ransom me.
Upon the completion of my eighth year I was seized with an uncontrollable desire to enter at once upon the fulfillment of my long cherished plans, to visit far-away lands inhabited by strange and curious people. My own home, my own language, my own people, wearied me and wore upon me.
In my sleep I paced the deck of staunch vessels, shouted my orders, crowding sail in calm and reefing in threatening weather. I passed my time from morn till night, packing cases with suitable articles for traffic with the savages, so that I might be able to penetrate into interiors never visited by civilized man, and ascend rivers closed since the world began to the white-winged messengers of trade and commerce. But, strange to say, my father urged thereto, possibly, by the entreaties of my mother, firmly and resolutely set his face against my project of leaving home.
I was beside myself with disappointment. I entreated, I implored, I threatened. For the first time in my life—it pains me even now to make the confession—I was guilty of a certain disrespect to the authors of my being.
Bulger, after studying the situation for several days, reached the conclusion that the elder baron was in some way the cause of my unhappiness, and it required, at times, my sternest command to restrain him from setting his teeth in the calves of the elder baron’s legs as he quitted my apartment after some stormy interview.
“What!” cried I, in tones tremulous with grief, “am I doomed to waste the splendid gifts with which nature has endowed me, shut within the walls of this petty town, whose most boisterous scenes are the brawls of its market places, whose people never witness a grander pageant than the passing of a royal troop of horse? It must not, it shall not be. Thou hast said, thyself, that I am no ordinary child to be amused with ball and top, and entertained with picture books.”
But the elder baron had hardened his heart, and all my pleading was to no purpose.
And yet I did not despair of gaining my point in the end.
The continual dropping of water finally wore away the rock. I made up my mind now to move the elder baron to acquiesce in my project of leaving home by resorting to entirely different tactics. Said I to myself:
“He wishes me to be a child: I’ll be one!” And forthwith I set about making friends with every mischievous little rogue in the town.
Not a single juvenile ne’er-do-well escaped my attentions.
The more rampant, active, and tireless his power of mischief, the closer I wrapped him in my affections.
From gray dawn to dewy eve these chums and boon companions of mine flocked about the castle. They worshipped me as their leader and yielded an implicit obedience to my commands as were I possessed of some mastery over them.
The elder baron saw the gathering cloud and bent his head as if to meet the coming storm with better chance of resisting it.
Came there a dinner party, the choicest Burgundy was found to have been spirited away and the bottles filled with common claret. Did the elder baron meet his friends in the fields for a trial with the hawks, it was only to discover that they had been so overfed as to sit stupidly placid when the hood was removed. Let the cook be told that guests were expected, and that he must be careful to have the little dumplings of his soup extra delicate, to the elder baron’s horror, a cherry stone would be found in the centre of each little dumpling.
One of my coadjutors was venturesome enough to pilfer the elder baron’s snuff box and fill it with pepper. The result may be imagined. Another took good care to pour water into all the tinder boxes before the guests called for their pipes. Upon attempting to rise from the table, here and there a queue would be found securely tied to the back of the chair.
One of my favorite exploits was to station myself on the first landing of the stairway and “hold the bridge like Horatius Cocles of old,” my wild band of two dozen young barbarians rushing madly up the staircase with screams, yells and vociferations which would have done credit to any horde of real savages I have ever visited, while I, with my wooden sabre, beat down their sticks, occasionally rapping too bold a youngster on the knuckles and sending him bawling to the foot of the stairway, to Bulger’s infinite amusement, as he always insisted upon taking part in the fray and gloried in my prowess.
At last to my great joy, I noticed that the elder baron showed signs of surrender.
Like a prudent general I ordered an attack all along the line.
There was to be a fox hunt the next day. I directed one of my trusted lieutenants to feed the hounds all the raw meat they could swallow, about an hour before the start.
Ten others, most fleet-footed and glib-tongued, I dispatched to the houses of the ten leading physicians and surgeons of the town and its immediate neighborhood, with the same message to each, namely, that every man, woman and child at the manor house had been taken violently ill, and that the greatest haste must be made to come with their medicine chests so that the epidemic might be checked.
THE TEN BOTTLES OF MEDICINE BROUGHT BY THE TEN DOCTORS.
The ten doctors galloped into the courtyard at nearly the same moment, only to find the elder baron and his friends gathered on the platform and holding a whispered consultation over the strange actions of the hounds. The angry disciples of Galen refused to prescribe for the poor animals, and galloped away again with their well-filled holsters thumping against their legs.
Meanwhile I had not been idle.
To the claws of a score or more of the elder baron’s fowls I tied a kind of fuzee of my own invention, so inflammable that the slightest friction would cause it to burst into flame, and then I turned them loose in the fields and garden adjoining the family hall.
They had been cooped up all the Summer, and were overjoyed at the prospect of a good, comfortable scratching time ’mid the dry leaves and stubble of the open fields.
The gamekeepers by this time had succeeded in arousing the hounds somewhat from their stupor, when the cry of “fire! fire!” went up. The hunting party hastily dismounted and joined the servants in the mad rush for buckets of water.
I was sitting calmly in my apartment, with Bulger by my side, when the alarm was raised.
The elder baron at first was inclined to think that although my workmanship was plainly visible in the fabrics of mischief, which consisted in overfeeding the hounds and summoning the ten doctors to the manor house on a wild goose chase, yet the breaking out of the fire in the neighboring gardens and fields was really something with which I had nothing to do. The return of a venerable old Dominick rooster, which had been either too feeble or too lazy to explode the fuzees attached to his claws, settled the matter, however.
The elder baron’s mind was now clear as to who had conceived the crime in which his poor fowls had so unwittingly become the accomplices.
That night Bulger and I went to bed with light hearts.
The elder baron had at last consented to let us set out on our first journey in quest of strange adventures among the curious people of far-away lands.
THE FOWLS THAT WOULDN’T SCRATCH, AND SO BETRAYED ME.
CHAPTER
