Ah, Master Cheever has taken down that terrible birch rod! Short is the trial, — the sentence quickly passed, — and now the judge prepares to execute it in person. Thwack! thwack! thwack! In these good old times, a schoolmaster’s blows were well laid on.
See, the birch rod has lost several of its twigs, and will hardly serve for another execution. Mercy on his, what a bellowing the urchins make! My ears are almost deafened, though the clamor comes through the far length of a hundred and fifty years. There, go to your seats, poor boys; and do not cry, sweet little Alice, for they have ceased to feel the pain a long time since.
And thus the forenoon passes away. Now it is twelve o’clock. The master looks at his great silver watch, and then, with tiresome deliberation, puts the ferule into his desk. The little multitude await the word of dismissal with almost irrepressible impatience.
“You are dismissed,” says Master Cheever.
The boys retire, treading softly until they have passed the threshold; but, fairly out of the schoolroom, lo, what a joyous shout! what a scampering and trampling of feet! what a sense of recovered freedom expressed in the merry uproar of all their voices! What care they for the ferule and birch rod now? Were boys created merely to study Latin and arithmetic? No; the better purposes of their being are to sport, to leap, to run, to shout, to slide upon the ice, to snowball.
Happy boys! Enjoy your playtime now, and come again to study and to feel the birch rod and the ferule tomorrow; not till tomorrow; for to-day is Thursday lecture; and, ever since the settlement of Massachusetts, there has been no school on Thursday afternoons. Therefore sport, boys, while you may, for the morrow cometh, with the birch rod and the ferule; and after that another morrow, with troubles of its own.
Now the master has set everything to rights, and is ready to go home to dinner. Yet he goes reluctantly. The old man has spent so much of his life in the smoky, noisy, buzzing schoolroom, that, when he has a holiday, he feels as if his place were lost and himself a stranger in the world. But forth he goes; and there stands our old chair, vacant and solitary, till good Master Cheever resumes his seat in it tomorrow morning.
“Grandfather,” said Charley, “I wonder whether the boys did not use to upset the old chair when the schoolmaster was out.”
“There is a tradition,” replied Grandfather, “that one of its arms was dislocated in some such manner. But I cannot believe that any schoolboy would behave so naughtily.”
As it was now later than little Alice’s usual bedtime, Grandfather broke off his narrative, promising to talk more about Master Cheever and his scholars some other evening.
CHAPTER IV. COTTON MATHER
Accordingly, the next evening, Grandfather resumed the history of his beloved chair.
“Master Ezekiel Cheever,” said he, “died in 1707, after having taught school about seventy years. It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils. Almost all the great men of that period, and for many years back, had been whipped into eminence by Master Cheever. Moreover, he had written a Latin Accidence, which was used in schools more than half a century after his death; so that the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys.”
Grandfather proceeded to say, that, when Master Cheever died, he bequeathed the chair to the most learned man that was educated at his school, or that had ever been born in America. This was the renowned Cotton Mather, minister of the Old North Church in Boston.
“And author of the Magnalia, Grandfather, which we sometimes see you reading,” said Laurence.
“Yes, Laurence,” replied Grandfather. “The Magnalia is a strange, pedantic history, in which true events and real personages move before the reader with the dreamy aspect which they wore in Cotton Mather’s singular mind. This huge volume, however, was written and published before our chair came into his possession. But, as he was the author of more books than there are days in the year, we may conclude that he wrote a great deal while sitting in this chair.”
“I am tired of these schoolmasters and learned men,” said Charley. “I wish some stirring man, that knew how to do something in the world, like Sir William Phips, would sit in the chair.”
“Such men seldom have leisure to sit quietly in a chair,” said Grandfather. “We must make the best of such people as we have.”
As Cotton Mather was a very distinguished man, Grandfather took some pains to give the children a lively conception of his character. Over the door of his library were painted these words, BE SHORT, — as a warning to visitors that they must not do the world so much harm as needlessly to interrupt this great man’s wonderful labors. On entering the room you would probably behold it crowded, and piled, and heaped with books. There were huge, ponderous folios, and quartos, and little duodecimos, in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldaic, and all other languages that either originated at the confusion of Babel or have since come into use.
All these books, no doubt, were tossed about in confusion, thus forming a visible emblem of the manner in which their contents were crowded into Cotton Mather’s brain. And in the middle of the room stood table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather’s chair, which seemed to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its cushion were stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and other hard matters.
In this chair, from one year’s end to another, sat that prodigious bookworm, Cotton Mather, sometimes devouring a great book, and sometimes scribbling one as big. In Grandfather’s younger days there used to be a wax figure of him in one of the Boston museums, representing a solemn, dark-visaged person, in a minister’s black gown, and with a black-letter volume before him.
“It is difficult, my children,” observed Grandfather, “to make you understand such a character as Cotton Mather’s, in whom there was so much good, and yet so many failings and frailties. Undoubtedly he was a pious man. Often he kept fasts; and once, for three whole days, he allowed himself not a morsel of food, but spent the time in prayer and religious meditation. Many a livelong night did he watch and pray. These fasts and vigils made him meagre and haggard, and probably caused him to appear as if he hardly belonged to the world.”
“Was not the witchcraft delusion partly caused by Cotton Mather?” inquired Laurence.
“He was the chief agent of the mischief,” answered Grandfather; “but we will not suppose that he acted otherwise than conscientiously. He believed that there were evil spirits all about the world. Doubtless he imagined that they were hidden in the corners and crevices of his library, and that they peeped out from among the leaves of many of his books, as he turned them over, at midnight. He supposed that these unlovely demons were everywhere, in the sunshine as well as in the darkness, and that they were hidden in men’s hearts, and stole into their most secret thoughts.”
Here Grandfather was interrupted by little Alice, who hid her face in his lap, and murmured a wish that he would not talk any more about Cotton Mather and the evil spirits. Grandfather kissed her, and told her that angels were the only spirits whom she had anything to do with.
He
