About this time, too, he was kicked by a horse. A lady had come to call on his mother, and had tied her horse to a tree near the door. There were fresh chips scattered about, and William and his elder brother amused themselves by throwing them at the horse’s heels to make him caper. William got too near and at last the horse kicked him over. He soon recovered, and went to school with a bandaged head, but a scar from the wound on his head he carried to the day of his death. When he was five years old, the family went to live on Grandfather Snell’s old homestead, where Dr. Peter Bryant remained as long as he lived. Years afterward, when the poet became rich, he bought this place for a country home. He began now to go regularly to the district school, where he learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, a little grammar and geography, and the Westminster Catechism. He was a fine speller, seldom missing a word, and he got on well in geography. The catechism, however, did not interest him and he could not understand it. Those were very strict Puritanic days. Says Bryant, in his autobiography: “One of the means of keeping boys in order was a little bundle of birchen rods, bound together with a small cord, and generally suspended on a nail against the kitchen wall. This was esteemed as much a part of the necessary furniture as the crane that hung in the kitchen fireplace, or the shovel and tongs.” And he tells us that sometimes the boy was sent out to cut the twigs with which he himself was to be whipped. Not only was whipping thought to be good for boys, but even grown-up people were whipped in public for petty crimes. About a mile from the Bryant home was a public whipping-post. Says the poet: “I remember seeing a young fellow, of about eighteen years of age, upon whose back, by direction of a justice of the peace, forty lashes had just been laid, as the punishment for a theft which he had committed. His eyes were red, like those of one who had been crying, and I well remember the feeling of curiosity, mingled with pity and fear, with which I gazed on him.” This was the last time the whipping-post was used in that neighborhood, but it stood there for several years longer. CHAPTER III WHAT THE BOYS DID WHEN BRYANT WAS YOUNG Life in the time of Bryant’s boyhood was rather hard and rough. New England country life was never easy. The chairs were very straight-backed, the beds were hard, and the food was not very delicate, though there was always plenty of it—plenty of pork and beans, if nothing else. For all that, the boys in Bryant’s day had a very good time, which he tells about in the account of his early life to which we have already referred.