THE DOCTOR ORDERS THE BEST SULKY.
(_With a Digression on "Hired Help"_)
"Abel! Slip Cassia into the new sulky, and fetch her round."
Abel was Dr. Kittredge's hired man. He was born in New Hampshire, a
queer sort of a State, with fat streaks of soil and population where
they breed giants in mind and body, and lean streaks which export
imperfectly nourished young men with promising but neglected appetites,
who may be found in great numbers in all the large towns, or could be
until of late years, when they have been half driven out of their
favorite basement-stories by foreigners, and half coaxed away from them
by California. New Hampshire is in more than one sense the Switzerland
of New England. The "Granite State" being naturally enough deficient in
pudding-stone, its children are apt to wander southward in search of
that deposit,--in the unpetrified condition.
Abel Stebbins was a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or mule
between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England
serving-man. The Old World has nothing at all like him. He is at once
an emperor and a subordinate. In one hand he holds one five-millionth
part (be the same more or less) of the power that sways the destinies
of the Great Republic. His other hand is in your boot, which he is
about to polish. It is impossible to turn a fellow-citizen whose vote
may make his master--say, rather, employer--Governor or President, or
who may be one or both himself, into a flunky. That article must be
imported ready-made from other centres of civilization. When a
New-Englander has lost his self-respect as a citizen and as a man, he
is demoralized, and cannot be trusted with the money to pay for a
dinner.
It may be supposed, therefore, that this fractional emperor, this
continent-shaper, finds his position awkward when he goes into service,
and that his employer is apt to find it still more embarrassing. It is
always under protest that the hired man does his duty. Every act of
service is subject to the drawback, "I am as good as you are." This is
so common, at least, as almost to be the rule, and partly accounts for
the rapid disappearance of the indigenous "domestic" from the basements
above mentioned. Paleontologists will by-and-by be examining the floors
of our kitchens for tracks of the extinct native species of
serving-man. The female of the same race is fast dying out; indeed, the
time is not far distant when all the varieties of young _woman_ will
have vanished from New England, as the dodo has perished in the
Mauritius. The young _lady_ is all that we shall have left, and the mop
and duster of the last Almira or Loïzy will be stared at by generations
of Bridgets and Noras as that famous head and foot of the lost bird are
stared at in the Ashmolean Museum.
Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man, took the true American view of his
difficult position. He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold
it, he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain. The Doctor, on his
part, treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not order a
gentleman to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he treated him
like a man. Every order was given in courteous terms. His reasonable
privileges were respected as much as if they had been guarantied under
hand and seal. The Doctor lent him books from his own library, and gave
him all friendly counsel, as if he were a son or a younger brother.
Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to
"hire out," he could never stand the word "servant," or consider
himself the inferior one of the two high contracting parties. When he
came to live with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss the
old gentleman, if he did not behave according to his notions of
propriety. But he soon found that the Doctor was one of the right sort,
and so determined to keep him. The Doctor soon found, on his side, that
he had a trustworthy, intelligent fellow, who would be invaluable to
him, if he only let him have his own way of doing what was to be done.
The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet. He was
grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely smiled,
but was always at work in the daytime and always reading in the
evening. He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man could
properly do, would go to the door or "tend table," bought the
provisions for the family,--in short, did almost everything for them
but get their clothing. There was no office in a perfectly appointed
household, from that of steward down to that of stable-boy, which he
did not cheerfully assume. His round of work not consuming all his
energies, he must needs cultivate the Doctor's garden, which he kept in
one perpetual bloom, from the blowing of the first crocus to the fading
of the last dahlia.
This garden was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos.
Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy
in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and
sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the
sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding
floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-
man. It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped God
according to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist's Puritanism
is always colored by the petals of his flowers,--and Nature never shows
him a black corolla.
Perhaps he may have little or nothing to do in this narrative; but as
there must be some who confound the New-England _hired man_,
native-born, with the _servant_ of foreign birth, and as there is the
difference of two continents and two civilizations between them, it did
not seem fair to let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky
without touching his features in half-shadow into our background.
The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her
cinnamon color, cassia being one of the professional names for that
spice or drug. She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an
Englishman would perhaps say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare, with
a low forehand, as is common in this breed, but with strong quarters
and flat hocks, well ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair of lively
ears,--a first-rate doctor's beast,--would stand until her harness
dropped off her back at the door of a tedious case, and trot over hill
and dale thirty miles in three hours, if there was a child in the next
county with a bean in its windpipe and the Doctor gave her a hint of
the fact. Cassia was not large, but she had a good deal of action, and
was the Doctor's show-horse. There were two other animals in his
stable: Quassia or Quashy, the black horse, and Caustic, the old bay,
with whom he jogged round the village.
"A long ride to-day?" said Abel, as he brought up the equipage.
"Just out of the village,--that's all.--There's a kink in her
mane,--pull it out, will you?"
"Goin' to visit some of the great folks," Abel said to himself. "Wonder
who it is."--Then to the Doctor,--"Anybody get sick at Sprowles's? They
say Deacon Soper had a fit, after eatin' some o' their frozen
victuals."
The Doctor smiled. He guessed the Deacon would do well enough. He was
only going to ride over to the Dudley mansion-house.