NOW and again you dream one special dream. Suddenly you find yourself back in school. There you are, a great awkward man, squeezing into the old familiar seat and essaying some strangely mixed-up lesson. And about you are the mates of yore, who have not, apparently, grown a bit.

Although they seem not to notice anything peculiar in your presence, nevertheless your position is decidedly embarrassing to you. You feel that you must mind the teacher, of course, and yet you cannot, for the life of you, get that lesson! What a gawk you are! And how in the world are you ever going to stand this awful reversal?

Then you awaken, and with a sigh of relief discover yourself, in the gray of the morning, safely brought down to date, in your bed.

And once more you sigh, but this time not in relief. It is a sigh tenderly laid by retrospection upon the urn of the past.

In your dream the schoolroom was unusually small, and your seat was constricted to the extent that your knees were tightly pressed against the under side of the desk, while the edge of it was creasing your stomach. However, probably it was not that the room and the seat had shrunk; it was that you had expanded beyond limits.

In the days when it was quite proper that you should be in school, the room was extensive indeed, and the seat was ample for innumerable wriggles. For instance, it permitted you to slide down until, reaching forward with your two feet, you engaged the insteps of Billy Lunt, and hauling back with all your might, deliciously held him so that he could move only from the waist upward. Abruptly you released him, and his feet dropped with a big thump that made the teacher frown.

This seat and desk was your little state, surrounded by other little states similar to it, and all ruled by “teacher,” who, like some Pallas Athena, from her Olympia platform surveyed and appraised, bade and forbade.

Your state was bounded on the rear by Snoopie Mitchell’s, on the front by Billy Lunt’s, on the right and the left by a river, or aisle, such as at regular intervals divided the country and opened up the interior to travel.

This was a country of equal suffrage; some of the states were feminine, some were masculine. All, but especially the masculine, were liable to internal troubles, produced through external agencies.

As example, the bent pin was an indefatigable disturber of the peace. It would intrude at the slightest opportunity, and the first thing that you knew it was in your midst—almost literally. The canny explored their seat of state (or their state of seat, if preferred) with their hands, before venturing to settle for the pursuance of routine duties.

Poor, long-suffering Billy Lunt (yet poor you, as well; for although you are behind him, the mischievous Snoopie is behind you)! Down he plumps, and up he jumps with a wild “Yow!” at which your whole being exults even while your heart beats uneasily. You descry, where he is frantically clutching, the steely glint of it!

“Will, sit down!” thunders the teacher.

This, forsooth, is adding insult to injury; for had he been able to sit, assuredly he would not thus have arisen. In a moment he cautiously, gingerly obeys, at the same time holding into sight the pin, as though it were a monstrosity, so that all must see.

To “yow” very loudly, and to expose the cause with great ostentation to the utmost publicity, was the resort of every pin-afflicted petty ruler.

“John, did you put that pin on Will’s seat?” demands the teacher.

The wave of sniggers that had swelled during Billy’s antics ebbs and dies, and all the world listens for your reply.

With the frankest astonishment—astonishment that ought to have completely turned suspicion—you have been gazing at the Lunt performance. Has he gone crazy? What can ail him? Who could have done it to him?

This simulated wonder is your part of the program—your voluntary part, that is.

“John, I ask you if you put that pin there,” reiterates the persistent examiner, judge, and executioner.

And now that the glamour of the deed has faded, how you wish that you had not! For the voluntary part of the program is always followed by an involuntary part.

All in all, the possession of a state in these united states is fraught with peril. So much is prohibited. It is unlawful to have a poor memory or a dull brain or a careless tongue; it is unlawful to carry on intercourse, either written or oral or by signs, with neighbor states; it is unlawful to import articles for consumption—such as cinnamon drops, or lemon drops, or jujube, or licorice; while to import gum is a capital offense.

Nevertheless, gum is imported and secreted by being stuck to the inner surface of the desk-top, thence to be peeled off at recess and at closing-time, and chewed. Sometimes it is forgotten, and the janitor contemptuously scrapes it to the floor for his dust-heap, or a successor to you rapturously finds it. Whenever one moves into a new state, one runs a pleasurable chance of discovering a gum-deposit.

The principal penalties are “stayin’-after-school,” “gettin’-sent-home,” and “lickin’s.”

It is the close of a day in this despotic monarchy, and the despot has tapped her bell for books to be put away. The next tap will mean dismissal; but between taps comes the allotment of punishments.

You reflect—and regret. There was once during the day when you asked Billy Lunt if he had “the first example.” You whispered it very circumspectly, but the unruly sibilants in your tones somehow spread into the open. “Teacher” pricked her ears in your direction, and with her pencil she apparently made a memorandum upon her ready slip.

Was it your name she jotted? Or was it Billy’s? He was in the act of showing you his slate. You are ungenerous enough to hope that it was Billy’s.

In the meantime you hold your breath (as, in similar anxiety, round about you do your compatriots, save the goody-goodies and the “teacher’s pets,” whose names never are read) and listen.

The kids are going swimming; the signal has been passed along. You have set your heart upon going with them. Consequently, never have you felt so repentant, so full of high resolves and the best intentions, and your appealing gaze might well have moved a stone, to say nothing of a teacher.

“Those whose names I read may remain,” she announces calmly: “Sam Jessup, Dolly Smith, Horace Brown, Leonard Irving, Patrick Conroy, Olga Jansen, John Walker!”

Crushed, you hear the second tap; freed, the others rise; out they file, but you stay behind—you and a few companions in misery scattered at wide intervals through the nearly deserted room.

From without sound gay shouts and laughter, growing fainter and fainter, and dying in the distance.

You are marooned.

“Take your books and go to work at some lesson!” orders the teacher.

Maybe, if you strive hard and obediently, she will let you go soon. Some of the prisoners shuffle angrily, and rebelliously bang things about in their desks; but you promptly open your geography, and hoping that her eye is noting you, pretend to apply yourself to its text. Silence falls, broken only by the measured tick-tock of the clock on the wall.

Presently you glance up. Five minutes have passed. “Teacher,” with eyes fastened upon her desk, is engaged in correcting a quantity of exercises. She seems to pay not the slightest attention to the clock.

You give a weary little shuffle—your first—and turn a page.

Two more minutes. Even yet you could catch the kids. How good you are! But, blame it, what is the sense, if she does not notice?

Tick-tock, tick-tock, repeats the monitor on the wall, checking off the wasted moments.

Ten minutes! Is she going to keep you all night? Doesn’t she see what time it is getting to be? You make a lot of noise, to warn her; but she never looks. For all that is evident, she might have forgotten the existence of you and everybody else. She simply goes on reading and marking.

Twelve minutes. You raise your hand. You keep it raised. You shuffle some more, and you cough, and you shuffle again.

“Well, John, what is it?” she vouchsafes in a tired voice.

She has heard you all the time, but you don’t know it. Neither do you know that she has been reading you while reading scrawly exercises.

“How long do I have to stay?”

“Until I tell you you may go.”

Fifteen minutes. You throw off your hypocritical sainthood, and you lapse into your genuine boiling, raging self. Darn her. Darn the teacher! Darn the old teacher! What does she care about going swimming? She just wants to keep a fellow in! You’ll show her sometime! And you shuffle and scrape and kick and bang, and she apparently pays not the least heed to it.

The darned old thing (although, in truth, she is not old, save in boy eyes and in boy ways)!

Twenty minutes! Darn the—

“You may go now, Johnny.”

She cuts your condemnatory sentence right in the middle; and not finishing it, you hastily throw the geography into your desk, and make for the door. On your way you dart a glance at her, wondering if she knows what names you have been calling her. She smiles at you, and you feel rather sheepish.

After all, you have time for a swim, delightfully prefaced by throwing mud at the whole crowd in ahead of you.

Staying-after-school is a penalty for misdemeanors; for crimes there is “gettin’-sent-home”—not bad at all until you get there, furnishing, as it does, a vacation—and “lickin’s,” which sounds worse than it really is.

“Lickin’s” don’t hurt half the time. Never would a boy admit, outside, that a licking hurt; he “bellered just for fun”! The fact is, lots of the kids declared they had rather take a licking than be kept after school, for a licking was soon over, and then you were through.

But by virtually unanimous vote the kids all asserted that they had rather be licked, any day, or stay after school for a whole month, than “speak.”

It is Friday afternoon—a fateful Friday when sashes and squeaky shoes and slicked hair and significantly arrayed chairs herald “speaking day.” And you are among the elect, as testify your red tie without and your uneasy heart within.

Early the books are put away, and with the clearing of the desks are cleared also the metaphorical decks.

A bustle is heard at the threshold, and in come the first of the visitors—a pair of mothers. Whose mothers they are is speedily indicated by the flaming ears of a very red girl and a very red boy, at whom, as the intelligence spreads, all the school looks.

The mothers rustle chairward, settle into place, and smilingly wait.

Another bustle! More visitors! Out of the corner of your eye you slant one apprehensive glance in their direction, and then you quickly turn your head the other way. It is your mother. You felt it even before Snoopie gave you a painful telegraphic kick. She has come. She said that she might. You have been alternately hoping and fearing. Now you know.

In impish ecstasy Snoopie keeps dealing you irritating jabs. His mother never comes.

Teacher moves from the platform and seats herself at one side. It is the final preparation. In her hand she holds the list of prospective performers, and somewhere adown it is your name.

You would give worlds to know just where—just whom you follow. The chief agony attached to the afternoon is in the racking uncertainty as to when one will be called upon. The nearer the top of the list, the better, for thereafter one will be free to revel in the plight of others. But to be reserved until toward the last, and to sit in a cold sweat through most of the afternoon—ah, this is the suspense that fairly curls one’s toes!

Listen! She is going to read.

“Harry Wilson. Recitation: ‘George Nidiver.’”

Amid oppressive silence Harry clumps up the aisle, and stumbling miserably on the platform step receives a tribute of grateful titters. Teacher taps rebukingly with her pencil, and frowns. Harry bobs his head for a bow, and, white and blinky, proceeds:

You would bask the more unrestrictedly in Harry’s presence did you not see in him your unlucky self; and while he is speaking you feverishly go over and over parts of your own piece.

As Harry approaches the end, his pace grows faster and faster, until at a gallop he dashes through the concluding stanza, offers a second bob in lieu of other punctuation, long lacking, and clumps back to his seat, where he grins rapturously, as if he had at last had a tooth pulled.

How you envy Harry’s light-heartedness as with bated breath you strain your ears for the next announcement!

This proves to be “Nina Gottlob. Composition: ‘Kindness.’” After Nina somebody else, not you, is summoned; and thus name after name is read, with you hanging on by your very eyebrows, before, at the most unexpected moment, come to you, like the crack o’ doom, the words: “Johnny Walker. Recitation: ‘The Soldier of the Rhine.’”

The teacher looks at you expectantly. Snoopie trips you as you tower into the aisle. Oh, the tremendous distance which you, all feet and arms, traverse in getting to the platform! You mount; and here you stand, a giant, and bow. Away below, and stretching into space remote, are faces of friends and enemies—the ones (mostly those of little girls) gravely staring at you, and the others twisted into hideous grimaces calculated to make you laugh. As in a dream you witness your mother gazing up at you with beaming, prideful, but withal anxious eye.

Very vacant-headed, you drag from your throat a thin stranger voice which says:

and mechanically maintains the narrative for some moments, and then on a sudden peters out!

You cast about for something with which to start it up again, but you light upon nothing. All the faces in front watch you curiously, amusedly, grinningly. Helpless, you look in the direction of Billy Lunt, upon whose desk, as you passed, you had laid the book, that he might prompt you, if necessary.

Billy has lost the place, and is desperately running his forefinger adown the page.

“‘Tell my mother that her other sons—’” presently he assists, in husky tones; and, as if set in motion by the vibrations, your voice, with an apologetic “Oh, yes,” goes ahead once more.

And so forth.

Several times it stops again, but Billy sits alert to fill in each hiatus; and vastly relieved in mind you triumphantly regain your seat, only to ascertain, to your disgust, that you are the last of the afternoon’s victims.

Escape from this despotism of school, with its penalties and speaking and other disagreeable features, which combined to outweigh any possible advantages or profit, was always engaging in prospect, although apt to be unsatisfactory in realization.

You longed to be a man. You wondered how it would seem to walk about paying no attention whatsoever to the old bell. Were the people outside the school aware of their fortunate state? Gee!

It was an odd fact that in the week the finest and most interesting days, out of doors, habitually were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—and Sunday. The best fishing invariably came on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and Sunday. You always felt the most like having fun on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and Sunday. What was measly little Saturday, eclipsed so by these other days all-glorious without!

If your folks were only like Snoopie’s folks you could play hooky once in a while. Snoopie asserted that his father “didn’t care.” Yours did—very much.

The sole recourse which remained for you was being sick; and insomuch as the real article was annoyingly scarce with you, it was requisite that you manufacture some substitute.

’Tis a spell of beautiful weather—the kind of weather that came, as aforesaid, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays—and Sundays. Your feet lagged to school, and your heart kept pace with them. Now you are idling in your seat, utterly unable to work. A vagrant bee hums in through an open window, and hums out through another. A woodpecker drums, as on a sounding-board, upon the spire of the Congregational church. A blue jay screams derisively, like an exultant truant, among the elms arching the street in front. All these things upset you, stirring as they do the Wanderlust of boyhood.

The sky never has been so blue, the grass and the trees never so green, the sunshine never so golden, nor the air so mellow, as at recess.

You hate school. You don’t want to go in. Snoopie volunteers:

“Let’s play hooky this afternoon, and go fishin’!”

“My father won’t let me,” you declare.

“Aw, come on. He’ll never know,” scoffs Snoopie.

But he would, just the same.

The only chance you have is to be sick.

It is over-late to be sick to-day, for there is a ball game after school, and you are to take part. If you are sick this evening, when the sports of the day are finished, your mother will accuse you of having played too hard, and such a notion would turn your attack into a boomerang.

You will be sick in the morning.

Accordingly, with great languidness you flop into your chair at breakfast, and carefully dawdle over your food. You endeavor not to eat, although, as luck would have it, the menu is one of which you are particularly fond. But so much the better.

“Why, John, you aren’t eating! Isn’t the breakfast good?” exclaims mother, instantly noting.

“Yes, ’m.”

“Then why don’t you eat it?”

“Come, eat your breakfast, Johnny,” supplements father.

“I don’t want to,” you plead.

“Don’t you feel well?” asks mother anxiously.

“Not very.”

“Where do you feel sick?”

“Oh, my head aches.”

“Give me your hand.”

You lay it in hers, and she thoughtfully holds it and scrutinizes you.

“I do believe that the boy has a little fever, Henry,” she says to father.

“Maybe he’s caught cold. Better have him keep quiet to-day,” suggests father. “I’ll do his chores this morning.”

You really begin to feel ill, the word “fever” has such a portentous sound. And you thereby submit the easier to being stowed upon the sofa against the wall, your head upon a pillow and the ready afghan over your feet and legs.

“There’s so much measles about now; don’t you think we ought to have Dr. Reese come in and look at him?” remarks mother to father, in that impersonal mode of conversation, like an aside, which seems to presuppose that you have no ears.

“N-n-no,” decides father. “I’d wait and see if he doesn’t feel better soon.”

In his eye there is a twinkle, at which mother’s face clears, and they exchange glances which you do not comprehend.

The first bell rings. The chattering boys and girls on their way to school pass the house. But no school for you, you bet! And the last bell rings. As you hark to some belated, luckless being scampering madly by, you hug yourself. Let the blamed old bell bang; you don’t care!

The summons dies away in a jarring clang. Here you are, safe.

You remain prone as long as you can, but your sofa-station at last grows unbearably irksome. It is time that you pave the way for more action. Mother is bustling in and out of the room, and you are emboldened to hail her:

“I want to get up.”

“Not yet,” she cautions. “Lie quiet and try to go to sleep.”

Sleep!

She places her cool palm, for a moment, upon your forehead.

“I don’t think that you’ve got much fever, after all,” she hazards. “But lie still.”

Out of policy you strive to obey for a while longer, but every muscle in your eager body rebels. You twist and toss; you stick up one knee, and then the other, and then both at once; and finally a leg dangles to the floor over the outer edge of your unhappy bed.

“I want to get up. I feel lots better,” you whine.

“No,” rebukes mother, firmly. “Papa said that you were to keep quiet.”

“But I will be quiet,” you promise.

“W-well, only you must not go outdoors,” she warns.

However, anything to be released from that narrow sofa; so off you roll, and apply yourself further to the delicate business of gaining health not too rapidly, yet conveniently.

It appears, however, that, according to some occult line of reasoning, “a boy who is not well enough to do his chores or go to school is not well enough to play”! The more vigorous you grow, the more this maxim is rubbed into you.

When the afternoon has fairly set in, you have become so very, very well that in your opinion you may, without risk of a relapse, play catch against the barn—which, of course, would be a preliminary warming up, leading to meeting the kids after school. You propose the half of your project to your mother; but she sees only impropriety in it, and proffers that if you really need exercise you may finish uncompleted chores!

After school you hear the other boys tearing around; but you must “keep quiet”! The only consideration won by your suddenly bursting health is intimation from mother that unless you moderate, you will be deemed strong enough to stand a “good whipping.”

In fact, the whole bright day proves more of a farce than you had anticipated. What is the use of being sick, if you are not allowed to have any fun?

By bedtime your mysterious malady is by common consent a thing of antiquity and in the morning you go to school.

The time arrives when you go no more. You yourself are now of that free company whom you have so envied. Yet it does not seem such a wonderful company, after all. You find that your position still has limitations. When you had lived within, it was permitted you to pass and mingle with the life without; but now that you have chosen the without, not again may you pass within, save in dreams.