Bill's School and Mine: A Collection of Essays on Education — Reading Companion

One said it was a hot baseball, Zippt thru the brambly thatch, But the others said 'twas a note by post Or a telergraph dispatch. Looky there!

So they hunted and they hal-looed; And the next thing they did sight, Was a great big bull-dog chasing them, And a farmer hollering "Skite!" Looky there!

And the first one said "Hi-jinktum!" And the next, "Hi-jinktum-jee!" And the last one said, "Them very words Has just occurred to me!" Looky there! (Showing the tattered seat of his pants.)

This is the hunting song of the American Bander-log[B], and this kind of hunting is better than the kind that needs a gun. To one who falls into the habit of it, the gun is indeed a useless tool. I am reminded of a day I spent with a gun at a remote place in the Rocky Mountains, where, during the 25 days I have camped there on four different trips, I have seen as many as 150 of the wildest of North American animals, the Rocky Mountain sheep. I lay in ambush for three hours waiting for sheep, and the sheep came; but they were out of range again before I saw them because I had become so interested in killing mosquitoes! I timed myself at intervals, and 80 per minute for three solid hours makes an honest estimate of 14,400. And I was hungry, too. I fancy the sheep were not frightened but wished the good work to go on undisturbed.

Do you, perhaps, like candy? Did you ever consider that the only sweetmeat our forefathers had for thousands of years was wild honey? And those sour times--if I may call them such--before the days of sugar and candy, come much nearer to us than you realize, for I can remember my own grandfather's tales of bee-hunting in Tennessee. Just imagine how exciting it must have been in the days of long-ago to find a tree loaded with--candy! A bee tree! If Bill were to go back with me to the wild woods of Tennessee, some thrill of that old excitement would well up from the depths of his soul at finding such a tree. You may wonder what I am driving at, so I will tell you, that one of the most exciting experiences of my boyhood was a battle with a colony of bumble bees. I was led into it by an older companion and the ardor and excitement of that battle, as I even now remember it, are wholly inexplicable to me except I think of it as a representation through inherited instinct of a ten-thousand-years' search for wild honey.

My schooling grew out of instinctive reactions toward natural things; hunting and fishing, digging and planting in the Spring, nutting in the Fall, and the thousands of variations which these things involve, and I believe that the play of instinct is the only solid basis of growth of a boy or girl. I believe, furthermore, that the very essence of boy humor is bound up with the amazing incongruity of his instincts. Was there ever a boy whose instincts (many of them mere fatuity like his digestive appendix) have not led him time and again into just thin air, to say nothing of water and mud! For my part I have never known anything more supremely funny than learning what a hopeless mess of wood pulp and worms a bumble-bee's nest really is, except, perhaps, seeing another boy learn the same stinging lesson.

The use of formulas, too, is unquestionably instinctive, and we all know how apt a boy is to indulge in formulas of the hocus-pocus sort, like Tom Sawyer's recipe for removing warts by the combined charm of black midnight and a black cat, dead. And a boy arrives only late in his boyhood, if ever, to some sense of the distinction between formulas of this kind and such as are vital and rational. I think that there is much instruction and a great deal of humor connected with the play of this instinctive tendency. I remember a great big boy, a hired man on my grandfather's farm, in fact, who was led into a fight with a nest of hornets with the expectation that he would bear a charmed skin if he shouted in loud repetition the words, "Jew's-harp, jew's-harp."