had not taught them, but which they had taught him; they had played it

with him that very morning.

When he had stepped across the open to the school, he found that the older

boys, having formed themselves into a garrison for the defence of the

smaller boys and girls, had barricaded the door and barred and manned the

wooden windows: the schoolhouse had suddenly become a frontier station; they

were the pioneers; he was the invading Indians--let him attack them if he

dared! He did dare and that at once; for he knew that otherwise there would

be no school that day or as long as the white race on the inside remained

unconquered. So had ensued a rough-and-tumble scrimmage for fifteen minutes,

during which the babies within wailed aloud with real terror of the battle,

and he received some real knocks and whacks and punches through the

loop-holes of the stockade: the end being arrived at when the schoolhouse

door, by a terrible wrench from the outside, was torn entirely off its

wooden hinges; and the victory being attributed--as an Indian victory always

was in those days--to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.

With such an opening of the day, the academic influence over childhood may

soon be restored to forcible supremacy but will awaken little zest. Gray was

glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he

had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks. Thirteen years

before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken

place; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons, many

widows who still dreamed of their young husbands, fallen that beautiful,

fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars, or floating down the

red-dyed river. All the morning he could see the expectation of this story

in their faces: a pair of distant, clearest eyes would be furtively lifted

to his, then quickly dropped; or another pair more steadily directed at him

through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers.

At noon, then, having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess, he

was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others--bareheaded under

the brilliant sky of May. He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork, where it

crossed the common, as a place in which he should be freest from

interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well

understood. This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now

with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel; but then it flashed

broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and

cornfields and patches of cane.