111 mil 11*1 wmwi Mil W'^fmm LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, | J^iiiHtap I°re"sw |a.'Uf ^ I Mmi^ jyic// iii7 ! UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. | iSi Iq<%'^<^ <%>'?fe,<%.^'? ■■I ppm s M ^^^5 K S SSHaMlKiS ^:'^B.$^jjg->- IMw^^aMW^ ^j^m!^''^?^'?^ ^J_l3 ^kIi^^ (Hi ^K ^"^^Hm ^H^^^j -^^^^ T^tnUv^'is :^^?^ ^H^ m-^' m-- >•) md >4 FIFTEENTH EDITION. YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS. By JAMES THOMAS FIELDS. 1 vol. I2m0. $ 2.00. CONTEXTS : INTRODUCTORY. — THACKERAY. — HAWTHORNE. — DICK- ENS. —WORDSWORTH. —MISS MiTFORD. — Barry Cornwall. " Mr. Fields has certainly met with signal success in the composition of an entertaining volume. It offers a rare charm to the lovers of literary anecdote, a class virhich probably includes the whole of its readers, — and in many consid- erable portions possesses an interest no less enticing than the naive recitals of Boswellor the pleasant recollections of Crabb Robinson." — AVa/ York Tribune. " The world owes Mr. Fields many thanks for his ' Yesterdays with Authors,' — a volume full of reminiscences, anecdotes, and letters of some of the writers whom Mr. Fields has known. Thackeray, Hawthorne, Dickens, and Miss Mit- ford are the chief personages described, and what is said of them all is fresh and interesting- The paper on Wordsworth gives some of his traits as distinctly as any description we have ever seen, and the whole book is good." — Sfring- Jield Republican. - "This work is far better than Crabb Robinson's delightful book, the fault of which was that, being chiefly a Diary, it only gave glimpses of eminent people ; whereas Mr. Fields gives portraits, not elaborated, but spirited, graceful, and undeniably accurate. Much of what he tells us is the result of personal knowl- edge and observation, and for the rest he has allowed the subjects of his remi- niscences to speak for themselves in their many letters. This is particularly the case with Dickens, from whom there is a double set of epistles, one to Mr. Fields and the other to the late Professor Felton, —and in that of Miss Mitford, whose correspondence is equal in spirit and easy grace to that of Lady Mary Montagu or Madame de S€\igni." — Phiiacielphia Press. " The volume is full of interest to the lovers of those great authors. — Nev) York IVorld. JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Publishers, Boston. UNDERBRUSH By JAMES T. FIELDS. ". . . . plucked out of hedges, pitched in the ground confusedly." Shakespeare. ^igmaiigi^Xi No ^. V or co^^ *'o»'/v.5H».>0'l^^ BOSTON JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 1S77. \x Copyright, 1877- By JAMES T. FIELDS. Universitv Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co, Cambridge. lim^^T^,! TO A. F. IS77. r iliH^^li^lil CONTENTS, My Friend's Library A Peculiar Case .... Familiar Letter to House-Breakers Our Village Dogmatist A Watch that "Wanted Cleaning" Bothersome People .... Pleasant Ghosts .... The Pettibone Lineage Getting Home again How TO Rough it ... . An Old-Time Scholar . Diamonds and Pearls The Author of "Paul and Virginia If I were a Boy again PAGE 3 65 83 95 111 119 139 147 161 179 197 209 251 277 <^^cr<5*<5^<$jBc9'c>5>'^^^ MY PEIEITD'S LIBEAET. eJ^l^lS^ gs ^^^[! ^^S^S ^sss^l 1^^-^ ^ & s ^ ^H ^ ^^^ ^ ^^ ^ MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. THINK it was Jean Paul who said he always looked on a library as a learned conversation. But there are libraries and libraries. H. L. told me he once found a foolish, pedan- tic old millionnaire curled up in a luxurious apartment, walled with richly bound books, not one of which he had ever read, but all of which he pretended to have devoured. L. says that when he entered this room, bestudded with glittering tomes, the proprietor exclaimed : " And so you have found me out at last, alone with my books ! Here 's where I hide away from the family, day after day, and nobody's none the 8 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. plan Zeus by Phidias, and D. has the same opin- ion of those unhappy mortals who are translated before they have handled his sumptuous Hor- ace in Hayday's magnificent morocco. The biographer of Dickens (John Forster) had assembled a library worthy of himself, which is not unmeaning eulogy. It was full of what Lamb calls "Great Nature's Stereotypes," the " eterne " copies that never can grow stale or unproductive, and to have spent a day in it with the host for indicator, and Dickens for co-enthusiast, is a memory forever. Manuscripts of Goldsmith, Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Addison, Burke, Fielding, and Smollet, together with the original draughts of " David Copperfield," " Oliver Twist," and a dozen other books from the same glowing hand and brain, were not to be handled without a thrill ! I once had the privilege of walking about in Wordsworth's library, and being shown by the poet himself many of the jewels it contained. I recall what I saw and heard there with a kind of transport even now, although it is more than MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 9 twenty-five years since I stood beside the vener- able author of "The Excursion" while he jjointed out in the margins of his books what Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey had noted there. Lord Houghton's library also is one of the most attractive in England, especially in poetry and autographs. Alexander Dyce, the editor of "Beaumont and Fletcher," had marvels to show me in his fine old book-rooms in Gray's Inn, thirty years ago. But perhaps the most inter- esting to me of all tire private libraries I have ever seen in England was the small collection of Charles and Mary Lamb, which Edward Moxon the publisher unlocked for me when I was first in England, before the books were dispersed, as they never ought to have been. Then and there I lovingly handled his Kit Mar- lowe, his Drummond of Hawthornden, his Dray- ton, his Cowley, and his Burton ! I remember how Moxon's whole family stood around that *' Life of the Duke of Newcastle by his Duchess," and told stories of Lamb's enthusiasm over the book, a volume about which he has written, " No 10 MY FR J END'S LIBRAE T. casket is rich enough, no ctising sufficiently dura- ble, to honor and keep safe such a jewel." One of the selectest household libraries in America has lately been left desolate. Our new Minister to Spain leaves behind him a family of "literary magnificos" at Elmwood not easily to be surpassed anywhere ; and altho\igh we are all proud of the call his country sends him to aid and honor her in the land of Cervantes, wo lament the necessary absence which now renders it impossible for our bd'oved professor to give, as his wonted address, "Among my Books." I scarcely know a greater pleasure than to be allowed for a whole day to spend the hours unmo- lested in my friend A.'s library. So much jn-iv- ilege abounds there, I call it Urhanxty Hall. It is a plain, modestly appointed apartment, overlook- ing a broad sheet of water ; and I can see, from where I like to sit and read, the sail-boats go tilt- ing ])y, and glancing across the bay. Sometimes, when a rainy day sets in, I run down to my friend's house, and ask leave to browse about the librujy, — not so mucli for the sake of reading, a.s MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. H for the intense enjoyment I have in turning over the books that have a personal history attached. Many of them once belonged to authors whose libraries have been dispersed. My friend has enriched her editions with autographic notes of those fine spirits who wrote the books which illu- mine her shelves, so that one is constantly coming upon some fresh treasure in the way of a literary curiosity. I am apt to discover something new every time I take down a folio or a miniature volume. As I ramble on from slielf to shelf, " Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures," and the hours often slip by into the afternoon, and glide noiselessly into twilight, before dinner- time is remembered. Drifting about only a few days ago, I came by accident upon a magic quarto, shabby enough iu its exterior, with one of the covers hanging by the eyelids, and otherwise sadly battered, to the great disfigurement of its external aspect. I did not remember even to have seen it in the library before (it turned out to be a new-comer), and was about to pass it by with an unkind thought as to 12 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. its pauper condition, when it occiuTed to mc, .-is the lettering was obHterated from the back, I might as well open to the title-page and learn the name at least of the tattered stranger. And I was amply rewarded for the attention. It turned out to be " The Novels and Tales of the Renowned John Boccaccio, The first Refiner of Italian Prose : containing A Hundred Curious Novels, by Seven Honorable Ladies and Three Noble Gentlemen, Framed in Ten Days." It was printed in London in 1684, "for Awnsham Churchill, at the Black Swan at Amen Corner." But what makes this old yellow-leaved book a treasure-volume for all time is the inscription on the first fly-leaf, in the hand- WTiting of a man of genius, who, many years ago, wrote thus on the blank page : — " To Marianne Hunt. " Her Boccaccio {alter et idem) come back to her after many years' absence, for her good-nature in giving it away in a foreign country to a traveller whose want of books was still worse than her own. " From her att'ectionate husband, Leiuh Hunt. "August 23, 1839 — Chklska, Enulano." MY FRIENDS LFBRARY. 13 This record tells a most interesting story, and reveals to us an episode in the life of the poet, well worth the knowing. I hope no accident will ever cancel this old leather-bound veteran from the world's bibliographic treasures. Spare it, Fire, Water, and Worms ! for it does the heart good to handle such a quarto. One does not need to look far among the shelves in my friend's library to find companion-gems of this antiquated tome. Among so many of "The assembled souls of all that men held wise," there is no solitude of the mind. I reach out my hand at random, and, lo ! the first edition of Milton's " Paradise Lost " ! It is a little brown volume, "Printed by S. Simmons, and to be sold by S. Thomson at the Bishop's-Head iu Duck Lane, by H. Mortlack at the White Hart in Westminster Hall, M. Walker under St. Dun- stan's Church in Fleet Street, and R. Boulten at the Turk's Head in Bishopsgate Street, 1G68." Foolish old Simmons deemed it necessary to insert over his own name the following notice, which heads the Argument to the Poem : — ■ 14 31 Y FRIEND'S LIBRARY. "The Printer to the Eeader. "Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured it, and withall a reason of that which stumLled many others, why the Poem Rimes not." The " Argument," which Milton omitted in sub- sequent editions, is very curious throughout ; and the reason which the author gives, at the request of Mr. Publisher Simmons, why the poem "Rimes not," is quaint and well worth transcribing an extract here, as it does not always appear in more modern editions. Mr. Simmons's Poet is made to say, — "The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homers in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Or- nament of Poem or good Verse, in longer AVorks espe- cially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but nuich to thir own vexation, hindrance, luid constraint to express iuany things otherwise, and MY FRIENirS LIBRARY. 15 for the most part worse then else they would have ex- prest thein." We give the orthography precisely as Milton gave it in this his first edition. There is a Table of Errata prefixed to this old copy, in which the reader is told, *'for hundreds read hnmlerds. "for we read wee.'" Master Simmons's proof-reader was no adept in his art, if one may judge from the countless errors which he allowed to creep into this immortal poem when it first appeared in print. One can imagine the identical copy now before us being handed over the coiniter in Duck Lane to some eager scholar on the lookout for a new sensation, and handed back again to Mr. Thomson as too dull a looking poem for his perusal. Mr. Edmund Waller entertained that idea of it, at any rate. One of the sturdiest little books in my friend's library is a thick-set, stumpy old copy of Richard Baxter's " Holy Commonwealth," written in 1659, and, as the title-page informs us, " at the invita- 16 MY FRIEND'S LTBRARY. tion of James Harrington Esquire," — as one would take a glass of Canar}-, — by invitation ! There is a preface addressed " To all those in the Army or elsewhere, that have caused our many and great Eclipses since 1G4G." The worms have made dagger-holes through and through the " in- spired leaves " of this fat little volume, till much strong thinking is now very perforated printing. On the fly-leaf is written, in a rough, straggling hand, " William Wordsworth, " Rydal Mount." The poet seems to have read the old hook pretty closely, for there are evident marks of his liking throughout its pages. Connected with the Bard of the Lakes is an- other work in my friend's librar}^ which I always handle with a tender interest. It is a copy of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, printed in 1815, with all the alterations afterwards made in the pieces copied in by the poet from tlie edition pub- lished in 1827. Some of the changes are marked MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 17 improvements, and nearly all make the meaning clearer. Now and then a prosaic phrase gives place to a more poetical expression. The well- known lines, *' Of Him who Avalked in glory and in joy, Following his plough along the mountain-side," read at first, "Behind his plough upo7i the mountain-side." In a well-preserved quarto copy of " Rasselas," •with illustrations by Smirke, which my friend picked up in London a few years ago, I found the other day an unpublished autograph letter from Dr. Johnson, so characteristic of the great man that it is worth transcribing. It is addressed " To the Reverend Mr. Compton. " To be sent to Mrs. Williams." And it is thus worded : — " Sir, — Your business, I suppose, is in a way of as easy progress as such business ever has. It is seldom that event keeps pace with expectation. " The scheme of your book I cannot say that I fully comprehend. I would not have you ask less than an hundred guineas, for it seems a large octavo. 18 ^ry friend- s library. " Go to M'. Davis, in Russell Street, show him this letter, and .show hiiii the book if he desires to see it. He will tell you what hopes you may form, and to what Bookseller you should apply. " If you succeed in selling your book, you raa}^ do better than by dedicating it to me. You may perhaps obtain permission to dedicate it to the Bishop of Lon- don, or to D^ Vyse, and make way by your book to more advantage than I can procure you. " Please to tell Mrs. Williams that I grow better, and that I wish to know how she goes on. You, Sir, may write for her to, " Sir, " Your most humble Servant, " Sam : Johnson. "Oclo 24, 1782." Dear kind-hearted old bear ! On turning to BoswcU's Life of his Ursine Majesty, we learn who Mr. Compton was. When the Doctor visited France in 1775, the Benedictine Monks in Paris entertained him in the most friendly way. One of them, the Rev. James Compton, wlio had left. England at the early age of six to reside on tlie Continent, questioned liini pretty closely about MY FR/EyD'S LIBRARY. 19 tlie Protestant faith, and proposed, if at some fu- ture time ho should go to England to consider the subject more deeply, to call at Bolt Court. In the summer of 1782 he paid the Doctor a visit, and informed him of his desire to be admitted into the Church of England. Johnson managed the matter satisfixctorily for him, and he was re- ceived into communion in St. James's Parish Church. Till the end of January, 1783, he lived entirely at the Doctor's expense, his own means being very scanty. Through Johnson's kindness lie was nominated Chaplain at the French Chapel of St. James's, and in 1802 we hear of him as being quite in favor with the excellent Bishop Porteus and several other distinguished London- ers. Thus, by the friendly hand of the hard- working, earnest old lexicographer, Mr. Compton was led from deep poverty up to a secure compe- tency, and a place among the influential digni- taries of London society. Poor enough himself, Johnson never fell back, when there was an honest person in distress to be helped on in the battle of life. God's blessing on his memory for all his sympathy with struggling humanity ! 20 MV FRIEND'S LIBRARY. My friend has an ardent affection for Walter Scott and Charles Lamb. I find the first edition of '' Marmion," i)rinted in 1808, "by J. Ballan- tyne & Co. for Archibald Constable and Company, Edinburgh," most carefully bound in savory Rus- sia, standing in a pleasant corner of the room. Being in quarto, the type is regal. Of course the copy is enriched with a letter in the handwriting of Sir Walter. It is addressed to a personal friend, and is dated April 17, 1825. The closing passage in it is of especial interest. " I have seen Sheridan's last letter imploring Rogers to come to his assistance. It stated that he was dying, and concluded abruptly Avith these words 'they are throwing the things out of window.' The memorialist certainly took pennyworths out of his friend's charac- ter. — I sat three hours for my picture to Sir Thomas Lawrence during which the w^hole conversation was filled up by Rogers wdth stories of Sheridan, for the least of which if true he deserved the gallows. " Ever Yours, " Walter Scott." In the Ai)ril of 1802 Scott was living in a pretty MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 21 cottage at Lasswade ; and while there he sent otf the following- letter, which I find attached with a wafer to my friend'a copy of the Abbotsford edi- tion of his works, and written in a mnch plainer hand than he afterwards fell into. The address is torn off. " Sir, — I esteem myself honored by the polite re- ception which you have given to the Border Min- strelsy and am particularly flattered that so very good a judge of poetical Antiquities finds any reason to be pleased with the work. — There is no portrait of the Flower of Yarrow in existence, nor do I think it very probable that any was ever taken. Much family anec- dote concerning her has been preserved among her descendants of whom I have the honor to be one. The epithet of ' Flower of Yarrow ' was in later times bestowed upon one of her immediate posterity, Miss Mary Lillias Scott, daughter of John Scott Es(p of Harden, and celebrated for her beauty in the pastoral song of Tweedside, — I mean that set of modern words which begins ' What beauty does Flora disclose.' This lady I myself remember very well, and I men- tion her to you lest you should receive any inaccurate information owing to her being called like her prede- 22 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. cesser the 'Flower of Yarrow.' There was a portrait of this latter lady in the collection at Hamilton which the present Duke transferred through my hands to Lady Diana Scott relict of the late Walter Scott Esq. of Harden, which picture was vulgarly but inaccurately supposed to have been a resemblance of the original Mary Scott, daughter of Philip Scott of Dryhope, and married to Auld Wat of Harden in the middle of the 16"' century. " I shall be particularly happy if upon any future occasion I can in the slightest degree contribute to advance your valuable and patriotic labours, and I re- main, Sir, " Your very faithful " and ob*. Servant "Walter Scott." Old Bernard Lintott, at the Cross-Keys in Fleet Street, brought out in 1714 "The Rape of the Lock, an Heroi-Comical Poem, in Five Cantos, written by M^ Pope." He printed certain words in the title-page in red, and other certain words in black ink. His own name and Mr. Pope's he chose to exhibit in sanguinary tint. A copy of this edition, very much thumbed and wanting half a dozen leaves, fell into the possession of Charles MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 23 L'cunb more than a hundred years after it was pub- lished. Charles bore it home, and set to work at once to supply, in his small neat hand, from another edition, what was missing from the text in his stall-bought copy. As he paid only sixpence for his prize, he could well aftbrd the time it took him to write in on blank leaves, which he inserted, the lines from "Tims far both armies to BeliiiJa yiekl," onward to the couplet, " And tlirice they twitch'd the Diamond in her Ear, Thrice slie look'd back, and thrice the Foe drew near." Besides this autographic addition, enhancing forever the value of this old copy of Pope's im- mortal poem, I find the following little note, in Lamb's clerkly chirography, addressed to " M'. Wainright, on Thursday. " Dear Sir, — The Wits (as Clare calls us) assemble at my cell (20 Russell Street, Cov. Gar.) this evening at \ before 7. Cold meat at 9. Puns at a little after. M^ Cary wants to see you, to scold you. I hope you will not fail. " Yours &c. &c. &c. " C. Lamb." 24 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. There are two books in my friend's library which once belonged to the author of the " Elegy in a Country Churchyard." One of them is " A Voyage to and from tlie Island of Borneo, in the East Indies : printed for T. Warner at the Black Boy, and F. Batley at the Dove, in 1718." It has the name of T. Gray, written by himself, in the middle of the title-page, as was his custom always. Before Gray owned this book, it belonged to Mr. Antrobus, his uncle, who wrote many origi- nal notes in it. The volume has also this manu- script memorandum on one of the fly-leaves, signed by a well-known naturalist not long ago living in England : — "August 28, 1851. " This book has Gray's autograph on the title-page, written in his usual neat hand. It has twice been my fate to witness the sale of Gray's most interesting collection of manuscripts and hooks, and at the last sale I purchased tliis volume. I present it to as a little token of affectionate regard by her old friend, now in his So"" year. "Edwd. Jesse." AVho will not be willing to admit the great MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 25 good-luck of my friend in having such a donor for an acquaintance ? But one of the chief treasures in the library of which I write is Gray's copy of Milton's " Po- ems upon several occasions. Both English and Latin. Printed at the Blew Anchor next Mitre Court over against Fetter Lane in Fleet Street." When a boy at school, Gray owned and read this charming old volume, and he has printed his name, school-boy fashion, all over the title-page. Wherever there is a vacant space big enough to hold Thomas Gray, there it stands in faded ink, still fading as time rolls on. The Latin poems seem to have been most carefully conned by the youthful Etonian, and we know how much he esteemed them in after-life. Scholarly Robert Southey once owned a book that now towers aloft in my friend's library. It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious. Southey lent it, when he possessed the magmjico^ to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with 26 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. his fine poncillings. As Ben onee handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a brick- layer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gos- sip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged. My friend would hardly thank me, if I filled ten of these pages with extracts from the rambhng dissertations in S. T. C.'s hand- writing which I find in her rai-e folio, but I could easily pick out that amount of readable matter from the inargins. One manuscript anecdote, however, I must transcribe from the last leaf. I think Coleridge got the story from " The Seer." " An Irish laliorer laid a wager with another hod- heai'er that the latter could not carry him up the lad- der to the top of a house in his hod, without letting him fall. The bet is accepted, and iip they go. There is peril at every step. At the top of the ladder there is life and the loss of the wager, — death and success below ! The highest point is reached in safety ; the wagerer looks humbled and disappointed. 'Well,' said he, 'you have won ; there is no doubt of that; worse luck to you another time ; but at the third story I HAD HOPES.' " In a quaint old edition of " The Spectator," J/F FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 27 which seems to have been through many sieges, and must have come to grief very early in its existence, if one may judge anything from the various names which are scrawled upon it in different years, reaching back almost to the date pf its publication, I find this note in the hand- writing of Addison, sticking fast on the reverse side of his portrait. It is addressed to Ambrose Philips, and there is no doubt that he w^ent where he was bidden, and found the illustrious author quite ready to receive him at a well-furnished table. "Taesflay Night. "Sir, — If you are at leisure for an hour, your company will be a great obligation to "Y^ most humble sev*. "J. Addison. "Fountain Tavern." That night at the " Fountain," perchance, they discussed that war of words which might then have been raging between the author of the " Pas- torals" and Mr. Pope, dampening their clay, at the same time, with a compound to which they were both notoriously inclined. 28 31 Y FRIEND'S LIBRARY. My friend rides hard her hobby for choice edi- tions, and she hunts with a will whenever a good old copy of a well-beloved author is np for pur- suit. She is not a fop in binding, but she must have apjn-ojwiate dresses for her favorites. She knows what ''Adds a precious seeing to the eye" as well as Hayday himself, and never lets her folios shiver when they ought to be warm.' More- over, she reach her books, and, like the scholar in Chaucer, would rather have ** At her beddes head A twentj' bokes, clothed in black and red, Of Aristotle and his i)hilosophy, Than robes rich, or fiddle, or psaltrie." I found her not long ago deep in a volume of " Mr. Welstcd's Poems " ; and as that author is not particularly lively or inviting to a modem reader, I begged to know why he was thus hon- ored. " I was trying," said she, " to learn, if possible, why Dicky Steele should have made his daughter a birthday gift of these poems. This MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 29 cojjy I found on a stall in Fleet Street many years ago, and it has in Sir Richard's handwriting this inscription on one of the fly-leaves : — Elizabeth Steele Her Book Giv'n by Her Father Richard Steele. March 2Ct\ 1723. Running my eye over the pieces, I find a poem in praise of ' Apple-Pye,' and one of the passages in it is marked, as if to call the attention of young Eliza to something worthy her notice. These are the lines the young lady is charged to remember : — *Dear Nelly, learn with Care the Pastry- Art, And. mind the easy Precepts I impart : Draw out your Dough elaborately thin, And cease not to fatigue your Rolling-Pin : Of Eggs and Butter see you mix enough ; For then the Paste will swell into a Puif, Which will in crumpling Sounds your Praise report, And eat, as Housewives speak, exceeding short.' " Who was Abou Ben Ad hem 1 Was his exist- ence merely in the poet's brain, or did he walk 30 .MY FRIEND'S LlDRARr. this planet somewhere, — and when"? In a copy of the " Biblioth^que Orientale," which once be- longed to the author of that exquisite little gem of poesy beginning with a wish that Abou's tribe might increase, I find (the leaf is lovingly turned down and otherwise noted) the following account of the forever famous dreamer. "Adhem was the name of a Doctor celebrated for Mussulman traditions. He was the contemporary of Aamarsch, another relater of traditions of the first class. Adheni had a son noted for his doctrine and his piety. The Mussulmans place him among the number of their Saints who have done miracles. He was named Abou-Ishak-Ben- Adhem. It is said he was distinguished for his piety from his earliest youtli, and that he joined the Softs, or the Religious sect in Mecca, under the direction of Fodhail. He went from there to Damas, where he died in the year 106 of the Hegira. He undertook, it is said, to make a pilgrim- age from Mecca, and to pass through the desert alone and without provisions, making a thousand genuflex- ions for every mile of the way. It is added that he was twelve years in making this journey, during which he was often tempted and alarmed by Demons. The MY fri/:nd'S library. 31 Khalife Haroim Raschid, making the same pilgrimage, met him upon the way and in(iuired after his welfare ; the Sofi answered him with an Arabian quatrain, of which this is the meaning : — " ' We mend the rags of this worldly robe with the pieces of the robe of Religion, which we tear apart for this end ; " ' And we do our work so thoroughly that nothing remains of the latter, " ' And the garment we mend escapes out of our bands. " ' Happy is the servant who has chosen God for his master, and who employs his present good only to acquire those which he awaits/ "It is related also of Abou, that he saw^ in a dream an Angel who wrote, and that having de- manded what he was doing, the Angel answered, 'I write the names of those who love God sincerely, those who perform Malek-Ben-Dinar, Thabel-al-Be- nani, Aioud-al-Sakhtiani, etc' Then said he to the Angel, 'Am I not placed among these?' 'No,' re- plied the Angel. 'Ah, w^ell,' said he, 'write me, then, I pray you, for love of these, as the friend of all who love the Lord.' It is added, that the same Angel revealed to him soon after that he had received 32 MV FRIEND'S LIBRARY. an order from God to place liim at the head of all the rest. This is the same Abai ^vho said that he preferred Hell with the will of God to Paradise witli- oiit it ; or, as another writer relates it : ' I love Hell, if I am doing the will of God, better than the eiijoy- ments of Paradise and disobedience.'" With books printed by "B. Franklin, Phila- delphia," my friend's library is richly stored. One of them is " The Charter of Privileges, granted by AVilliam Penn Esq : to the Inhabi- tants of Pennsylvania and Territories." " Printed AND Sold by B. Franklin" looks odd enough on the dingy title-page of this old volume, and the contents are full of interest. Rough days were those when "Jehu Curtis" was "Speaker of the House," and put liis name to such docu- ments as this : — " And Be it Further Enacted by the authority afore- said, That if any Person shall wilfully or premedi- tately be guilty of Blasphemy, and shall thereof be legally convicted, the Person so offending shall, for every such Offence, be set in the Pillory for the space of Two Hours, and be branded on his or her MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 33 Foresheacl with the letter B, and be publickly whipt, on his or her bare Back, with Thirty nine Lashes ivell laid on." My friend is a collector of the various editions of Hawthorne's writings, not only in English but in various languages. Many of the works she has illustrated with choice engravings, pho- tographs, and autographs. One of the letters in Hawthorne's handwriting thus added seems to me very curious in its accurate foreshadow- ings. It was written forty-five years ago to Franklin Pierce, when both young men could not have been long out of College. Its pro- phetic intimations in the light of what has since occurred in Pierce's career sound weird and start- ling and the epistle is worth perusal. It is ad- dressed to Colonel Franklin Pierce, Hillsboro', New Hampshire. "Salem, June 28, 1832. " Dear Mr. Speaker, — I sincerely congratulate you on all your public honors, in possession or in prospect. If they continue to accumulate so rapidly, you will be at the summit of political eminence by 34 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. that time of life when men are usually just begin- ning to make a figiue. I suppose there is hardly a limit to your expectations at this moment ; and I really cannot see why there should be any. If I were in your place I should like to proceed by the following steps, — after a few years in Congress, to be chosen Governor, say at thirty years old, — next a Senator in Congress, — then minister to England, — then to be put at the head of one of the Departments (that of War would suit you, I should think), and lastly — but it will be time enough to think of the next step some years hence. You cannot imagine how proud I feel, when I recollect that I myself was once in office with you on the standing Com- mittee of the Athenean Society. That was my first and last appearance in public life. "I read the paper which you sent me from begin- ning to end, not forgetting Colonel Pierce's neat and appropriate address. I also perused 's speech in favor of grog-shops ; he seems to have taken quite a characteristic and consistent course in this respect, and I presume he gives the retail dealers as much of his personal patronage as ever. I was rather sur- prised at not finding more of my acquaintance in your Legislature. Your own name and 's were all that I recognized. 3fY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 35 " I was making preparations for a Northern tour when this accursed cholera broke out in Canada. It was my intention to go by way of New York and Albany to Niagara ; from thence to Montreal and Quebec, and home through Vermont and New Hamp- shire. I am very desirous of making this journey on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation, but which I cannot commence writing till I have visited Can- ada. I still hope that the pestilence will disappear, so that it may be safe to go in a month or two. If my route brings me into the vicinity of Hillsboro' I shall certainly visit you. As to the cholera, if it comes, I believe I shall face it here. By the by, I have been afflicted for two days past with one of the symptoms of it, which makes me write rather a trem- ulous hand. I keep it secret, however, for fear of being sent to the hospital. "I suppose your election to Congress is absolutely certain. Of course, however, there will be an oppo- sition, and I wish you would send me some of the newspapers containing articles either laudatory or abusive of you. I shall read them with great inter- est, be they what they may. It is a pity that I am not in a situation to exercise my pen -in your behalf. 30 AfY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. though you seem not to need the assistance of news- paper scribblers. "I do not feel very well, and will close my letter here, especially as your many associations would not permit you to read a longer one. I shall be happy to hear from you as often as you can find leisure and inclination to write, ^' I observe that the paper styles you the ' Hon. Franklin Pierce.' Have you alread}" an official claim to that title ? " Your friend, " Nath. Hawthorne, ^' alias, 'Hath.'" The first edition of the "Pickwick Papers" has now grown to be a rare volume, and is not readily picked up even in London. Dickens was not the owner of a copy, and long desired to possess one on account of the early impressions of the forty-three illustrations in it by Seymour and " Phiz." One day my friend A. was stroll- ing about London, and coming into the Hay- market observed a bookseller placing in his win- dow a handsomely bound volume in red morocco. She had got* b}-, but some good genius whis- AfV FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 37 pered to her, " Turn back, — that is a book yoii have long burned to become the owner of ! " " Go on ! " insinuated another kind of genius ; "you will be late to dinner if you loiter another moment ! " She turned back, notwithstanding, and bought the book : it was the first edition of "Pickwick"! Mark her good luck, reader! Taking the book to her hotel, she laid it on the table and went out again after dinner. Return- ing late in the evening she found Dickens had called upon her : the volume was lying open, and this inscription, in a well-known hand, en- riched her prize : — CHARLES DICKENS Wishes he had given this First Edition of riclcwick TO HIS FRIENDS, * * * ♦ In Witness that he did not. He, at Edward's Hotel, George Street, Hanover Square, London, Hereunto sets his hand. On Saturday, 24''' July, 1869. C. D. And this precious volume, thus enriched, is not the least among my friend's possessions. 38 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. My friend has a habit of placing on the fly- leaves of many of her books any interesting, out- of-the-way things she may happen to find with reference to their authors, — a custom that cannot be too warmly commended to all book-owners. Ho\^ welcome is such a record as this one, for in- stance ! Nearly fifty years ago there appeared a charming work written by a lieutenant hi our navy, named Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, enti- tled " A Year in Spain, by a Young American." On his way to Segovia, the youthful officer fell in with a stripling fresh from the State of Maine, imknown at that time, of course, but who has since become a power in literature, not only in his own countrj^, but all over the civilized world. This is the pleasant glimpse Mackenzie gives us of the Longfellow of half a century ago : — " Fortune, in a happy moment, provided a compan- ion for me in the person of a young countryman, Mho had come to Spain in search of instruction. He was just from college, full of the ardent feeling excited by classical pursuits, with health unbroken, hope that was a stranger to disappointment, curiosity which had 3fY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 39 never yet been fed to satiety. He had sunny locks, a fresh complexion, and a clear blue eye, — all indi- cations of a joyous temperament. We had l)een thrown almost alone together in a strange and unknown land. Our ages were not dissimilar, and, though our previous occupations had been so, we were nevertheless soon ac- ([uainted, first with each other, then with each other's views, and presently after we had agreed to be com- panions on the journey." On the same leaf with this extract I find in- serted these words by Cardinal Wiseman, spoken forty years after Mackenzie met young Long- fellow in Spain : — " Our hemisphere cannot claim the honor of having brought him forth, but he still belongs to us, for his works have become household words wherever the lan- guage is spoken. I am sure that all who hear my voice will join with me in the tribute I pay to the genius of Longfellow." And here is still another appended tribute in the same volume, copied from the Life and Letters of a distinguished lady in England : — " I have just received a long and welcome letter 40 MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. liom my Boston correspoiideiit, in answer to one I had written to him asking for some particiihxrs about Longfellow, whose beautiful poems are now so much read here I will copy some of my fiiend's exact words about the poet, as they are sure to interest you. 'I never knew a man of more endearing qualities. He has no little animosities ; no petty, vin- dictive feelings ; and if he can help any poor, envious creature who may have tried to wound his feelings by a malicious or ill-timed critirifm, he never limits his charity on that account. He says, " If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and sufi"ering enough to disarm all hostility." .... Every one near him loves him, and his neighbors rejoice in his fame and his prosper- ity. He always has a good word to put in for any unfortunate man or woman who happens to be up for conversational dissection ; and I have often noticed, when all the rest of the com])any have been busy pull- ing to "shreds and patches" some new and ridiculous rhymer, Longfellow has culled and got ready to quote, in the dull bard's favor, the only good line perhaps in the whole volume. I never saw a man so constantly on the lookout to aid and comfort, and never by any accident, even, to depress a fellow-mortal. If any one MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 41 of Ms friends is ill, he is the first person who remem- bers to send in cheering little messages, accompanied, perhaps, by some sick-ro(jm delicacy, not easily to be obtained elsewhere, for the patient. I have lived, as you know, a long time among authors, but I never knew one so absolutely free from all manner of vanities and vices as Longfellow He is the soul of good- nature and candor ; and his whole life has been spent not only in strengthening the foundations of truth and justice, but in lending a vigorous helping hand to all below him in station and ability. In short, he is one of the most lovable men in America, as well as the most distinguished poet.'" My friend's copy of " Warton's History of Eng^ lish Poetry" is in three volumes quarto, and it once belonged to no less a character than Mr. Horatio Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, who has packed it with notes in his own neat penman- ship. Some former owner has added to the first volume a long and curious autograph letter from Warton, and an equally interesting epistle in Wal- pole's handwriting. It is curious to follow the notes in this edition, and see how carefidly Wal- pole has studied Warton in this work. He seems 12 MY FRIEND'S LIBRAE Y. to have been specially Dioved by the earliest- Eng- lish love-song on record, written about the year 1200, and beginning, — "Blow Dortherne wynd," etc. Walpole has appended this note at the bottom of one of the pages in Vol. I. in ink as fresh as if it had been written to-day : — " A coachman of George 2% who had been harassed by driving the Maids of Honour, left his fortune to his son, but with a promise that he should never marry a Maid of Honour." Other remarks, both in pencil and ink, by Wal- pole, abound in the volumes, and many of them arc as keen as this one in the famous letters of the brilliant epigrammatist. He was, it seems, much diverted with the manoeuvres of a certain Mrs. Holman, "whose passion," he says, "is keep- ing an assembly, and inviting literally everybody in it. She goes to the drawing-room to watch for sneezes ; whips out a courtesy ; and then sends next morning to know how your cold does, and to desire your company next Thursday!" J/r FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 43 All over the margins of my friend's " Wurton " the lord of Strawberry Hill is constantly finding fault with the author, correcting his proper names and worrying his statements. Walpole knew, or pretended to know, everybody, not only of his own time, but of all time. His enemies used to say he bragged a good deal of acquaintances to whom he had never spoken a word. Apropos of this charge against H. W., we had many years ago in Paris an American pretender of this sort. When my fellow-traveller, S. G., arrived in the French capital twenty years ago, this all-knowing, forth-putting countryman of ours called upon him and said : " If there is any celebrity you care to meet among the French authors, I shall be happy to bring you together, as I am on intimate terms with all the w^riters." My friend was an admirer of Victor Hugo, and jumped at the offer, naming him as the man he most desired to see. " That shall be brought about shortly," replied the uni- versal intimate of everybody worth knowing in Paris. *' Victor Hugo and I are very old friends, and he will be glad to see you on my account," he 44 My FRIEND'S LIBRARY. continued. A week or so after tliis conversation, my friend was at one of Laniartine's Sunday recep- tions, and stood talking some time with a gentle- man to whom Madame Lamartiue had presented him. The kind-hearted American who had prom- ised an introduction to Hugo was also in the room, and, observing G. in conversation with a rather distinguished-looking person, came up when they had separated, and asked G. who that tall, hand- some individual might be. "0, that," said G., with freezing nonchalance^ — " that is your friend, Victor Hugo / '* Among the books which I take down with special delight is a rough old copy of " Diogenes Laertius " in Greek and Latin. It belonged to Shelley and Leigh Hunt, in partnership, and has their names written above the title-page in Hunt's best hand, thus, — " Percy Shelleij and Leigh Hunt." It seems to have been their joint property, and, loving each other as they did, they were content to own it together. It has luimerous notes in MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY. 45 both their handwritings. The Greek motto from Plato, which Shelley placed at the beginning of his exqnisite Elegy on the death of Keats, has always been greatly admired. The translation is, "You shone, whilst hving, a morning star; but, dead, you now shine Hesperus among the shades," and it was written by Plato on his friend Stella. Laertius preserved it among his own writings, and Shelley copied it from him. More than fifty years have elapsed since this precious old volume went wandering about the Continent with the two young English poets, and was thumbed by them on the decks of vessels, in the chambers of out-of-the-way inns, and under the olive-trees of Pisa and Genoa. Half a century has gone by, and lo ! the worn and battered book finds itself, after all its jour- neys, safely housed and cared for on the shelves of my friend's library in a street in Boston. There are few things in Charlotte Bronte's peculiar chirography more touching than this note of September the 29th, 1850, addressed to that excellent Mr. Williams, so many years faniil- 46 MY FR I END'S LIBRARY. iar to all ^vho were in the habit of visiting the old publishing house of Smith, Eldei*, and Company, in London. I find the original placed in my friend's copy of [[ Jane Eyre," with this caution written opposite : " Be cartful not to disturb this precious document^ " Dear Sir, — It is my intention to write a few lines of remark on ' Wuthering Heights,' which however I propose to place apart as a brief preface before the tale. I am likewise compelling myself to read it over, for the first time of opening the book since my sister's death. Its power fills me with renewed admiration ; but yet I am oppressed : the reader is scarcely ever perndtted a taste of unalloyed pleasure ; every beam of suushine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud ; every page is surcharged with a sort of moral electricity ; and the w^riter was unconscious of all this, — nothing could make her conscious of it " Yours sincerely, "C. Bronte." William Blake's Illustrated Volumes occupy honored places in my friend's library, for she has a irenuine reuard for the man, and a warm feeliuL^" 31 Y FRIENirS LIBRARY. 47 for his poems. His weird pictures attract and Iiold the attention, just as his poetical pieces grapple to the memory. In the copy of " Songs of Innocence and Experience " are many charming notes pencilled on the margins or on the fly-leaves, and this one I transcribe for its intrinsic beauty : " When Blake, wliose life had been one of poverty and privation, was in his old age and about to die, he one day put his hands on the head of a little girl, and said, ' May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me ! ' " My friend being an ardent admirer of Coleridge, has added to her beautiful copy of his works several autograph letters that have come into her hands from various sources. Everything " rich and strange " in that way seems always gravitating to her library. Here is a letter which I copy from the neat, small page, penned by Coleridge on a "Tuesday afternoon, on the 13th of February, 1827." It is addressed to " J. B. Williams, Esq«^. " Surgeon, &c. &c., " Aldersgate Street." and runs thus : — 48 MY par END'S library. "My Dear Williams, — I shall, God permitting, be in town and in your neighbourhood to-morrow, and shall at least make the attempt of doing, what I have some half score of times proposed to Mr. G. that we should do conjointly — that is, shake hands with you in your own ASKAHIIEION, Latinic Esculapium. Your home, I am well aware, is not at your own com- mand : and unluckily I am not acquainted with the Horology of your daily Routine, or the relations of the Wliens to the Wheres in your scheme of successive self-distribution. But I will call between One and Two ; and i±" I find that you will be in, at any mentionable time between that and half past two, I will return at the same time, and billet (I should have said label) my- self on you for a mutton chop and a potatoe — or what I should like better, a few sausages and a potatoe. — Were my duodenal digestion brisk enough for me to work after dinner, I should always dine from ^ past 1 to ^ past 2, for that is the only time of the 24 hours, in which I have any appetite for animal food. " Gillman has been very poorly, and complains much of his head : l)ut he is now much better, Mrs. Gill- man is at imr — something between so so, and j;reie^wZmr case," said his father (a squab little man, devoid of hair) ; "but don't be hash with him, and he '11 soon learn yer ways," — which he never did. His multifarious manocuvrings to avoid learning our ways astounded the household. He was for- ever "jest a-goin'" to do everything, but he accom- plished nothing. Shirking was a fine art with the rogue ; it w^as akin to meat and drink with him ; a kind of constant nutriment conducive to special gratification. And so he always postponed em- ployment to a more convenient season, which season he trusted might never come. 70 A PECULIAR CASE. Honest W. C, discoursing of the Washington embezzlements, let foil this explanation of ''irreg- ularities " at the "Capitol : " Work 's an old-fash- ioned way of gittin' a livin' ; it tires folks, and they don't Uke it." Cyrus exemplified the forceful truth of a state- ment like this. Punctuality to duty in any form met with his sternest exprobation. He was what is called in the country " a growin' boy," and he grew to be a thorn in our side, a pest in our path, a cloud in our landscape. In brief, he proved the only serious trial in our cottage life by the sea, our only real skeleton, indoors or out. Words are colorless to depict the inadecpmcy of Cyrus to the situation we had called him to fill. A dark lantern without a candle would have served us quite as well, for the boy shed no light any- where, and handled nothing fitly. He was a crea- ture of misinformation on every topic he ought to have been conversant wnth. He was constantly getting himself poisoned with ivy, the leaf of which he mistook for something else, and the consequent obfuscation of his countenance added A PECULIAR CASE. 71 nothing to his personal attractions. He had a natural aversion to self-agency, so far as he was concerned. He did not know things by halves, or quarters even. He had languid hands, and languider legs. His figure was long and fuzzy, and when he walked, swung itself to and fro like a broken bulrush. All the possibilities of sloth were apparent in his feet. He limped and crept rather than walked. His whole being seemed parboiled, and his joints unsettled. He was an emblem of incompleteness, a memento of hopeless dearth, both moral and physical ; celerity was extinct in him. He had a gone-out appearance, as of one dug up from the ashes of some Yankee Herculaneum ; and, as a family, we felt a kind of mortification at belonging to the same race with such a remnant, such a bundle of half intuitions. Coleridge describes him when he speaks of "a monument of imbecility and blank endeavor," for the boy heard nothing, and saw nothing, from sheer and stubborn nnuse of his faculties. He was unobservant as a "blind alley," whatever that ophthalmic curiosity may be ; and he never picked A PECULIAR CASE. up anything, for he was uot cognizant of matter like the majority of the liuman race. Of positive truth, he was born insolvent. He was strong in partial falsehoods, and preferred the serpentine to a direct course on every occasion ; but he had no falterings in deception. He pre- ferred to sidle up to a lie rather than present it squarely; but there was no imperfection in the article itself when he had reached it. Sometimes, but not often, his fabrications were too crude to escape detection. Of this nature was his frequent apology for absences on account of the necessity of " attending his grandmother's funeral." At the end of the season, 1 made out from my records that Cyrus had been called upon to mourn the loss of nine extinct grandmothers in three mouths ; but as his moral tegument was impervious to pro- testation, I never charged upon him, face to face, his pretended unnatural supply of female relations. (Ovid alludes to Bacchus as "twice born," — bis geniti, — but all such natal exaggerations are abhorrent to credulity.) There are those whose minds are always ou A PECULIAR CAiiK. 73 the wrong side of any subject presented to them. Of such was the boy Cyrus in an eminent de- gree, for his mind was ever in that wandering state which precludes the possibihty of lodging an idea within an acre or two of its blundering precincts. He dwelt in an atmosphere beclouded with carelessness, and so he comprehended every- thing in an opposite light from the true one. He paused when he should have gone on, and moved rapidly (for him) when he should have ceased motion. His manners were preposterous in their illimit- able absurdity. When I begged him one day to step forward quickly and hold a friend's horse that was restive at the door, he leisurely ob- served " he was not a-goin' to spring for any- body ! " (Cyrus on a spring would have been a sight worth seeing.) Being in the habit of bursting into my private room to ask irrelevant questions, at all hours, without the formality of knocking, I hinted mildly to him that it was the custom to knock before entering another's apartment. He stared 74 A PECULIAR CASE. at my suggested act of propriety for a moment, and then blurted out the remark that for his part he did not "see wot good that would do, but he would give a thump next time." Accord- ingly when he had occasion to come again to my door, he pounded vigorously on it with the heel of his heavy boot. "Who's there?" I inquired. "Cyrus J. Muchmore ! " he shouted in a voice that set all the crockery dancing on the adja- cent shelves, and " woke the neighboring cliffs around." Laziness was his foible. He had that unpleas- ant quality in its supreme condition. The throne of indolence was vacant on our coast until Cyrus lolled forward and fell into it. He was own brother to the snail, and no rela- tion whatever to the ant. Even his cautious father, discoursing of him one day, acknowledged that "the boy was rather chicken-hearted about work." Unaided locomotion was distasteful to him. If sent on an errand to the next cottage, he waited patiently for an opportunity to trans- A PECULIAR CASE. 75 fer himself bodily into the tail-end of somebody's passing wagon, considering it better to be thus assisted along than to assume the responsibility of moving forward on his own legs. He spared himself all the fatigue possible to mortality, and overcame labor by constantly lying in wait for "a lift," as he called it. He was the only seaside stripling I ever met who eschewed fishing. Most boys are devotees of the rod and line, but Cyrus Avas an exception. The necessary anterior search for bait was too much for his inertia. Clam and worm might lie forever undisturbed, so far as he was concerned. He must have slowly descended from that notorious son of laziness celebrated by old Barton, who said he enjoyed fishing until the fish began to bite ; then he gave it up, as he could not endure the fatigue of drawing nj) the line and rebaiting the hook. His dilatory habit rose sometimes fo the au- dacity of genius. He could consume more hours in going a mile to the village post-office and return- ing with the mail than one would credit, unless his gait came under personal observation. We 70 A PECULIAR CASE. took a kind of exasperated delight as we used to watch him trailing along the ground, and we felt a fresh wonder every day at liis power of slaw pro- cedure. It seemed a gift, an endowment, now for the first time vouchsafed to mortal inertness. The caterpillar would have been too rapid for him ; he would lose in a race with that dull groundling. He seemed to be counting myriads of something in the road. When he cautiously and laboriously lifted up one foot, it seemed an eternity before the other followed it. He would frequently drop asleep in getting over a stone-wall, and his recum- bent figure was imprinted under all the trees by the roadside. He hated action, except at meals. There he astonished the cook, who complained after his advent into our kitchen that " one pair of hands could n't provide enough for such a com- morunk," and advised us to have him " exam- ined ! " She accused him of " always a-georging of hisself." She averred that when he was help- ing her shell peas he ate up all but the pods dur- ing the operation ; and she dechired tliat if slic took her eyes off him as he moved througli the A PECULIAR CASE. 77 pantry, he devoured as he went, to use her own words, " hke an army of locusses." He never knew what o'clock it was, but con- stantly asked everybody he met for " the time o' day." When informed, and the hour announced did not approximate dinner-time, he became dis- couraged and low-spirited, but revived at the sight of a chance apple or cucumber lying on the groin d near by. I have seen him blossom into slow activity when unexpected food has been offered to him " between meals." His stomach rose to any occasion, and coped with all emergencies. We used to try him with a heavy slice of beef and mus- tard at ten o'clock in the morning, and he settled upon it at once wdth stolid avidity, cobra-fashion. He yearned for family picnics where tiiere was no walking to be done, where the viands were ample, and nobody had occasion to bear along the bas- kets. He was constitutionally susceptible of double meals. His favorite localities could always be recognized by the debris of comestibles strewn around. Rinds of w^ater-melon, egg-shells, and apple-cores betrayed his whereabouts. When off 78 A PECULIAR CASE. duty at the kitchen-table he was ever devouring something from out a huge pocket which adorned his trousers on the right side, bulging it out like a wen. The protuberance became so enormous that one day I felt constrained to ask him if he had a cannon-ball in his thigh. No, it was only a couple of turnips he w^as " a-goin' to eat bum- by." Every edible thing that grew was tributary to him. His taste was catholic. He fed largely and promiscuously. He was matchless in his dep- redations on cooked or uncooked. He was, in short, the lineal descendant of Pliny's "Annihila- tor," the great food destroyer of antiquity ! Born in the country, he was ignorant as a sign- post of what came out of the soil. When set to work in the garden he pulled up ever^'thing but the weeds. He would mistake wormwood for parslej', and mustard for mint. Interrogatories disquieted him. When asked a question -about what should have concerned him most, his unblushing reply was, "Don't know !" He had adroitness in delegating jobs about the place to unsuspecting lads of his acquaintance that A PECULIAR CASE. 79 wjis both amusing and exasperating. He would saunter along to the cottage in the morning, bring- ing with him two or three shabby -looking varlets of his own age, or a little younger, perhaps, and hide them away behind the rocks until their ser- vices might be required. At the proper time he would carry out the new hoe, or the new-fangled rake, to show them. Then he would gradually toll the boys up to some gap in the avenue that needed filling, or allure them to a lot of hay that must be gathered for the barn. He, iiiean while, would lie on the ground in a state of flat con- tentment, making the most of himself, and regard- ing the boys with supine satisfaction as they accomplished the task he ought himself to be engaged in. Coming upon him unexpectedly once while thus disporting his lazy length, I asked for an explanation of his conduct. He replied that he " was obleeged to lay daown on accaount of a jumpin' tewth-ache that bed jess sot in." His subterfuges were endless and invincible. They revolved about him in a perpetual cycle, ready for use at any moment, and so he was never caught 80 A PECULIAR CASE. disfurnished with an excuse. Evasion was his armature, quiddity his defence. To upbraid him was a loss of time and patience. It would be a shrewd master indeed who could circumvent him ! Choate was not more wary, or Webster more pro- found, than Cyrus when he was brought to bay. He was full of illogical intrepidities. He eluded reproof with a conversational dexterity beyond the ordinary bent and level of his brain. He changed the current of discourse at will. When remonstrating with him one day on his short-comings and long-goings, he interrupted the strain of remark by inquiring if I had " heered that 'Siah Jones's boss got cast t' other night, and took four men to drag him aout by the tail." On another occasion he cut short my admonition, just as the homily was cidminating, by asking mo if I " knowed that Abel Baker wore false teeth in his maouth, and sometimes put 'em in upside-daown, cos he did n't mider- stand 'em." In the middle of a colloquy with him one morning on his unpunctual appearance at the cottage, he threw me completely off the A PECULIAR CASE. 81 track by casually "wondering" if I had "ever run acrost tlie sca-sarpunt in my travels ! " Ha- ranguing him at the close of a day when he had neglected every duty, he broke the force of my censure by demanding if I was " for or agin capital punishment." He liabitually glided away from a subject that happened to set against him, just as Tennyson's snake "slipped under a spray ! " Poor Cyrus ! I have not even veiled his in- significant and unmusical name, for he is no longer extant in a world he did nothing to ben- efit or adorn. Oblivion called for him years ago. He was carried off in the season of green apples, being unable to restrain his reckless passion for unripe fruit. As I strew this handful of pop- pies over his unconscious eyelids, I remember with a smile of gratitude the daily fun his drowsy presence afforded to at least one mem- ber of that little household by the sea ; and pondering how small an interest he ever took in the industries of life, I confidently apply to his "peculiar case" the well-known assertion in 82 A PECULIAR CASE. a celebrated monody, — " Little he '11 reck if they let him sleep on ! " Vex not his ghost ! Light lie the turf on his inactive elbows, for the}^ would be troubled, even now, if under press- ure of any kind. It cannot be seriously said of him that he "rests from his labors," poor lad, for his frequent slumber was always more natural than his infrequent toil, and he knew how to take much ease during his brief sojourn in til is work-a-day world. No " hoary-headed swain" Down East can ever make this passing observation touching the habits of our defunct acquaintance : — ''Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with liasty steps the dews away To meet the snn upon the upland lawn." But many of us still remember how often — "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old, fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by." rAMILIAE LETTER TO HOUSE-BEEAKEES. ^==r^^ FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. ENTLEMEN, — Your daring eccentrici- ties have often moved me to address you ; but your recent gambols on my own premises compel immediate attention to the subject. The last time some of your fraternity unexpectedly called at my residence several incidents occurred which were not at all to your credit as honest and true men. Some of them, as the painters say, were entirely "out of drawing." Pardon me if I remind you in this public manner of the well-ven- tilated, proverbial reference to that fine sense of honor which is said to exist even among individ- uals of your exceptional calling. In " breaking and entering," as the law succinctlv denominates 86 FAMTLTAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. one of the customs of your craft, you did not, on the occasion referred to (again I crave forgiveness for the candid strain of my complaint), so care- fully abstain from injuring my unfortunate posses- sions as you might have done. It has never been the habit of the confiding household to which I belong to lock either its doors or its drawers, but to save all unnecessary trouble by leaving every- thing we own most easy of access and quite free to the handling of your brotherhood, should any members of it chance to drop in upon us ; yet, notwithstanding our forethought in your behalf, our studied solicitude for your comfort and con- venience, you abstracted all the keys thus left to your mercy and utterly disregarded our natural claims in the matter. Note for one moment, gen- tlemen, what trouble you have caused us by this oversight of propriety. Every instrument you have thus purloined and appropriated to other entrances must be replaced by us; and, as the locks on most of the doors thus defrauded are patent ones and not easily fitted by an ordinary locksmith, experts at a distance must be sent for FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. 87 and brought, with considerable expense, into thesie gaping and unprotected apartments. Again, it is not exactly according to the Commandments for an unknown number of persons to come by night into a dwelling-house of which they do not " hold the title-deed," wearing boots that leave indelible nail-marks on the tops of other people's pianos and that soil unworn carpets and stairs with a compound of tar and mud, whose consistence it is beyond the efforts of time and chemistry to re- move. Spilling oil or other disagreeable fluid by the quart, or even by the pint, on couches and table-covers and leaving it supernatent where fine proof engravings have been laid is not a high-toned act, gentlemen, and ought not to be sanctioned by your guild. I am sorry to notice, also, a morbid tendency in your profession, of late, to mutilate paintings hawjhig on the inoffensive walls; and the inhuman wish will not be kept down that some of you could be compelled to change places with them, — for a few hours, at least. There seems, too, a growing desire among you to molest the marble adornments, '' Whose white hivestuients figure innocence," 88 FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. in a house. Consider for a moment, gentlemen, what it must be for a proprietor to go down stairs in the mornmg and find his own bust transmuted from a " speaking likeness " into an object fit only for the ash-barrel ! Think of his domestic part- ner's feelings when she descends into the drawing- room, after your midnight visit, and beholds the wreck you have left behind ! Gentlemen, could you have been present on a certain morning of last week, you would have witnessed a scene of woe to flutter in unwonted manner the most dis- honest heart, albeit, you are, I believe, somewhat given to the melting mood. (The silver tea-set you conveyed away from us during your late so- journ was a wedding-gift, most chastely wrought. Where is it now and what rank furnace saw its molten pangs ?) I will not here enumerate all " The parcels and particulars of our grief " ; but what an incommunicative heap you left us of what was once the semblance of a living and immortal art ! There lay our " Young Augustus," quite chapfallen ; our " Clytie," headless in the flower of youth ; our " Dying Gladiator," more FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. 89 than dead and turned to clay ; our skyey-pointing " Mercury," overthrown and void. Bending over her vanished treasures (spoils of many and many a happy year), the tearful owner stood, a monu- ment of sorrow paralyzed by grief, among her broken idols. Really, gentlemen, it did seem a wholesale and superfluous destruction of beautiful things (could not one suffice 1) ; but perhaps you are of Captain Swosser's opinion, that " if you make pitch hot you cannot make it too hot." (Pardon this levity, gentlemen, on a theme so serious ; but pitch is always suggestive.) I did not hear your ingress on that fatal night which brought us all our woe, for I am torpid as a watchman after twelve o'clock ; but if I had encountered you on my premises during your call I should have made a special revolving plea for the safety of those particular household gods. Excuse my bluntness, gentlemen ; but your icono- clastic feats are unpraiseworthy and will not bear repetition. Such rites are unholy in the extreme, and are only practised by bunglers in your voca- tion. Performances like those are crude and can- 90 FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. not come to good. No true artist will ever stoop so low. I linger over our wrongs because they are so great. You have inflicted upon this family a household cruelty, and, to employ the pomp of Shakesperean phrase, have made us " Feel tlie bruises of the day before. And suffer the condition of the times To lay a heavy and unequal hand Upon our honors." We are, indeed, wounded where we least expected blows; and we cannot, therefore, as some of our modern judges and juries do, regard you in the light of honest and civil citizens. I am aware that current sympathy, in and out of the courts, now runs in favor of protecting the criminal ; but the amusements you pursue, though possibly lucra- tive, are dangerous. Your pastime is open to sus- picion, at least. There are individuals here and there, even in this year of the Republic, who doubt if a thief ought to be habitually classed with hon- est men. " Flat burglary " has in some quarters become prejudicial to reputations. FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. 91 Not many years ago, in England, — a country, I am told, from which many of your stock have emigrated to this one, — they instituted a kind of gymnastic exercise specially adapted for your per- manent reform. "Dancing on nothing" I think they called the saltatory position where sentence was executed in those days. A friend of mine attended several trials at the Old Bailey in 1827, and on one occasion saw three able-bodied and accomplished gentlemen of your persuasion con- demned to death for forgery and house-breaking; and there was no pardon following close upon the decision of that court. They gave no quarter then to Worshipfid Knights of the False Keys. There was no divergence of opinion touching the char- acter of your Order in those days, gentlemen. Yours is not a liberal profession ; consequently, yonr exceptional career is limited. A great artist in your line is now passing the remainder of his life (when not engaged in lapidarian dissections) in the contemplation of a very small, unfurnished apartment, adorned with no wood-work and much rectangular iron. He possessed rare social quali- 92 FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. ties and was friendly to the worst pursuits of man. Constabulary restraint grew fluid at his touch. From his youth up he could pick a lock with the best of his tribe, and shop-lifting was his favorite faith. His special gift, perhaps, lay in crawling through apertures where an infant's body would have been tightly wedged. The secret skill with which he transferred the well-guarded property of others into his own keeping seemed a new-born power, coming into the world only at his particular advent. He was the w^onder of his time and the envy of his clan. But pause now before his her- mit cell and gaze upon his shaven head. Your own fair locks, gentlemen, may one day come to to be picked like his. He once had curls abun- dant as your own. Think of your macassared crowns diminished to that ignoble condition ! Un- der the circumstances, gentlemen, is it obtrusive in me to warn you and call your attention loudly to this example of capillary unattraction before you ] You have had among you, no doubt, many a hair-hreadth escape ; but yonder dismantled dome of thought, once thatched with comely locks, FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. 93 preaches a lesson to you not to be liglitly set aside. Ymcr turn in the barber-shop of fate, when you, too, will be invited to take the inexorable chair, is sure to come. The avenging shears are waiting to crop you also. " Be wise to-day ; 't is madness to defer," cries Dr. Young, in his suggestive " Night Thoughts," a book written for after-dark reflection, — the very time when your unhallowed business begins. Think, gentlemen, how party-colored trou- sers would become such nimble legs as yours ! Would iron bracelets ornament a pair of wrists in close proximity to taper fingers such as you ex- hibit, — fingers educated, I am mformed, by adepts in reducing size to especial emergencies 1 Gentle- men, I will pursue no further a course of thought distasteful perhaps to sensitive spirits and unwel- come to household artists like yourselves. I will venture the hope, however, that you will, in all future exploits on my own premises, do me the particular favor to abstain from wanton acts of cruelty to " lifeless and inanimate clay " (to say nothing of marble), — acts " That make such waste in brief mortality." 94 FAMILIAR LETTER TO HOUSE-BREAKERS. Ill closing this epistle, let me remind your brother- hood of an observation written years ago by a brilliant and thoughtful French woman, when describing a certain notorious and infamous char- acter who figured a long time since in high Pa- risian circles : " There are two little inconvenien- ces," said she, "which make it difficult for any one to undertake his funeral oration, — namely, his life and his death ! " This remark is equally valuable to those of us who move in a lower stratum of society than the archbishop whom Madame was depicting. Take care, gentlemen with fractured reputations, devourers of widows' houses, and breakers and enterers generally, or your own dark records, like that of the great prelate's, may de- prive you also of those obsequies which he for- feited by the habitual sequestration of other people's property and the application of it to his own unbridled and selfish uses. Gentlemen, I have no reluctance now in bidding you farewell, and, in doing so, I sincerely wish it may erelong be said of all your tribe individually, what Lucullus in the play observes of Timoii : — "Every man lias liis I'uult, aud Iloiiedy is his." OUE VILLAGE DOGMATIST. vi;p<>=^ OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. F " to bo wise wore to be obstinate, " Un- derbill bas lately lost its incarnation of wisdom. A few months ago we followed to his corner-lot in the windy graveyard all that was mortal (and there was considerable of it) of "old Cap'n Barker Brine," as he was familiarly called by man, woman, and child in our little com- munity. Born with protruded lips and elevated eyebrows, he was for many j-ears our village doubter, oracle, and critic, — our tyrannical master of opinion in all public and private matters; and even now the prelude to any wise commonplace is, " Old Caphi Brine used to say.''' He is already a classic in Underbill, and will be cpjoted for cen- 98 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. turics to come, no doubt. " Cap^n Barker Brine said so'^ will always be familiar in the common mouth, and will settle many a disputed point — theological, political, and domestic — for genera- tions yet to advance and take possession of these quaint streets and antique dwellings. What he said was ordinary, unoriginal, and absurdly illogi- cal, but it was the ivaf/ he said it that produced an effect. He had " great command of language," but the commodity was good for nothing after it had been commanded. He evinced a constitu- tional determination to verbiage unsurpassed in the records of inanity, and only those wdio knew him could possibly appreciate his affluence of rig- marole. He was a colloquial inebriate, constantly tumbling about in a kind of verbal delirium tre- mens. For instance, I remember one thick, foggy day he rolled into the post-office, where we were all assembled to wait for the morning mail ; and, on being appealed to for an explanation of the cause which brings about the heavy mists wdiich so frequently envelop us at Underhill, he leaned thoughtfully on his walking-stick and thus deliv- OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 99 ered himself, in a swelling, majestic tone, that implied long and mysterious study over the phe- nomenon : " When the AtmospJiere and Hermisphere comes together, it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces a fog ! " The learned manner in which the Cap'n pronounced these idiotic words estab- lished conviction in the minds of nearly all the listeners present. The Cap'n was a bulky person, and he needed to be so, for only an extra-sized individual could have carried around such " ponderous syllables " as he encircled. Susan G., who gladdens our summer cliffs with her presence, and whose sense of humor is one of her prominent delightful qualities, hoards up ques- tions all winter to stagger the Cap'n with during July and August. She says she has never yet been put off sans answer, no matter how absurd the interrogation. The Cap'n cannot afford to appear unknowing in his native Underbill, before anybody. Susan, encountering him one day at the little-of-every thing shop, boldly marched up to the chair he was sitting in, surrounded by his ad- 100 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. miring townsmen, and inquired, " Is there any dif- ference, Captain, between a radical and a barnacle]" " It '5 the same specie, — the same specie^'* loftily rejoined the j^hilosopher, with a half-negligent, self-satisfied air, waving off Susan to a more re- moved corner of the shop. S. says there was a general consciousness of superiority in the tone in which the Cap'n said this, that no attempted imitation could possibly delineate. It was the meridian triumph of small vanity and ignorant readiness, which only the Cap'n's experience knew how to combine. S. declares it was inherent, con- summate genius I The blank uniformity of opinion in our small community was due entirely to the influence of this oracular, seaworthy old inhabitant, full as he was of misinformation and conceit. He had picked up, in his early wanderings about the world, a collection of high-sounding phrases, which he never omitted to employ when the time came, and they never failed to produce an effect. The sound of a word was more to him than the sense it conveyed. He found twenty different uses for the OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 101 same expression. He had a natural disrelish for simplicity, and craved the show of things. When a poor, half-crazed fellow, in a fit of despondency, jumped into the water, and was taken out before he had time to drown, the Cap'n, in telling the story, said the man had " committed suicide tem- porarilyy Observing some thin boards under his arm as he was proceeding homeward to dinner, I asked him what they were for, and he informed me they were for '^piazzary purposes." Showing him an ingenious contrivance for washing clothes, which regulated itself, he assumed an artistic ex- pression, and said, " Yes, sir, I preceive it is a self- digesting machine." He affected to be what he called " a studier of complaints, ^^ and he made fre- quent allusions to a " suggestion of the brain," and "longevity of the spinal marrow," whatever these diseases might be. He spoke disparagingly of people who kept a " revenue of servants," and a fresh, healthy breeze from the north he called an ^^ embracing air." For the clergy generally he had just contempt, and always spoke of them as " ignorameans.^^ One of his favorite phrases, " the 102 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. line of demarcation^' he employed every day of his Hfe, and it was amusing to note how he pressed it into conversation even on the most inopportune occasions. You could not be long in his company without culling the information that he had seen "the great Cooper play Richard the King"; that he had " shaken hands with Old Hickory " (Gen- eral Jackson) ; that he had " held an argument once with a bishop," whom he complimentarily described as "a high-toned, pompous gentlemen " ; and that he had frequently sailed "among the Spanish islands." " When I was master of the old Numy" (Numa Pompilius'?) prefaced many of his impossible adventures; and he constantly re- ferred to a period when he saw a mermaid "off the coast of Gibberalter." " What the Frenchman calls Kick-shoes'^ (quelque-chose) was an every-day phrase with him. ^' As the Sweden-virgins (Swe- denborgians) believe,''' was another. He quoted frequently from " the Pitomy," whatever that might be ; probably it was the Epitome of some- thing or other, — perhaps an old-time nautical volume. One of his favorite axioms was this : OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 103 " When a man understands navigation he under- stands everything " ; and there was no one in Underhill to dispute the assertion. The Cap'n's admiration for the First Napo- leon was profusely vociferous whenever occasion offered. Indeed, his worship extended to all the Bonaparte family, and he spoke as familiarly of Joseph and Jerome as of his own brethren of the sea. But, instead of declaring himself, as he meant no doubt to do, a Napoleonist, he always made the mistake of asserting that he was a "stanch Neapolitan,'' having early in life, no doubt, got the impression that was the word most expressive of his homage for the Napoleon dynasty. He would read steadily by the hour in an anti- quated dictionary called " Perry's Royal Stand- ard " ; but Plutarch and Pope, he said, engaged his attention more constantly than all other au- thors. Somehow he had got a confused idea that they were contemporary writers. This was the person who dominated Underhill, proving conclusively that a man is apt to be esti- 104 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. mated everywhere according as he estimates him- self. We all lived under the sway of his critical faculty, and accepted his dictum from mere force of habit. Nobody cared to praise or find fault with the paint on a new house, the style of a new barn, the color of a new cow, the gait of a new horse, the sermons of a new minister, until the Cap'n had " pronounced upon them." I remember he spoiled all the chances of settling an excellent young clergyman in our parish by saying of the new candidate, that ^^his thoughts ivas 2^oor, and his manners in the pulpit was prepostuousP Some few of the parishioners attempted a dissent from this judgment, but it availed nothing. " Old Cap'n Brine don't like him " settled the matter, but not the minister. The Cap'n's wife had died in middle life, and we were informed by the only old lady in the parish who dared to speak disparagingly of the village oracle, that " Maria Brine was harnsum as a picter when she was young," but that she was worn out by her husband's contempt for every word she ut- tered in his presence, — "scorched by his disdain." OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 105 If the meek woman happened to make a remark on any subject nnder consideration, he would fiercely demand how she came to know anything about it ! "I believe to my soul," said our inform- ant, " he fairly mortified that poor creetur into her grave long before her time ! " Our first encounter with the Cap'n happened in this wise. When we first went to look for summer lodgings in Underbill, the postmaster referred us to " Cap'n Barker Brine down by the p'int, who some- times took folks to board as an accommodation." Steering coastwise, according to direction, we found a stout, cranberry-colored personage mending some old lobster-nets that were spread out on the little green lawn between the rocks at the back of his weather-beaten house. We opened the garden- gate and saluted the master on his own premises ; but he was arrogantly oblivious, or pretended to be, that two strangers had entered on his domain. " Is Captain Brine at home 1 " we inquired. " He is," deliberately responded the proud pro- prietor. '' Can we see him ] " one of us ventured to ask. 106 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. "You can," responded the retired mariner, who still went on, like a determined old spider, labori- ously mending his nets. Coming nearer to the point, w^e asked if he were Captain Brine. " I awi," he replied ; and taking from his jacket- pocket a half-decayed clay pipe, proceeded to look down the bowl as if the vista were a mile or two long, assuming all the while the appearance of a philosopher "tracking Suggestion to her inmost cell." " Vse have come to look for board this summer, Captain, and we 've taken the liberty to inquire here." "Nobody benders ye," jerked out the net- mender. " Is there good fishing off these rocks. Cap- tain?" " 'Cordin' to what you call good ! " he replied. " Professor Agassi z says this is a capital place for perch," we ventured to remark. "Old Gashus don't know ei-t^ry thing," responded the Cap'n. OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 107 " But he knows a great deal about fishes, having made them a special study," we rejoined. " I can learn Gashns and all the rest of 'em their A B C ! " roared the Cap'n, with an exple- tive at the end of his defiant remark. Not caring to dispute with the irate old mariner as to the relative piscatory knowledge of the great professor and himself, we brought round the con- versation to its starting-point, and begged to know if he could " accommodate " us for two months in his cottage. The old man gave a contemptuous glance from under his shaggy gray brows, and thus delivered himself: "In the fust place, I'm not acquainted with ye. In the second place, you 're too set in your notions for me. In the third place, we don't take boarders no more." Some time after this encounter we came to know the Cap'n intimately, and were frequently honored with invitations to fish with him. Well might a plain, unlettered farmer, who feared we might underrate the Cap'n's powers, observe in our hearing with considerable emphasis, "Cap'n Barker Brine can handle logic just as well as I can 108 OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST, handle a hoe ! " The logic was i^oor enough, to be sure, but 0, the manner of it, the handUng, — therein consisted its greatness? He measured everything by the shadow of his own paucity of intellect, mistaking himself all the while for a mental giant. His ideas had been deranged by the village flattery of attention to his opinions, until he came to consider his own feeble and foolish judgments a necessity for the welfixre of mankind. Having no humility to begin wdth, vanity, nur- tured in a weak community, soon grafted itself on such a nature, and self-conceit blossomed and flourished accordingly. His godship among the natives became a fact which he never once ques- tioned. It is said that shortly before the Cap'n passed away, he turned to an old neighbor who was watch- ing at his bedside, and with a kind of short-breath ostentation gave this his last order : " Ira Dock- um! let the line of demarcation 2:)roceed from this end of the house ! " He was evidently babbling of his funeral cortege, and the closing passage in " Enoch ArJen " came to my mind, as the dwellers in OUR VILLAGE DOGMATIST. 109 Underhill solemnly formed and marched in their Sunday garments at the obsequies of Captain Brine : — " And when they buried him the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral." Truly says Sir Thomas Browne, " Man is a no- ble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave ! " A WATCH THAT "WANTED CLEANING.' A WATCH THAT "WANTED CLEANmG." THINK I never saw a person who needed renewal of garments in a more prononnced degree than the gannt in- dividual I encountered a few weeks ago in Omaha. We met casually on the upland overlooking Coun- cil Bluffs, whither I had gone for a morning walk in that city of newness and hospitality. The man was sitting on the stump of a recently beheaded tree, regarding a watch, which he now and then held up in a kind of hopeless manner, and listened to for a sign of life from its inner apartments. When he saw me approaching he rose up and asked for " the time o' day." As I had only " Boston time," and that was of no use so far " out 114 A WATCH THAT ''WANTED CLEANING. West," he sighed, again shook the unresponsive article in liis hand, and sj^oke as follows : — " This 'ere watch, stranger, 's a puzzler. Some thing 's the matter w^ith 'er. I 've seen a good-die of trouble in my day, but nothin' at all like this afore. In my younger days I once had a personal difficulty with a bear, but that was fun compared to this affliction." Noticing a settled grief on the poor fellow's soiled and sunken countenance, I sat down beside him on the ample resting-place he had chosen, and made inquiry as to the cause of his untimely sorrow. After a brief pause he thus unburdened himself: — " Stranger, if you was in the watch line, we 'd have nothing to do with one another ; but as you ain't, I don't mind givin' jow 'er histor}^, which you '11 allow^ is somewhat discouragin'. I bought 'er two months ago in ^S'/i^-cargo for sixteen dollars down and five dollars in poultry. I had 'er of a fine- lookin' man who keeps jewillry on the sidewalk down by the Palmer House. He was a perfect gentleman in appearance, wore studs himself, nnd his conversation was high-toned. He said he was a A WATCH THAT ''WANTED CLEANING:' 115 member in reg'lar standin' of more 'n fifty churches in various parts of the United States where he traded. He said he set his hfe by the watch, but would part with 'er if he was shore the man he sold 'er to was a moral man, and would take good care of 'er. He said she was wunst the property of a particular friend o' hisn, one o' the craowned heads o' Ure-up, but the king was obleeged to sell 'er on accoaunt of a change in his circumstarnces. He said there was more 'n two hundred jewills in 'er wliich was invisible to the naked eye. Waal, to make a long story short, I negoshated for 'er on the spot, and I 'member just as well as if 't was yisterday, he said she would n't warnt cleanin' ef I card 'er in mur pocket, keerful, for twenty year. ** So, ye see, I took 'er 'long to Rock Island on the Mississippi, where I live, but she seemed to go on the jump all the way daown. Waal, I carried 'er into Jason's one day, and asked kim to give a look into 'er insides, and tell me, ef he could, what made 'er act so. He screwed his old glass into the right eye, and arter a while IIG A WATCH THAT "WANTED CLEANING:' he laid 'er down on the coaunter, and says he, ' She 's a powerful good watch, but she warnts cleaniii I ' When I heerd that, I was dumb- founded. Says I, ' She was cleaned all over last week.' Says he, ' That may be, but she 's full o' dirt naow. It 's dusty this foil,' says he, ' and some on it 's got into 'er.' Waal, I thought it all over, and said he might go to work on 'er next day ; and he charged me tew dollars and fifty cents for cleanin' on 'er aout. Pooty soon I had to go off to Aiu'ory, and she begun to act quair agin. So I took 'er into a watchmaker's there, and asked him to fling his eye round, and see what ailed 'er. W^aal, he did, for ez much as five miuits, and then says he, ' She 's a fust-rate watch, but she warnts cleanin' ! ' Says I (and I could n't help gittiu' riled then), * She 's bin cleaned aout twice lately, and that 's a fact.' * Waal,' says he, * I never seed a dirtier, and if she ain't 'tended to, double quick, in twenty-four hours she '11 bust of 'er own accord, and fly all to pieces, and never go agin.' This illarmed me, nat'rally, and so I told him to strip 'er and go to work with his tooth- A WATCH THAT ''WAITED CLEANING/' 117 brush and things, and I 'd pay him what was right. So he did, and he sot down on me for one seventy-five, and one fifty for what he called m- side-entle expenses. Waal, she went ellygant all the way on to Milwaukee, but the fust night I got thar she begun to hitch and sputter to that ex- tent I run over to a watchmaker, early in the mornin', for assistance. Waal, he turned 'er over three or four times, and kind o' smiled at the rumblin' inside on 'er. Then he looked thoughtful and pried 'er open. Says I, ' Enny thing serious ? ' Says he, — and his reply run through me like a fawk, — says he, 'She 's a remarkable good time- piece, but she warnts cleanin ! ' Waal, to make an end to mur story, I had 'er put through his mill, and some o' his ile slung into 'er. He said 't was such a ugly job (I told him when he took' er in hand to be careful o' the invisible jewills), that his bill would be four dollars and ten cents, the ten cents bein' for fingerin' careful round the reubies and things. Waal, Sir, she cut up agin last night, and I stept in to Cross & Jones's, and asked their young man to ixamine 'er parts, and pro- us A WATCH THAT ''WANTED CLEANING.'' noaunce upon 'er. Waal, he rubbed in his mag- nify] ng-gl ass, and screwtenized 'er, and says he, ' That 's the most valuble watch I evei' seed inside o' Omaha, but she warnts cleanin^ most y ! ' When I heerd that, I expressed myself like a dis- gusted night-hawk, and snatched 'er aout o' his hands, and brought 'erraound here to ponder over. What I wish to inquire is. Stranger (and I ask for information), how many times a watch thet 's full o' invisible jewills has to be cleaned aout in the course o' two months'? I never owned one afore, but if the jewills nee-sessiates that expense, as I 'm a pore man, had n't I better have 'em punched aout, don't you think?" And I advised him to have the "jewills" re- moved immediately, and sold in Europe for the most they would bring. ^ BOTHERSOME PEOPLE, BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. Vi ASTER SLOWWORM, the grammarian, on glancing at the title of this paper, will affirm, without contradiction, that the word bothersome cannot be found in the dic- tionary. I retort on our verbal patriarch the equall}' truthful remark that neither does the word enthusiasm exist in Shakespeare! And just there I leave Master Slowworm's objection. There are loose superfluous mortals who seem to have come into the world on a special mis- sion to break the Ten Commandments ; and they w^ould do it all at one blow, if possible. But I do not reckon them among the bothersome people of our planet. The law kindly looks after those 122 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. who thus meddle wickedly with certain portions of the Decalogue, and deals justly with them all. But the botherers in life escape unpunished, and go to their graves unbranded with infamy. Their tombstones are often, nay, commonly, placed in the most respectable corners of the graveyard; and I have found, not infrequently, the word virtue engraven on their marbles. Annoyances, not sinSy have been their offences against man, woman, and children kind ; and it was in little things they performed their abominations, while sojourning above gTound. In yonder breezy mound sleeps all that was mortal of Mr. Benjamin Borax. The inscription above his bones does not record all his worldly accomplishments. He had one trait which the stone-cutter has omitted ; and I refer to it, in passing, simply in justice to B. B.'s remains. Having had his acquaintance forty long and tedi- ous years, I am qualified to speak feelingly of the man ; and I do it without a particle of malice, or exultation at his removal from my "list of friends." But I will say that, while he was living. BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. ' 123 after an experience elongated through the period I have mentioned, death had no longer any ter- rors for the members of my immediate family or myself. B. B, never meant to " hurt any- body's feelings." " He would n't kill a fly " might have been chiselled with the rest of his church- yard eulogy. But he bothered all who knew him to the very verge of unforgiveness. When he entered your house, fear fell upon all its inmates ; for his want of tact and courtesy, his utter obliv- ion to tliose small decencies which make social life sweet and commendable, often rendered his pres- ence, not to speak it profanely, little short of infernal. Bearing about an incapacity for hap- piness on his countenance, he would come unsmil- ing and unbidden into your nursery, and frighten, by the very awkwardness in his face, the small oc- cupants almost into idiocy. Not knowing how to a'p'proach the infant sense, he bothered the little ones by his miscalculations at direful pleasantry with them. Dickens mentions a cruel propensity which some people have of rumpling the hair of small boys, as if they were little dogs that ought 124 BO THERS OME PE OPL E. to be nibbed up somewhere. No sooner does a sleek young fellow enter the room, with his hair "all in order for compan}'," than up starts some great stupid visitor to begin a friendship with the lad by ivohhling up his carefully brushed locks into a tangled mop of uncomeliness. Such a bothersome old towzer was B. B. ; and I confess it was not without a secret satisfaction that I once saw little Peter F. administer him a sturdy kick on his unprotected ankles during the very act of mangling up the urchin's pretty golden curls. When I called Peter to account next moi-ning tor this belligerent outl)reak of temper, he said, with considerable emphasis, that he 'd "do it again, if Mr. Borax meddled with him!^^ (P. F. at that time was aged six, and went to bed habitually, without a murmur, at eight o'clock !) Children hate to be bothered with questions, both in and out of school ; and yet how we bore them with catechismal demands, almost in their very cradles. As soon as they are old enough to stammer out a reply, we arraign their little wits, and seek to make them respond to such BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 125 foolish whimsies as, "How old was Methuselah 1" " Who discovered America *? " " What do two and two make % " and the like. Nervous little Rob R. was nearly frightened into fits one day, when bungling old Parson Pew, in his hard, unsmiling way, with a voice like thunder, asked him sud- denly, "Who made the world in six days, and rested on the seventh T' " / did ! " screamed the child, bursting into tears, " but — I HI — never — do so — any more ! " Poor Bob was bothered into assuming to himself the formation of a universe, and told a sinless lie in order to blurt out a promise of future good conduct. Emerson, in one of his wise, characteristic sen- tences, says we sometimes meet a person who, if good manners had not existed, would have in- vented them. I know a cumberer of my neigh- borhood who would have originated bothersome bad ones, if the article had not previously been contrived. He brings his total wealth of infe- licities with him wherever he comes. When he enters your dwelling, mental chaos begins. He is anxious and peppery, albeit he is uncertain, 126 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. even to the very Anno Domini in which he is at present breathing and fuming. He looks en- cyclopaedias, but utters himself in primers. He is a perfect master of Misreport. His mind could be dispensed with, like a decayed turnip, or an out-of-date oyster; and he forgets an event before he knows it. Gravity and lassitude would better become his lack-brain-itudenarian habit ; but he chooses to be conversational and informa- tive. He never keeps an appointment. Every- thing " slips his mind." He carries two w'atches, but he never knows the time of day ; nor (1 am bound to say it) of night, either. Once seated at your winter fireside, he "outwatches the bear." He begins a story as the clock strikes Twelve, and when the coal is declining to burn any longer. It is near One when the uneasy shadow departs, volunteering, as he goes, the unsolicited remark that he is " sure to come again next week, when he hopes to find me in better spirits." I was charmed with J. W.'s experience with a ponderous country neighbor of his not long ago, who ivould "drop in" just as the family were all BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 127 pointing bedward, and then bother them for an hour or two with puffy accounts of his ailments. J. W. keeps a parrot, — one of the most sapient of birds, — and he lets the chattering, companion- able creature walk about the room, strutting, with habitual self-importance, here and there as pretentious fancy dictates. One night W.'s un- prepossessing neighbor settled himself, about nine o'clock, in front of the crackling logs, and began liis usual hypochondriac recital. The seance threatened to be prolonged into midnight. Oba- diah's droning voice went sounding on its "dim and perilous way " ; and now and then one of the female members of the family glided noiselessly out of the room, unnoticed by the dreary visitor. J. W. felt the need of all his Christian fortitude, and was making up his mind for a sitting never equalled on a similar occasion in length, when the parrot, spying around Obadiah's legs, discovered a bare spot lying between the hitched-up trousers and the adjacent stocking. Working his way cau- tiously under the chair, while the narrator was deeply engaged in dull discourse, the bird sud- 128 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. denly pounced upon the uncovered limb, nnd adroitly nipped out a piece about the size of a small blister. The pain caused Obadiah to sprin<^ into the air ; and, seizing his hat, he left the house, vowing vengeance on the "pesky parrot." And to this day he declares he will never enter J. W.'s mansion again, "so long as that tarnal bird is round." There is a kind of long-drawn bothersome vis- itor, who has a habit of disappointing his host and hostess by constantly making httle feints of going away, but never quite accomplishing it. Now he raises himself slowly from his chair, and your cheated spirits rise with him. He is about to say " good-night," you think. He is preparing to depart ! His figure is partly out of the seat in which he has been for two hours planted ! He seems fairly under way ! One manly effort more, and you are free ! Vain hope ! it is only to settle himself more firmly that he stretches up, for a moment, his awful form. Down he sinks again, and you are booked for another hour of "dire disaster and supine defeat." ya moths of BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 129 precious moments ! affable wolves of time ! who eat up our very seed-brain, and give us nothing hi return but unprofitable husks and chaff! What golden hours ye have remorselessly destroyed, feeding upon those priceless, hoarded evenings that never can be restored, — nights that seemed made for study and the "mind's most apt en- deavor " ! The Emperor Julius Caesar, on one occasion, proved himself a most bothersome social visitor. I read lately one of Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus, describing a visit which the august Julius had been making at his villa; and the epistle gives a most ludicrous account of the Emperor's "dropping in" upon him. It seems that the world's imperial master had sent word to Cicero that he would soon be along his way, and would give him a call. The silver-tongued orator w^as only too delighted at the promised honor, and immediately hurried off a messenger to say, " Come, by all means ; happy to see you any time; and you must spend several days with me." On the morninfj of the bald headed warrior's ex- 130 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. pected arrival, we may judge of Cicero's aston- isliment and alarm, when a courier arrived with the hitelligeuce that Julius was comfortablj^ on his way to the villa, but that he was attended by a thousand men, who must also be " put up," as we would say nowadays; that is, handsomely fed and sheltered during the Emperor's little visit. Cicero's accommodations were not exten- sive, and his dismay corresponded in inverse ratio to the smallness of his quarters. Not an- ticipating any such addition to his limited hos- pitalities, he was obliged to send out at once, all over the neighborhood, for tents and provender; and, borrowing here and there, he managed to make a fiiir appearance when the great Julius and all his host came riding up. But writing about the affair to Atticus, after the party had gone on, and tranquillity had been restored to his house, he says, "The Emperor was very pleasant, and all that, but, under the circumstances, he is not a man to whom I should ever say again, ' When you are passing this wa}' another time, sir, drop in and give us a call.'" BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 131 But how various the employment of your pro- fessionally ''bothersome people"! Kind-hearted B. C. told me he had been bothered for j^ears by a reforming inebriate, who made his acquaintance in this wise. B. is an old-fashioned clergyman who allows himself to be at everybody's call ; and, seated one Saturday morning busily "touching up " his sermon for the next day, Susan (his Irish footman, as he calls her) knocked at the study door (B. C. always writes in an apartment up five pairs of stairs), and informed the good padre that "a gintleman warnted to see his Riverence down in the lower intry." Now it is a matter of sev- eral minutes, and much expenditure of leg-power, to descend those multitudinous flights which lead into the hall below; but down goes B., with his ever-smihng, ready courtesy, to meet the gintle- man who has so kindly called upon him. B. says a suggestive odor, not at all aqueous, but com- pounded of various cheap and vile liquors, saluted his nostrils as he approached the vicinity of his imknown caller ; and that when he got fairly into the hall he was aware of a presence he had never 132 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. encountered before. The figure raised its head with difficulty, and thus delivered itself some- what ostentatiously : " I am a reformed inebriate, Doctor, and, having taken the oath, would hum- bl}- beg your Riverence to lend me five dollars to help me keep the pledge." B. C. affirms that he could not at the moment determine exactly how that precise amount in cuiTency was to help the poor man in the object named, but that he thought it best to "accommodate his caller to the desired sum." Dismissing the whilom ine- briate with such counsel as his wise heart can always command, B. went up stairs again to his dutiful task. A week went by, and that morning call had wellnigh vanished from his recollection,, when Susan again appeared as heretofore and an- nounced a second visit to the doctor from his unknown friend. Down went the good man in his slippers, anticipating an announcement from the poor creature that success had followed his efforts to keep sober, and that he had . come to express his gratitude. As B. was going down the last pair of stairs, the man, holding firmly on to BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 133 the baluster below, looked up confidingly and said, *' Doctor, I 've fallen again, and have come for five more ! " "I expostulated with him," said the doctor, in rehiting the incident to me, "but he would not retire until I had repeated the loan, and now he is constantly falling, and spends half his time in my front entry, bothering me for continued fives to enable him to stand up against temptation." There is a French proverb which declares that nothing is certain to happen but the unforeseen ; and some bothersome people are constantly illus- trating the truth of this Gallic mot. G. T., from his youth up, has been a constant exemplification of it. His watchful parents placed iron bars across his nursery windows, but he elected to fiill down the back stairs twice during his nonage, and on both occasions damaged his slender chances for being reckoned a " pretty fellow." All his life long, instead of hitting straight forward, he has bothered his agonized associates by striking out sideways without warning, and thus getting worsted in every contest. One can never be sure of him to this 134 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. dtiy (he is past seventy and alarmingly vigorous), and he bothers his best friends by unexpected infelicities of thought and action to that degree that they sometimes breathe the pious wish that he were an aged angel flying somewhere else. To enumerate his unlimited feats in the art of bother- ation would require the pen of a ready writer. If G. T. always does the wrong thing his kins- man X. as incontinently says the wrong one, and bothers people in that way. After reading and delighting in that wonderful romance, "Tlie Mar- ble Faun," on being introduced to the distin- guished author, X. asked him if "he had ever been in Italy. ^' And it is related that he inno- cently inquired of Mrs. Stowe one day " if she had looked much into the subject of slavery" ! "Do you take sugar in jonv coffee, Mr. X.'?" asked that careful, almost too immaculate housekeeper, the hospitable lady of Joy Cottage, as she handed him a cup of her aromatic beverage. "Never when the coffee is good," replied X., bowing his homage to our admirable hostess. A few moments afterwards we heard his loud, explosive voice call- BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 135 ing after Tom, the servant, to "^x^ss the sugar'" ! Now there is nothing positively had about X. : on the contrary, there is much that is positively good in him. At the first tap of the drum he ran off to the war, and among its battle-records there are no pages more fearless than his. Out of his mod- est income he supports one or more indigent lads (sons of his dead comrades) at the university. He is generous without fault ; but he is tranquilly hothersome in the way I have indicated to the very margin of patient endurance. He is a saint in morals, but a desperate offender in manners. My old acquaintance W. H. says the people who bother him most are those human Curiosity ter- riers who watch all your sayings and doings, and never let you stir without following you up every- where with this keen scent. They wish to know " all about you." They seem always on a cheerful tour of investigation among other people's faults or foibles. Their constant cry is, " Lo here ! " or " Lo there ! " They study " to find out your mo- tives " even. They desire to be informed (for their own satisfaction) what actuated you to move thus 136 BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. or thus. Tristram Shandy called this class of botherers " Motive Mongers," and accused his own father of being one of them. Tristram averred that the old gentleman was a very dangerous per- son for a man to sit by, either laughing or crying, for he generally knew your motive for doing both '' much better than you knew it yourself." Silas W. carried this searching demand of reasons for conduct to such a length that I once heard him express a decided aversion to Moses, " for," said he, " I never could exactly fathom that man's mo- tives ! " Among the smaller brood of bothersome people, my cousin G. reckons those dense- witted, circum- stantial souls who ivill interruj^t your best story with a doubt or a denial of its verity. They live in an atmosphere of imperfect sympathies, and goad you to blasphemy almost by their stolid unrecep- tivity. The man who robs your anecdote of its prosperity by an ill-timed arrest of its recital, says G., would bury his own father before the remains are decently ready for sepulture. I had written thus far, when a restless neighbor BOTHERSOME PEOPLE. 137 of mine called to bear me away, over a hot road, to view a bloated bowlder lie had discovered miles off, on one of his peregrinations. This kind, mis- taken soul constantly bothers me by insisting on " showing me things " I do not desire to see. His mania is that of an Indicator. Some " prospect," some famous kitchen-garden, somebody's pig or poultry, anything big enough " to show," trans- ports him into a fever of exhibition, and you never meet him but he burns to take you somewhere to see something, until you long to bequeath him as a constant resident to the next county. But the length of this paper is, I perceive, already a glaring illustration of my subject, and unwittingly I become one of the ^^ Bothersome Peo- 'pW'' I attempt to describe ! PLEASANT GHOSTS. o©iK3r> PLEASANT GHOSTS. li*^ i% OFTEN amuse myself, as I sit alone half- dreaming before the fire in a certain upper room, looking out on the river Charles, by calling up the memorable forms of those once active "ministers of thought," who at various periods during the past twenty years have slept in this very apartment, and are now "to calm, unwaking silence consecrate." Falling into an afternoon doze not long ago, as I rested in the twilight, " I saw a vision in my sleep," so enchanting in all its details that I shall never forget the exquisite impression left on my mind. I had been re-reading that afternoon Plu- tarch's divine essay " On the Tranquillity of the Mind," and had felt a soothing influence like a dis- 142 PLEASANT GHOSTS. tilled aroma rising up out of its lovely pages. When I came to these words I lingered over them several minutes, half-closing the book : " For as censers, even after they are empty, do for a long time re- tain their fragrancy, as Carneades expresseth it, so the good actions of a wise man perfume his mind, and leave a rich scent behind them; so that joy is, as it were, watered with these essences and owes its flourishing to them." Then suddenly I seemed to be listening to the beloved voice of a poet, reading from his manuscript an unprinted piece, which, in the kindness of an old friend- ship, he had brought to gladden me. I thought when he pronounced these words, — " Where are the others ? Voices from the deep Caverns of darkness answer nie, " They sleep ! " I heard in the outer passage a low, subdued sym- phony played only as a master-hand can call such harmonies into being. The notes rippled on as if caressed into sound by a most loving hand, and although veiled and seemingly remote in space, they were yet clear enough to be distinctly audi- ble throughout the room. Now the music was a PLEASANT GHOSTS. 143 kind of solemn march, intermingled with chants as if from antiphonals, and then it alternated into labyrinthine infinities of joyous, mystical harmony, expressive of rapturous praise and inexhaustible worship. On it seemed to come, — " As light and wind within some delicate cloud," — and pause outside the little room where I was sit- ting. Soon the door swung noiselessly open, and looking up I saw a beautiful procession of well- known forms enter the dimly lighted apartment. The faces were those I had known in years past, and each countenance was radiant with a glow of recognition, as it approached the white-haired poet who sat reading his glowing lines in the twilight. I was about to apprise him of the entrance of so many old and dear friends (shadows although I knew them to be), when one of the figures gave me a sign of warning not to disturb the flow of the poem, intimating with raised forefinger that they had all come to listen. When the last two lines — " And as the evening twilight fades away, The sky is filled with stars invisible by day " — 144 PLEASANT GHOSTS. fell from the poet's lips, and he was folding up the manuscript of " Morituri Salutamus," a holy silence seemed to pervade the room. Then the symphony began again, and as it now rose and died away, " a kind of fading rainbow-music on the air," the figures moved forward toward the spot where their old companion was sitting. Each one seemed to bend above him for a moment with infinite tenderness and illumined love, and then to kiss his forehead twice with a kind of rapture. I know not how many voiceless spirits had thus entered the room, for a mist had fallen before my eyes; but I recognized the never-to-be-forgotten forms of H. and D. and S. and A. and T. and K. and F. and M., — "Through lime and change unquenchably the same," — just as I had seen them come about Hyperion in the old remembered days. A brand falling on the hearth dispersed the immortal company, — the living and the dead " inheritors of w^ell-fulfilled renown " ; and when I descended to the library and told my wife what I PLEASANT GHOSTS. 145 had seen and heard up stairs, she said, with a wise and dehghted smile, " This is what comes of living- next door to a great artist. I have never heard him play Beethoven and Bach, through the ceil- ing, more divinely than he has rendered them during the last half-hour. It is a fortune in itself to live in the next house, with thin partitions between, to a master like the Herr Otto D. ; for such a neighbor has the power not only to gladden our waking hours, but to bring us the blessed boon of pleasant dreams." THE PETTIBOM LIMAGG. /^a9£3\ THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. E were sitting around the blazing fire one wet winter night, in Crawford's Roman studio, when somebody started the sub- ject of inherited wealth and talent. There were half a dozen artists in the group, and among them the handsome and successful Esek Pettibone. He was an aristocratic-looking youth, better dressed than his companions, and his air was that of a man who had a pedigree behind him that entitled hira to hold up his head anywhere. None of us knew exactly the story of his life, but we all thought he belonged to a " fine old family " some- where in America. After Crawford, who talked remarkably well, had told several anecdotes apro- 150 THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. pos of the subjects up for comment, he turned to Mr. Pettibone, and asked him to favor the com- pany with a certain little incident in his own life, feeling sure that we should all be interested in the narrative. The elegant young fellow crossed his legs, fondled his mustache in a way that meant willingness, and told the following bit of personal history : — The name Esek Pettibone, gentlemen, belongs to a remote and pious people, and I Avish to affirm in the outset that it is a good thing to be well- born. In thus connecting the mention of my name with a positive statement, I am not unaware that a catastrophe lies coiled up in the juxtaposi- tion. But I cannot help saying plainly that I am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. Esto PERPETUA ! To have had somebody for a great- grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE, 151 done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and, as the farmer in Conway described Mount Washington, I thought the Duke felt a propensity to " hunch up some." Somehow it is pleasant to look doiun on the crowd and have a conscious right to do so. Left an orphan at thp tender age of four years, having no brothers or sisters to prop me round with young affections and sympathies, I fell into three pairs of hands, excellent in their way, but peculiar. Patience, Eunice, and Mary Ann Petti- bone were my aunts on my father's side. All my mother's relations kept sliady when the lonely orphan looked about for protection ; but Patience Pettibone, in her stately way, said : " The boy belongs to a good family, and he shall never want while his three aunts> can support him." So I went to live with my plain but benignant protec- tors, in the State of New Hampshire. During my boyhood, the best-drilled lesson that fell to my keeping was this : " Respect yourself. We come of more than ordinary parentage. Su- 152 THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. perior blood was probably concerned in getting up the Pettibones. Hold your head erect, and some day you shall have proof of your high lineage." I remember once, on being told that I must not share my juvenile sports with the butcher's three little beings, I begged to know why not. Aunt Eunice looked at Patience, and Mary Ann knew what she meant. " My child," slowly murmured the eldest sister, " our family no doubt came of a very old stock ; perhaps we belong to the nobility. Our ancestors, it is thought, came over laden with honors, and no doubt were embarrassed with riches, though the latter importation has dwindled in the lapse of years. Respect yourself, and when you grow up you will not regret that your old and careful aunt did not wish you to pla}^ with butchers' oiFspring." I felt mortified that I had ever had a desire to " knuckle up " w^ith any but kings' sons or sultans'" little boys. I lodged to be among my equals in the urchin line, and fly my kite with only high- born youngsters. Thus 1 lived in a constant scene of self-enchant- THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. 153 ment on the part of the sisters, who assumed all the port and feeling that properly belong to ladies of quality. Patrimonial splendor to come danced before their dim eyes ; and handsome settlements, gay equipages, and a general grandeur of some sort loomed up in the future for the American branch of the House of Pettibone. It was a life of opulent self-delusion, which my aunts were never tired of nursing ; and I was too young to doubt the reality of it. All the mem- bers of our little houseliold held up their heads, as if each said, in so many words, " There is no origi- nal sin in our composition, whatever of that com- modity there may be mixed up with the common clay of Snowborough." Aunt Patience was a star, and dwelt apart. Aunt Eunice looked at her through a determined pair of spectacles, and worshipped while she gazed. The youngest sister lived in a dreamy state of honors to come, and had constant zoological vis- ions of lions, griffins, and unicorns, drawn and quartered in every possible style known to the Heralds' CoUeiie. The Keverend Hebrew Bullet, 154 THE PET TIB ONE LINEAGE. who used to drop in quite often and drink several compulsory glasses of home-made wine, encour- aged his three parishioners in their aristocratic notions, and extolled them for what he called their "stooping down to every-day life." He differed with the ladies of our house only on one point. He contended that the unicorn of the Bible and the rhinoceros of to-day were one and the same animal. My aunts held a different opinion. In the sleeping-room of my Aunt Patience re- posed a trunk. Often during my childish years I longed to lift the lid, and spy among its contents the treasures my young fancy conjured up as lying there in state. I dared not ask to have the cover raised for my gratification, as I had often been told I was " too little " to estimate aright what that armorial box contained. "When you grow^ up, you shall see the inside of it," Aunt Mary Ann used to say to me ; and so I wondered and wished, V)ut all in vain. I must have the virtue of yems, bef(^re I could view the treasures of past magnifi- cence, so long entombed in that wooden sarcoi^ha- TUB PETTIBONE LINEAGE. 155 gas. Once I saw the faded sisters bending over the trunk together, and, as I thought, embahning something in camphor. Curiosity impelled me to linger, but, nnder some pretext, I was nodded out of the room. Although my kinswomen's means were far from ample, they determined that Swiftmouth College should have the distinqtion of calling me one of her sons, and accordingly I was in due time sent for preparation to a neighboring academy. Years of study and hard fare in country boarding-houses told upon my self-importance as the descendant of a great Englishman, notwithstanding all my let- ters from the honored three came freighted with counsel to " respect myself, and keep up the dig- nity of the family." Growing-up man forgets good counsel. Tlie Arcadia of respectability is apt to give place to the levity of football, and other low-toned accomplishments. The book of life, at that period, opens readily at fun and frolic, and the insignia of greatness give the school-boy no envious pangs. I was nineteen when I entered tlie hoary halls 156 THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. of Swiftmouth. I call them hoary, because they had been built more than fifty years. To me they seemed unconmionly hoary, and I snuffed antiquity in the dusty purlieus. I now began to study in good earnest the wisdom of the past. I saw clearly the value of dead men and mouldy precepts, especially if the former had been en- tombed a thousand years, and if the latter were well done in sounding Greek and Latin. I began to reverence royal lines of deceased monarchs, and longed to connect my own name, now growing into college popularity, with some far-off mighty one who had ruled in pomp and luxury his obsequious people. The trunk in Snowborough troubled my dreams. In that receptacle still slept the proof of our family distinction. " I will go," said I, " to the home of my aunts the next vacation, and there learn how we became mighty, and discover pre- cisely why we don't practise to-day our inherited claims to glory." I went to Snowborough. Aunt Patience was now anxious to lay before her eager nephew the proof he burned to behold. But first she must THE PET TIB ONE LINEAGE. 157 explain. All the old family documents and let- ters were, no doubt, destroyed in the great fire of '98, as nothing in the shape of parchment or paper implying nobility had ever been discovered in Snowborough, or elsewhere. Bat — there had been preserved, for many years, a suit of imperial clothes, that had been worn by their great-grand- father in England, and, no doubt, in the New World also. These garments had been carefully watched and guarded ; for were they not the proof that their owner belonged to a station in life, second, if second at all, to the royal court of King George himself 1 Precious casket, into which I was soon to have the privilege of gazing ! Through how many long years these fond, foolish virgins had lighted their unflickering lamps of expectation and hope at this cherished shrine ! I was now on my way to the family repository of all our greatness. I went up stairs " on the jump." We all knelt down before the well-pre- served box ; and my proud Aunt Patience, in a somewhat reverent manner, turned the key. My heart, — I am not ashamed to confess it now, 158 THE PET TIB ONE LINEAGE. although it is several years since the partle carree, in search of family honors, were on their knees that summer afternoon in Snowborough, — my heart beat high. I was about to look on that which might be a duke's or an earl's regalia. And I was descended from the owner in a direct line ! I had lately been reading Shakespeare's " Titus Androni- cus " ; and I remembered, there before the trunk, the lines, — " sacred receptacle of my joys, Sweet cell of virtue and iioLility ! " The lid went up, and the sisters began to unroll the precious garments, which seemed all enshrined in aromatic gums and spices. The odor of that interior lives with me to this day; and I grow faint with the memory of tliat hour. With pious precision the clothes were uncovered, and at last the whole suit was laid before my expectant eyes. Whatever dreadful shock may be in reserve for my declining years, I am certain I can bear it ; for I went through that scene at Snowborough, and still live ! THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE. 159 When the garments were fully displayed, all the aunts looked at me. I had been to college ; I had studied Burke's " Peerage " ; I had been once to New York. Perhaps I could immediately name the exact station in noble British life to which that suit of clothes belonged. I could ; I saw it all at a glance. I grew flustered and pale. I dared not look my poor deluded female relatives in the face. " What rank in the peerage do these gold-laced garments and big buttons betoken 1 " cried all three. " It is a suit of servant's livery T' gasped I, and. fell back with a shudder. That evening, after the sun had gone down, we buried those hateful garments in a ditch at the bottom of the garden. Ptest there, perturbed body-coat, yellow breeches, brown gaiters, and all! " Vain pomp and glory of tliis world, I hate ye! " GETTING HOME AGAIN, ^m^ GETTING HOME AGAIN. A REVERIE. T is a good thing, said an aged Chinese TraveUing Philosopher, for every man, sooner or later, to get back again to his own teacup. And Oo Long was right. Travel may be "the conversion of money into mind," — and happy the man who has turned much coin into that precious commodity, — but it is a good thing, after being tossed about the world from the Battery to Africa, — that dry-nurse of lions, as Horace calls her, — to anchor once more beside the old familiar tea-urn on the old familiar tea-table. This is the only " steamy column " worth hailing with a glad welcome after long absence from home, 1G4 GETTING HOME AGAIN. and fully entitled to be heartily applauded for its " loud-hissing " propensities. I am not a Marco Polo or a William de Ru- bruquis, and I have no wonders to tell of the Great Mogul or the Great Cham. I did not sail for Messrs. Pride, Pomp, Circumstance, and Com- pany ; consequently, I have no great exploits to recount. I have been wrecked at sea only once in my many voyages, and, so far as I know my tastes, do not care to solbcit aid again to be thrown into the same awkward situation. But for a time I have been " Placed far amid the melancholy main," and now I am among my own teacups. This is happiness enough for a cold winter's night. Mid- ocean, and mid teacups ! Stupendous change, let me tell you, worthy friend, who never yet set sail where sharks and other strange sea-cattle bob their noses above the brine, — who never lived forty days in the bowels of a ship, unable to hold your head up to the captain's bluff " good-morn- ing" or the steward's cheery "good-night." Sir Philip Sidney discourses of a riding-master he GETTING HOME AGAIN. 1G5 encountered in Vienna, who spoke so eloquently of tlie noble animal he had to deal with, that he. almost persuaded Sir Philip to wish himself a horse. I have known ancient mariners expa- tiate so lovingly on the frantic enjoyments of the deep sea, that very youthful listeners have for the time resolved to know no other existence. If the author of the "Arcadia" had been permitted to become a prancing steed, he might, after the first exhilarating canter, have lamented his equine state. How many a first voyage, begun in hilarious impatience, has caused a bitter repentance ! The sea is an overrated element, and I have nothing to say in its favor. Because I am out of its uneasy lap to-night, I almost resemble in felicity Rich- ter's Walt, who felt himself so happy, that he was transported to the third heaven, and held the other two in his hand that he might give them away. To-morrow morning I shall not hear that swashing, scaring sound directly overhead on the wet deck, which has so often murdered slumber. Delectable sensation that I do not care a rope's- end " how many knots " I am going, and that 166 GETTING HOME AGAIN. my ears are so far away from that eternal " Ay, ay, sir!" "The whales," says old Chapman, speaking of Neptmie, "exulted under him, and knew their mighty king." Let them exult, say I, and be blowed, and all due honor to their salt sovereign ! but of their personal acquaintance I am not ambitious. I have met them now and then in the sixty thousand miles of their watery playing-places I have passed over, and they are not pretty to look at. Roll on, — and so will I, for the present, at least, as far out oiyour reach as possible. Yes, wise denizen of the Celestial Empire, it is a good, nay, a great thing, to return even to so small a home-object as an old teacup. As I lift the bright brim to my lips, I repeat it. As I pour out my second, my third, and my fourth, I say it again. Oo Long was right ! And now, as the rest of the household have all gone up bed-ward, and left me with their good- night tones, "Like flowers' voices, if they could but speak," I dip my pen into the cocked hat of the brave little GETTING HOME AGAIN. 1G7 bronze warrior who has fed us all so many years with ink from the place where his brains ought to be. Pausing before I proceed to paper, I look around on our household gods. The coal bursts into crackling fits of merriment, as I thrust the poker between the iron ribs of the grate. It seems to say, in the most persuasive audible manner of which it is capable, " 0, go no more a-roaming, a-roaming, across the windy sea ! " How odd it seems to be sitting here again, listen- ing to the old clock out there in the entry ! Often I seemed to hear it during the months that have flown away, when I knew that " our ancient " was standing sentinel for Time in another hem- isphere. One night, dark and stormy on the Mediterranean, as I lay wakeful and watchful in the little steamer that was bearing us painfully on through the noisy tempest towards St. Peter's and the Colosseum, suddenly, above the tumult of the voyage, this household monitor began audibly and regularly, I thought, to mark the seconds. Then it must have been only fancy. Now it is something more, and I know that our 1G8 GETTING HOME AGAIN. mahogany friend is really wagging his brassy beard just outside the door. I remember now, as I lay listening that rough night at sea, how Mil- ton's magic-sounding line came to me beating a sad melody with the old clock's imagined tramp, — *' The Lars aud Lemures moan with midnight plaint." Let the waves bark to-night far out on " the deso- late, rainy seas," — the old clock is all right in our entry ! Landed, and all safe at last ! my much-abused, lock-broken, unhinged portmanteau unpacked and laid ignobly to rest under the household eaves ! Stay a moment, — let me pitch this inky passport into the fire. How it writhes and growls black in the face ! And now it will trouble its owner no more forever. It was a foolish, extravagant com- panion, and I am glad to be rid of it. One little blazing fragment lifts itself out of the flame, and I can trace on the smouldering relic the stamp of Austria. Go back again into the grate, and perish with the rest, dark blot ! I look around this quiet apartment, and won- GETTING HOME AGAIN. 169 der if it be all true, this getting home again. I stir the fire once more to assure myself that I am not somewhere else, — that the street outside my window is not known as Jermyn Street in the Haymarket, or the Via Babuino near the Pincio, or Princes Street, near the Monument. How can I determine that I am not dreaming, and that I shall not wake up to-morrow morn- ing and find myself on the Arno 1 Perhaps I am 7iot really back again where there are no " Eremites and friars, Wliite, black, and gray, with all their trumpery." Perhaps I am a flamingo, a banyan-tree, or a man- darin. But there stands the teacup, and identity is sure ! Here at last, then, for a live certainty ! But how strange it all seems, resting safely in easy slippers, to recall some of the far-off scenes so lately present to me ! Yesterday was it, or a few weeks ago, that this " excellent canopy," this mod- est roof, dwelt three thousand miles away to the westward of me 1 i\i this moment stowed away in a snuggery called my own ; and then — how brief 170 GETTING HOME AGAIN. a period it seems ! what a small parenthesis in time! — putting another man's latch-key into an- other man's door, night after niglit, in a London fog, and feeling for the unfamiliar aperture with all the sensation of an innocent housebreaker ! Muffled here in the oldest of dressing-gowns, that never lifted its arms ten rods from the spot where it was born ; and only a few weeks ago lolling out of C. R.'s college-window at Oxford, counting the deer, as they nibbled the grass, and grouped them- selves into beautiful pictures on the sward of an- cient Magdalen ! As I look into the red fire in the grate, I think of the scarlet coats flashing not long ago in Stratford, when E. F., kindest of men and mer- riest of hosts took us all to the " meet." I gaze round the field again, and enjoy the enlivening scene. White-haired and tall, our kind-hearted friend walks his glossy mare up and down the turf. His stalwart sons, with sport imbrowned, proud of their sire, call attention to the spar- kle in the old man's eye. I am mounted on a fiery little animal, and am half-frightened at the GETTING HOME AGAIN. 171 thought of what she may do with me wlieii the chase is high. Confident that a roll is inevi- table, and that, with a dislocated neck, enjoyment would be out of the question, I pull bridle, and carefully dismount, hoping not to attract atten- tion. Whereat all my English cousins beg to inquire, " What 's the row % " I whisper to the red-coated brave prancing near me, that " I have changed my mind, and will not follow the hunt to-day, — another time I shall be most happy, — just now I am not quite up to the mark, — next week I shall be all right again," etc. One of the lithe hounds, who seems to have steel springs in his hmd legs, looks contemptuously at the American stranger, and turns up his long nose like a moral insinuation. Off they fly ! I w^atch the beautiful cavalcade bound over the brook, and sweep away into the woodland passes. Then I saunter down by the Avon, and dream away the daylight in endless visions of long ago, w^hen sweet Will and his merry comrades moved about these pleasant haunts. Returning to the hall, I find I have walked ten miles over the breezy country, 172 GETTING HOME AGAIN. and knew it not, — so pleasant is the fi-agrant turf that has been often pressed by the feet of Nature's best-beloved child. Round the mahog- any tree that night I hearken as the hunters tell the glories of their sport, — how their horses, like Homer's steeds, " Devoured up the plain " ; and I can hear now, in imagination, the voices of the deep-mouthed hounds rising and swelling among the Warwick glens. Neither can I forget, as I sit musing here, whose green English carpet, down in Kent, I so lately rested on under the trees, — nor how I wandered off with the lord of that hospitable manor to an old castle hard by his grounds, and climbed with him to the turret-tops, — nor how I heard him repeople in fancy the aged ruin, as we leaned over the w\all together and looked into the desolate courtyard below. Let me bear in mind, too, how happil}^ the hours went by me so recently in the vine-embowered cottage of dear L. H., the beautiful old man with silver hair, — GETTING HOME AGAIN. 173 ''As hoary frost with spangles doth attire The mossy branches of an oak." The sound of the poet's voice was hke the musical fall of water in my ears, and every sentence he uttered then is still a melody. As I sit dreamily here, he speaks again of " life's morning march, when his bosom was young," and of his later years, when his struggles were many and keen, and only his pen was the lever which rolled poverty away from his door. I can hear him, as I pause over this leaf, as I listened to the old clock that night at sea. He tells me of his cher- ished companions, now all gone, — of Shelley, and Keats, and Charles Lamb, whom he loved, — of Byron, and Coleridge, and the rest. As I sit at his little table, he hands me a manuscript, and says it is the " Endymion," John Keats's gift to himself. He reads from it some of his favorite lines, and the tones of his voice are very tender over his dead friend's poem. As I pass out of his door that evening, the moon falls on his white locks, his thin hand rests for a moment on my shoulder, and I hear him say very kindly, " God 174 GETTING HOME AGAIN. bless you ! " And when, a few months later, I am among the Alpine hills, and word comes to me that L, H. is laid to rest in Kensal Green Church- yard, I am grateful to have looked upon his cheerful countenance, and to have heard him say those sacred last words. Gayest of cities, bright Bois de Boulogne, and splendid cafes ! I do not much affect your shows, but cannot dismiss forever the cheerful little room, cloud-environed almost, up to which I have so often toiled, after days of hard walking among the gaudy streets of the French capital. One pleasant scene, at least, rises unbidden, as I recall the past. It is a brisk, healthy morn- ing, and I walk in the direction of the Tuile- ries. Bending my steps toward the palace (it is yet early, and few loiterers are abroad in the leafy avenues), I observe a group of three per- sons, not at all distinguished in their appear- ance, having a roistering good time in the Im- perial Garden. One of them is a little boy, with a chubby, laughing face, who shouts loudly to his father, a grave, thoughtful gentleman, who GETTING HOME AGAIN. 175 runs backwards, endeavoring to out-race his child. The mother, a fair-haired woman, with her bonnet half loose in the wind, strives to attract the boy's attention and win him to her side. They all run and leap in the merry morning air, and, as I watch them more nearly, I know them to be the royal family out larking before Paris is astir. They have hung up a picture in my gallery of memory, very pleasant to look at, this cold night in America. Alas ! they were not always so happy as when they romped together in the garden ! The days that are fled still knock at the door and enter. I am walking on the banks of the Esk, toward a friendly dwelling in Lasswade, — Mavis Bush they call the pretty place at the foot of the hill. A slight figure, clad in black, waits for me at the garden-gate, and bids me welcome in accents so kindly, that I, too, feel the magic influence of his low, sweet voice, — an eff'ect which Wordsworth described to me, years before, as eloquence set to music. The face of my host is very pale, and, when he puts his thin arm within mine, I feel how frail a body may con- 176 GETTING HOME AG ATM. tain a spirit of fire. I go into his modest abode and listen to his wonderful talk, wishing all the while that the hours were months, that I might linger there, spellbound, day and night, before the master. He proposes a ramble across the meadows to Roslin Chapel, and on the way he discourses of the fascinating drug so painfully associated with his name in literature, — of Christopher North, in whose companionship he delighted among the Lakes, — of Elia, whom he recalled as the most lovable man among his friends, and whom he has well described else- where as a Diogenes with the heart of a Saint John. In the dark evening he insists npon sit- ting out with me on my return to Edinbnrgh. AVhen it grows late, and the mists are heavy on the mountains, we stand together, clasping hands of farewell in the dim road, the cold Scotch hills looming np all about ns. As the small figure of the English Opinm-Eater glides away into the midnight distance, my eyes strain after him to catch one more glimpse. The Esk roars, and I hear his footsteps no longer. GETTING HOME AG A FN. 177 The scene changes, as the clock strikes in the entry. I am lingering in the piazza of the Winged Lion, and the bronze giants in then- turret overlooking the square raise their ham- mers and beat the solemn march of Time. As I float away through the watery streets, old Shy- lock shuffles across the bridge, black barges glide by me in the silent canals, groups of un- familiar faces lean from the balconies, and I hear the plashing w^aters lap the crumbling walls of Venice, with its dead doges and decaying palaces. Again I stir the fire, and feel it is home all about me. Bat I like to sit longer and think of that rosy evening last summer, when, walking into Interlachen, I beheld the ghost-like figure of the Jungfrau issuing out of her cloudy palace to welcome the stars, — of a cool, bright, autumnal morning on the western battlements overlooking Genoa, the blue Mediterranean below mirroring the silent fleet that lay so motionless on its bosom, — of a midnight visit to the Colosseum with a band of German students, who bore torches 178 GETTING HOME AGAIN. in and out of the time-worn arches, and sang their echoing songs to the full moon, — of days, how many and how magical 1 when I awoke every morning to say, " We are in Rome ! " But it grows late, and it is time now to give over these reflections. Let me wind up my watch, and put out the candle. HOW TO Rouan it. HOW TO ROUGH IT. TFE has few things better than this," said Dr. Johnson, on feeling himself settled in a coach, and rolling along the road. I cannot agree with the great man. Times have changed since the Doctor and Mr. Boswell travelled for pleasure ; and I much prefer an ex- pedition to Moosehead, or a tramp in the Adiron- dack, to being boxed up in a four-wheeled ark and made " comfortable," according to the Doc- tor's idea of felicity. Francis Galton, Explorer, and Secretary to the Royal Geographical Society, has lately done the world a benefit by teaching its children how to travel. Few persons know the important secrets 182 EOW TO ROUGH IT. of how to walk, how to run, how to ride, how to cook, how to defend, how to ford rivers, how to make rafts, how to fish, how to hunt, in short, how to do the essential things that every travel- ler, soldier, sportsman, emigrant, and missionary- should be conversant with. The world is full of deserts, prairies, bushes, jungles, swamps, rivers, and oceans. How to " get round " the dangers of the land and the sea in the best possible way, how to shift and contrive so as to come out safely, are secrets w^ell worth knowing, and Mr. Galton has found the key. In this brief paper I shall frequently avail myself of the informa- tion he imparts, confident that in these days his wise directions are better than fine gold to a man who is obliged to rough it over the world, no matter where his feet may wander, his horse may travel, or his boat may sail. Wherewithal shall a man be clothed 1 Let us begin at the beginning with flannel always. Ex- perience has settled that flannel next the skin is indispensable for health to a traveller, and the sick and dead lists always include largely the HOW TO ROUGH IT. 183 names of those who neglect this material. Cotton stands Number Two on the list, and linen nowhere. Only last summer careless Tom Bowers achieved his quietus for the season by getting hot and wet and cold in one of his splendid Paris linen shirts, and now he wears calico ones whenever he wishes to ''appear proper" at Nahant or Newport. "The hotter the ground the thicker your socks," was the advice of an old traveller who once went a thirty-days' tramp at my side through the Alp country in summer. I have seen many a city bumpkin start for a White Mountain walk in the thinnest of cotton foot-coverings, but I never knew one to try them a second time. Stout shoes are preferable to boots always, and a wise traveller never omits to grease well his leather before and during his journey. Do not for- get to put a pair of old slippers into your knap- sack. After a hard day's toil, they are like magic, under foot. Let me remind the traveller whose feet are tender at starting that a capital remedy for blistered feet is to rub them at night with spirits mixed with tallow dropped from a candle. 184 now TO ROUGH IT. An old friend of mine thought it a good plan to soap the inside of the stocking before setting out, and I have seen him break a raw eg^^ into his shoes before putting them on, saying it softened the leather and made him " perfect " for the day. Touching coat, waistcoat, and trousers, there can be but one choice. Coarse tweed does the best business on a small capital. Cheap and strong, I have always found it the most ''paying" arti- cle in my travelling-wardrobe. Avoid that tailor- hem so common at the bottom of your pantaloons which retains water and does no good to anybody. Waistcoats would be counted as superfluous, were it not for the convenience of the pockets they carry. Take along an old dressing-gown, if you want solid comfort in camp or elsewhere after sunset. Gordon Cumming recommends a wide-awake hat, and he is good authority on that bead. A man " clothed in his right mind " is a noble object ; but six persons out of every ten who start on a jour- ney wear the wrong appai-el. The writer of these pages has seen four individuals at once standing EOW TO ROUGH IT. 185 up to their middles in a trout-stream, all adorned with black silk tiles, newly imported from the Hue St. Honore. It was a sight to make Daniel Boone and Izaak Walton smile in their celestial abodes. A light waterproof outside-coat and a thick pea-jacket are a proper span for a roving trip. Do not forget that a couple of good blankets also go a long way toward a traveller's paradise. I will not presume that an immortal being at this stage of the nineteenth century would make the mistake, when he had occasion to tuck up his shirt-sleeves, of turning them outw^ards, so that every five minutes they would be tumbling down with a crash of anathemas from the wearer. The supposition that any sane son of Adam would tuck up his sleeves inside out involves a suspicion, to say the least, that his wits had been overrated by a doting parent. " Grease and dirt are the savage's wearing- apparel," says the Swedish proverb. No comment is necessary in speaking wdth a Christian on this point, for cold water is one of civilization's closest allies. Avoid the bath, and the genius of disease 186 HOW TO ROUGH IT. and crime stalks in. *' Cleanliness is next to god- liness," remember. In packing your knapsack, keep in mind that sixteen or twenty pounds are weight enough, till, by practice, you can get pluck and energy into your back to increase that amount. Roughing it has various meanings, and the phrase is oftentimes ludicrously mistaken by many individuals. A friend with whom I once trav- elled thought he was roughing it daily for the space of three weeks, because he was obliged to lunch on cold chicken and tm-iced Champagne, and when it rained he was forced to seek shelter inside very inelegant hotels on the road. To rough it, in the best sense of that term, is to lie down every night with the ground for a mattress, a bundle of fagots for a pillow, and the stars for a coverlet. To sleep in a tent is semi-luxury, and tainted with too much effeminacy to suit the ardor of a first- rate " Rough," Parkyns, Taylor, Cumming, Fre- mont, and Kane have . told us how much superior are two trunks of trees, rolled together for a bed, under the open sky, to that soft, heating appara- HOW TO ROUGH IT. 187 tus called a bed in the best chamber. Every man to his taste, of course, but there come occasions in life when a man must look about him and arrange for himself, somehow. The traveller who has never slept in the woods has missed an enjoy- able sensation. A clump of trees makes a fine leafy post-bedstead, and to awake in the morning amid a grove of sheltering, nodding oaks is lung- inspiring. It was the good thought of a wanderer to say, " The forest is the poor man's jacket." Napoleon had a high opinion of the bivouac style of life, and on the score of health gave it the preference over tent-sleeping. Free circulation is a great blessing, albeit I think its eulogy rather strongly expressed by the Walden-Pondit, when he says, " I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox- cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion-train, and breathe a malaria all the way." The only objection to out- door slumber is dampness ; but it is easy to pro- tect one's self in wet weather from the unhealthy ground by boughs or india-rubber blankets. 188 HOW TO BOUGH IT. 'One of the great jjrecautions requisite for a tramp is to provide against thirst. AVant of water overtakes the traveller sometimes in the most annoying manner, and it is well to know how to fight off the dry fiend. Sir James Alexander cautions all who rough it to drink well before starting in the morning, and drink nothing all day till the halt, — and to keep the lips shut as much as possible. Another good authority recommends a pebble or leaf to be held in the mouth. Habit, however, does much in this case as in every other, and I have known a man, who had been accus- tomed at home to drink four tumblers of water at every meal, by force of will bring his necessity down to a pnit of liquid per day during a long tramp through the forest. One of the many ex- cellent things which Plutarch tells of Socrates is this noteworthy incident of his power of absti- nence. He says, whenever Socrates returned from any exercise, though he might be extremely dry, he refrained nevertheless from drinking till he had thrown away the first bucket of water he had drawn, that he might exercise himself to patience. HOW TO ROUGH IT. 189 and accustom his appetite to wait the leisure of reason. From water to fire is a natural transition. How to get a blaze just when you want it puzzles the will hugely sometimes. Every traveller should provide himself with a good handy steel, proper flint, and unfailing tinder, because lucifers are liable to many accidents. Pliny recommended the wood of mulberry, bay-laurel, and ivy, as good material to be rubbed together in order to procure a fire ; but Pliny is behind the times, and must not be trusted to make rules for " our boys." Of course no one would omit to take lucifers on a tramp ; but steel, flint, and tinder are three warm friends that in an emergency will always come up to the strike. To find firewood is a knack, and it ought to be well cultivated. Do not despise bits of dry moss, fine grass, and slips of bark, if you come across them. Twenty fires are fixilures in the open air for one that succeeds, unless the operator knows his business. A novice will use matches, wood, wind, time, and violent language enough to burn 190 no IV TO ROUGH IT. down a city, and never get any satisfaction out of all the expenditure ; while a knowing hand will, out of the stump of an old, half-rotten tree, bring you such magnificent, permanent heat, that your heart and your teakettle will sing together for joy over it. In making a fire, depend upon it, there is something more than luck, — there is always talent in it. I once saw Charles Lever (Harry Lorrequer's father) build up a towering blaze in a woody nook out of just nothing but what he scraped up from the ground, and his rare ability. You remember Mr. Opie the painter's answer to a student who asked him what he mixed his colors with. " Brains, sir," was the artist's prompt, gruff, and right reply. It takes brains to make a fire in a rainy night out in the woods ; but it can be done, — if you only know how to begin. I have seen a hearth made of logs on a deep snow sending out a cheerful glow, while the rain dripped and froze all about the merry party assembled. A traveller ought to be a good swimmer. There are plenty of watery crossings to be got over, and now TO ROUGH IT. 191 often there are no means at hand but what Na- ture has provided in legs and arms. But one of the easiest things in the world to make is a raft. Inflatable india-rubber boats also are now used in every climate, and a full-sized one weighs only forty pounds. General Fremont and Dr. Livingstone have tested their excellent qualities, and commend them as capable of standing a wonderful amount of wear and tear. But a boat can be made out of almost anything, if one have the skill to put it together. A party of sailors whose boat had been stolen put out to sea and were eighteen hours afloat in a crazy craft made out of a large basket woven with boughs such as they could pick up, and covered with their canvas tent, the inside being plastered with clay to keep out as much of the water as possible. In fording streams, it is well, if the water be deep and swift, to carry heavy stones in the hands, in order to resist being borne away by the cur- rent. Fords should not be deeper than three feet for men, or four feet for horses. Among the small conveniences, a good strong 192 now TO ROUGH IT. pocket-knife, a small " hard chisel," and a file should not be forgotten. A great deal of real work can be done with very few tools. One of Colt's rifles is a companion which should be spe- cially cared for, and a waterproof cover should always be taken to protect the lock during show- ers. There is one rule among hunters which ought always to be remembered, namely, " Look at the gun, but never let the gun look at you, or at your companions." Travellers are always more or less exposed to the careless handling of firearms, and numerous accidents occur by carry- ing the piece with the cock down on the nip- ple. Three fourths of all the gun accidents are owing to this cause ; for a blow on the back of the cock is almost sure to explode the cap, while a gun at half-cock is comparatively safe. Do not carry too many eatables on your expedi- tions. Dr. Kane says his party learned to modify and reduce their travelling-gear, and found that in direct proportion to its simplicity and to their apparent privation of articles of supposed necessity were their actual comfort and practical efficiency. HO IV TO ROUGH IT. 193 Step by step, so long as their Arctic service con- tinued, they went on reducing their sledging- oiitfit, until at last they came to the Esquimaux ultimatum of simplicity, — 7-aw 7neat and a far hag. Salt and pepper are needful condiments. Nearly all the rest are out of place on a roughing expedition. Among the most portable kinds of solid food are pemmican, jerked meat, wheat flour, barley, peas, cheese, and biscuit. Salt meat is a disappointing dish, and apt to be sadly uncertain. Somebody once said that water had tasted of sin- ners ever since the flood, and salted meat some- times has a taint full as vivid. Twenty-eight ounces of real nutriment per diem for a man in rough work as a traveller will be all that he requires; if he perform severe tramping, thirty ounces. The French say, C^est la soupe qui fait le soldaf, and I have always found on a tramping expedi- tion nothing so life-restoring after fatigue and hunger as the portable soup now so easily ob- tained at places where prepared food is put up for travellers' uses. Spirituous liquors are no 194 HOW TO ROUGH IT. help ill roughing it. On the contraiy, they in- vite sunstroke and various other unpleasant visit- ors incident to the life of a traveller. Habitual brandy-drinkers give out sooner than cold-water men, and I have seen fainting red noses by the score succumb to the weather, when boys addicted to water would crow like chanticleer through a long storm of sleet and snow on the freezing Alps. It is not well to lose your way ; but in case this unpleasant luck befall you, set systematically to work to find it. Throw terror to the idiots who always flutter and flounder, and so go wrong inevitably. Galton the Plucky says, — and he has as much cool wisdom to impart as a traveller needs, — when you make the unlively discovery that you are lost, ask yourself the three following questions : — 1. What is the least distance that I can with certainty specify, within which the path, the river, the seashore, etc., that I wish to regain, may lie ] 2. What is the direction, in a vague, general way, in which the path or river runs, or the sea- coast tends 1 now TO ROUGH IT. 195 3. When I last left the path, etc., did I turn to the left or to the right 1 As regards the first, calculate deliberate!}'- how long you have been riding or walking, and at what pace, since you left your party ; subtract for stop- pages and well-recollected zigzags; allow a mile and a half per hour as the pace when you have been loitering on foot, and three and a half when you have been walking fast. Occasional running makes an almost inappreciable difference. A man is always much nearer the lost path than he is inclined to fear. As regards the second, if you recollect the third, and also know the course of the path within eight points of the compass (or one fourth of the whole horizon), it is a great gain ; or even if you know your direction within twelve points, or one third of the whole horizon, that knowledge is worth something. Do not hurry, if you get bewildered. Stop and think. Then arrange matters, and you are safe. When Napoleon was once caught in a fog, while riding with his staff across a shallow arm of the Gulf of Suez, he thovght, as usual. 196 now TO ROUGH IT. His way was utterly lost, and going forward he found himself in deeper water. So he ordered his staff to ride from him in radiating lines in all directions, and such of them as should find shal- low water to shout out. If Napoleon had been alone on that occasion, he would have set his five wits to the task of finding the right way, and he would have found it. Finally, cheerfulness in large doses is the best medicine one can take along in his outdoor tramps. I once had the good luck to hear old Christopher North try his lungs in the open air in Scotland. Such laughter and such hill-shaking merry-heartedness I may never listen to again among the Lochs, but the lesson of the hour (how it rained that black night !) is stamped for life upon my remembrance. "Clap your back against the cliff," he shouted, " and never mind the del- uge ! " Christopher sleeps now under the turf he trod with such a gallant bearing, but few mortals know how to rouirh it like him ! AN OLD-TIME SOHOLAE,