Bidwell’s Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison

Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison

Austin Biron Bidwell

Fifteen Years in Solitude

CHAPTER I.

We lived in South Brooklyn, near to old No. 13, the Degraw Street Public School. To that I was sent, and there got all the education I was ever fated to have at any school, except the school of life and experience.

I attended for some years, and even now I cannot recall without a smile the absurd incompetency of every one connected with the institution and their utter ignorance of the art of imparting knowledge to children.

At home I had picked up that grand art of reading, and went to school to learn the other two R's, with any trifle that I might come across floating around promiscuously.

I certainly hope our much-lauded public schools are conducted on better lines now than then; if not, they are frauds from the foundation. The instruction in No. 13 was so lax and radically bad that the whole governing body and the principal ought to have been sent to the penitentiary on the charge of false pretense for drawing their salaries and giving nothing in return. And yet I remember when examination day came, instead of the committee investigating the progress of the pupils, it usually turned into a mere hallelujah chorus upon our "grand public school system."

Here is a remarkable fact: I seldom missed a promotion and passed from grade to grade until within two years I found myself in Junior "A," the next to the highest class in the school, just as ignorant as my classmates, and that is saying much.

It was all very pitiful. My blood boils even now when I think of the traitors chosen and paid to see me fully equipped and armed to begin the battle of life who left me with phantom weapons which would shiver into fragments at the first shock of conflict.

I left Junior A of old No. 13, with its algebra, logic, philosophy (heaven save the word!) and advanced grammar, unable to write a grammatical sentence. I had been taught spelling out of an expositor--a sort of pocket dictionary containing about fifteen hundred words. Most of these, with their definitions, parrotlike, I had learned to spell, but never once in all my school experience had I been taught the derivation of a single word. Indeed, I took it for granted that in the good old days Adam had invented the words much as he named the animals, and, of course, supposed that he spoke good English. The knowledge of history I gained at No. 13 was strictly limited and exceedingly primitive. I knew the Jews in the old days were a bad lot. That Brutus had slain Caesar. That the Mayflower had landed our fathers on Plymouth Rock. That wicked George III. was a tyrant, and that the boys in Boston had thrown a tea-kettle at his head. I knew all about our George and the cherry tree, and there my historical knowledge ended.

So here I was launched out in the world a model scholar! Stamped as proficient in grammar, history, logic, philosophy and arithmetic, but yet in useful knowledge a barbarian, unable to spell or even write a grammatical letter and unversed in the ways of the world--a world, too, where I would be cast entirely upon my own resources.

My home life was happy. My father had lost his grip on the world, but his faith in the Unseen remained. My mother, caring little for this life, lived in and for the spiritual. To her heaven was a place as much as the country village where she was born. She was never tired of talking to us children about its golden streets and the rest there after the toils and pains of life. But, boylike, we discounted all she said, and felt we wanted some of this world before we knocked at the gates of the next.

We loved our mother, but her soul was too gentle to keep in restraint hot, fiery youths like my brothers and myself. On the whole we were good boys, and I suppose caused her no more pain than the average youngsters. Perhaps the keynote of her character can best be found in the following incident, if that which was of daily occurrence could be called an incident: