Poems of Childhood/Our Whippings
OUR WHIPPINGS
COME, Harvey, let us sit a while and talk about the times
Before you went to selling clothes and I to peddling rimes—
The days when we were little boys, as naughty little boys
As ever worried home-folks with their everlasting noise!
Egad! and, were we so disposed, I'll venture we could show
The scars of wallopings we got some forty years ago;
What wallopings I mean I think I need not specify—
Mother's whippings didn't hurt, but father's! oh, my!
The way that we played hookey those many years ago—
We'd rather give 'most anything than have our children know!
The thousand naughty things we did, the thousand fibs we told—
Why, thinking of them makes my Presbyterian blood run cold!
How often Deacon Sabine Morse remarked if we were his
He'd tan our "pesky little hides until the blisters riz"!
It's many a hearty thrashing to that Deacon Morse we owe—
Mother's whippings didn't count—father's did, though!
We used to sneak off swimmin' in those careless, boyish days,
And come back home of evenings with our necks and backs ablaze;
How mother used to wonder why our clothes were full of sand,
But father, having been a boy, appeared to understand.
And, after tea, he 'd beckon us to join him in the shed
Where he'd proceed to tinge our backs a deeper, darker red;
Say what we will of mother's, there is none will controvert
The proposition that our father's lickings always hurt!
For mother was by nature so forgiving and so mild
That she inclined to spare the rod although she spoiled the child;
And when at last in self-defence she had to whip us, she
Appeared to feel those whippings a great deal more than we!
But how we bellowed and took on, as if we'd like to die—
Poor mother really thought she hurt, and that's what made her cry!
Then how we youngsters snickered as out the door we slid,
For mother's whippings never hurt, though father's always did.
In after years poor father simmered down to five feet four,
But in our youth he seemed to us in height eight feet or more!
Oh, how we shivered when he quoth in cold, suggestive tone:
"I'll see you in the woodshed after supper all alone!"
Oh, how the legs and arms and dust and trouser buttons flew—
What florid vocalisms marked that vesper interview!
Yes, after all this lapse of years, I feelingly assert,
With all respect to mother, it was father's whippings hurt!
The little boy experiencing that tingling 'neath his vest
Is often loath to realize that all is for the best;
Yet, when the boy gets older, he pictures with delight
The bufferings of childhood—as we do here to-night.
The years, the gracious years, have smoothed and beautified the ways
That to our little feet seemed all too rugged in the days
Before you went to selling clothes and I to peddling rimes—
So, Harvey, let us sit a while and think upon those times.