Close by on the high bank there was
a spot where the first wild violets came.
You might look along miles of
hedgerow, but there were never any until they had shown by John Brown's.
If a man's work that he has done all the days of his life could be
collected and piled up around him in visible shape, what a vast mound
there would be beside some! If each act or stroke was represented, say by
a brick, John Brown would have stood the day before his ending by the
side of a monument as high as a pyramid. Then if in front of him could be
placed the sum and product of his labour, the profit to himself, he could
have held it in his clenched hand like a nut, and no one would have seen
it. Our modern people think they train their sons to strength by football
and rowing and jumping, and what are called athletic exercises; all of
which it is the fashion now to preach as very noble, and likely to lead
to the goodness of the race. Certainly feats are accomplished and records
are beaten, but there is no real strength gained, no hardihood built up.
Without hardihood it is of little avail to be able to jump an inch
farther than somebody else. Hardihood is the true test, hardihood is the
ideal, and not these caperings or ten minutes' spurts.
Now, the way they made the boy John Brown hardy was to let him roll about
on the ground with naked legs and bare head from morn till night, from
June till December, from January till June. The rain fell on his head,
and he played in wet grass to his knees. Dry bread and a little lard was
his chief food. He went to work while he was still a child. At half-past
three in the morning he was on his way to the farm stables, there to help
feed the cart-horses, which used to be done with great care very early in
the morning. The carter's whip used to sting his legs, and sometimes he
felt the butt. At fifteen he was no taller than the sons of well-to-do
people at eleven; he scarcely seemed to grow at all till he was eighteen
or twenty, and even then very slowly, but at last became a tall big man.
That slouching walk, with knees always bent, diminished his height to
appearance; he really was the full size, and every inch of his frame had
been slowly welded together by this ceaseless work, continual life in the
open air, and coarse hard food. This is what makes a man hardy. This is
what makes a man able to stand almost anything, and gives a power of
endurance that can never be obtained by any amount of gymnastic training.
I used to watch him mowing with amazement. Sometimes he would begin at
half-past two in the morning, and continue till night. About eleven
o'clock, which used to be the mowers' noon, he took a rest on a couch of
half-dried grass in the shade of the hedge. For the rest, it was mow,
mow, mow for the long summer day.
John Brown was dead: died in an instant at his cottage door. I could
hardly credit it, so vivid was the memory of his strength. The gap of
time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me; to me he was
still in my mind the John Brown of the hayfield; there was nothing
between then and his death.
He used to catch us boys the bats in the stable, and tell us fearful
tales of the ghosts he had seen; and bring the bread from the town in an
old-fashioned wallet, half in front and half behind, long before the
bakers' carts began to come round in country places. One evening he came
into the dairy carrying a yoke of milk, staggering, with tipsy gravity;
he was quite sure he did not want any assistance, he could pour the milk
into the pans. He tried, and fell at full length and bathed himself from
head to foot. Of later days they say he worked in the town a good deal,
and did not look so well or so happy as on the farm. In this cottage
opposite the violet bank they had small-pox once, the only case I
recollect in the hamlet - the old men used to say everybody had it when
they were young; this was the only case in my time, and they recovered
quickly without any loss, nor did the disease spread. A roomy well-built
cottage like that, on dry ground, isolated, is the only hospital worthy
of the name. People have a chance to get well in such places; they have
very great difficulty in the huge buildings that are put up expressly for
them. I have a Convalescent Home in my mind at the moment, a vast
building. In these great blocks what they call ventilation is a steady
draught, and there is no 'home' about it. It is all walls and regulations
and draughts, and altogether miserable. I would infinitely rather see any
friend of mine in John Brown's cottage. That terrible disease, however,
seemed to quite spoil the violet bank opposite, and I never picked one
there afterwards. There is something in disease so destructive, as it
were, to flowers.
The hundreds of times I saw the tall chimney of that cottage rise out of
the hill-side as I came home at all hours of the day and night! the first
chimney after a long journey, always comfortable to see, especially so in
earlier days, when we had a kind of halting belief in John Brown's
ghosts, several of which were dotted along that road according to him.
The ghosts die as we grow older, they die and their places are taken by
real ghosts.
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