Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/30

22 The tragedy and comedy of this broad silent life turned on things strangely simple and primitive—the stealing of "three large brass pins"; the disappearance of the wonderful yellow marble which an Indian boy had given him; the love and losing of a little bob-tailed squirrel for which he wept and hunted the world in vain; and finally the shadow of death which is ever here—the death of a ewe-lamb and the death of the boy's own mother. All these things happened before he was eight and they were his main education. He could dress leather and make whip-lashes; he could herd cattle and talk Indian; but of books and formal schooling he had little.

"John was never quarrelsome, but was excessively fond of the hardest and roughest kind of plays, and could never get enough of them. Indeed when for a short time he was sometimes sent to school, the opportunity it afforded to wrestle and snowball and run and jump and knock off old seedy wool hats, offered to him almost the only compensation for the confinements and restraints of school.

"With such a feeling and but little chance of going to school at all, he did not become much of a scholar. He would always choose to stay at home and work hard rather than be sent to school." Consequently, "he learned nothing of grammar, nor did he get at school so much knowledge of common arithmetic as the four ground rules."

Almost his only reading at the age of ten was a little history to which the open bookcase of an old