We still had
some kind of a good time, but nothing like the good times they
had out at the school near grandpap's, where I sometimes visited.
There you could whisper! Yes, sir, you could whisper. So long
as you didn't talk out loud, it was all right. And there was no
rising at the tap of the bell, forming in line and walking in
lock-step. Seemingly it never entered the school-board's heads
that anybody would ever be sent to state's prison. They left the
scholars unprepared for any such career. They have remedied all
that in city schools. Now, when a boy grows up and goes to Sing
Sing, he knows exactly what to do and how to behave. It all comes
back to him.
But what I call the finest part of going to school in the country
was, that you didn't go home to dinner. Grandma had a boy only a
few years older than I was, and when I went a-visiting, she fixed
us up a "piece." They call it "luncheon" now, I think - a foolish,
hybrid mongrel of a word, made up of "lump," a piece of bread, and
"noon," and "shenk," a pouring or drink. But the right name is
"piece." What made this particular "piece" taste so wonderfully
good was that it was in a round-bottomed basket woven of splints
dyed blue, and black and red, and all in such a funny pattern. It
was an Indian basket. My grandma's mother, when she was a little
girl, got that from the squaw of old Chief Wiping-Stick.
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