You first fell in love when you were ten years of age; when I say “love,” I mean a blinding, dizzying agony of worship, self-consciousness, fear and infatuation, the like of which there are no words to tell. You were ten, a little spindle-shanked monster with projecting ears and mouse colored hair; you were addicted to marble when the sidewalks began to grow muddy in March; you made tracks, in winter, and slid down them, or delighted in “tiddledy-benders;” you played “scrub” on the old tennis-courts in summer; you pined for miscellaneous deviltry at all seasons. On Saturday you liked to storm Morrison’s barn, or defend it, Ivanhoe-fashion; evenings it was prisoner’s base or hide-an’-seek in Rogers’ yard. Occasionally you varied all this by fighting after school, at the end of Ashford Street, where the houses thinned out and a little sickly brook ran through a raw field. Then you and Eddie Parker or Tommy Nelligan or some other young “champeens” got together with a swarm of backers and hammered away at random till real blood flowed. You also got licked at home for fighting, licked with a black walnut ruler inlaid with stars made out of the original Charter Oak. Why history writers put that odious old tree into books you never could understand; but then, it was only one more piece of grown-up idiocy. The ruler stung shockingly and you danced and hollered. Your hands got as red as fire.
“I won’t, I won’t! Won’t never, never fight again (whack!) Ow! Ow-w-w-w! O-o-o-o-o! Aw, quit, why doncher when I say I won’t never, never (whack!!) Oo-o-o-oo!—”
“Now the other hand!”
It was just barbaric. You figured out all sorts of things you were going to do to get even, when you grew big—and first of all you were going to make ’way with that ruler. Oh, my, it was simply astonishing the things you were going to do to it! Somehow, it is in the family still, stars and all; it lies on your desk this minute. Piece of the real Charter Oak—no, you can’t afford to splinter those with dull hatchets, as you used to plan. Besides, it’s sometimes useful in little sessions you hold with your eldest son. Besides, again, you're rather grateful to it, now, because it kept you from fighting, once on a time, and thereby preserved your nose. Kept you from fighting, that is, until Bulb Cook dared you knock a teeny, weeny little chip off his shoulder, or Ally Arnold gave you what was technically known as a “coward-blow.” At such crises, somehow, the ruler was always forgotten; you rushed on fate again at the end of Ashford Street, and so on, da capo. For you were nothing but a little boy, a young American, one of million, and so you remained until she came.
She—she was nine and her name was Blanche Heath; she had two blonde pigtails and wore a calico dress all figured over with little sprigs of violets; her father ran a drug store in the village. Such, at least, are the salient facts as you perceive them down the rather dim corridors of time. What she seemed to you in those far days you really cannot tell, since any analysis or critical observation would then have keen sheer sacrilege. Memory furnishes items of pinkish cheeks, bluish eyes with slightly reddened lids, waxen locks and brilliant clothing with an occasional flutter of machine-made lace at the knee, stubby boots, and coarse brown stocking you feel it is but just and right she should have dazzled you. When she pegged stodgily into the school-room—and you always went early so that you might watch her enter—the whole world seemed to tremble and then stand still; you wondered that no one else noticed any unusual convulsion of nature. In study hours, even though she sat behind you, you seemed to have gimlet holes bored in the back of your head to peek at her out of. You were as good a pie, a regular little-Willie, till some of the boys began to call you “Teacher’s pet.” Had it not been for her you most certainly would have fought, for only blood can wipe away that epithet. You let it pass, however, for her sake; you stopped your whispering in school and your rude jests at recess; you sat at “attention,” even when teacher’s back was turned.