My nearest boy friend,
Gratz Van Rensselaer, gave me his knife. How close were our relations
may be understood from the fact that we had a private signal, a peculiar
whistle of our own which we used to call each other, as boys are wont to
do when on terms of exclusive intimacy. To quote Mr. Peggotty, "A man
can't say fairer nor that, now, can he?"
When Gratz went down into his pockets and handed me that knife in solemn
silence, I fully realized that he was making a sacrifice on the altar of
friendship. Any critic of this writing will be justified in objecting
that I did not probably formulate the idea in just these terms, but this
is about the size of it, all the same.
Whether my schoolmate ever afterward used our call, I do not know, as
our parting was a finality, but for my part, I took it with me to Brook
Farm where my new mates adopted it forthwith. Later, the elders took it
up, and eventually it became widely known over the face of the earth as
"the Brook Farm call." It went to California with a young married couple
in the early fifties; to China with one of our boys who became the
Captain of a Pacific steamer; to Spain and to Russia with another in the
United States diplomatic service; to Italy with two girls whose father
was an artist; to the Philippines with students returning to their home
in Manila, and to all quarters where Brook Farmers found their way, as
they seem always to have remembered it.
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