this auspicious occasion, I take the liberty to mingle my hearty
congratulations on the recurrence of the anniversary day we celebrate,
wishing your Highness (though indeed your Highness be somewhat
prematurely gray) many returns of the same, and that each of its
summer’s suns may shine as brightly on your brow as each winter snow
shall lightly rest on the grave of Israel Potter.
Your Highness’
Most devoted and obsequious,
THE EDITOR.
JUNE 17TH, 1854.
CHAPTER XXVI.
FORTY-FIVE YEARS.
For the most part, what befell Israel during his forty years wanderings
in the London deserts, surpassed the forty years in the natural
wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses.
In that London fog, went before him the ever-present cloud by day, but
no pillar of fire by the night, except the cold column of the monument,
two hundred feet beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top, at the
stone base, the shiverer, of midnight, often laid down.
But these experiences, both from their intensity and his solitude, were
necessarily squalid. Best not enlarge upon them. For just as extreme
suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim, so, to others,
is its depiction without some corresponding delusive mitigation. The
gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the
calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons;
least of all, the pauper’s; admonished by the fact, that to the craped
palace of the king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng;
but few feel enticed to the shanty, where, like a pealed knuckle-bone,
grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.
Why at one given stone in the flagging does man after man cross yonder
street? What plebeian Lear or Œdipus, what Israel Potter, cowers
there by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too
cross over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of
the starveling’s wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his
crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles’, where his
hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh
Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell
sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury,
which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added
cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties
unaffected by the concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.
But these were some of the incidents not belonging to the beginning
of his career. On the contrary, a sort of humble prosperity attended
him for a time; insomuch that once he was not without hopes of being
able to buy his homeward passage so soon as the war should end. But,
as stubborn fate would have it, being run over one day at Holborn
Bars, and taken into a neighboring bakery, he was there treated with
such kindliness by a Kentish lass, the shop-girl, that in the end
he thought his debt of gratitude could only be repaid by love. In a
word, the money saved up for his ocean voyage was lavished upon a rash
embarkation in wedlock.
Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the dilemma of
impressment or imprisonment. In the absence of other motives, the dread
of those hardships would have fixed him there till the peace. But now,
when hostilities were no more, so was his money. Some period elapsed
ere the affairs of the two governments were put on such a footing as
to support an American consul at London. Yet, when this came to pass,
he could only embrace the facilities for a return here furnished, by
deserting a wife and child, wedded and born in the enemy’s land.
The peace immediately filled England, and more especially London, with
hordes of disbanded soldiers; thousands of whom, rather than starve,
or turn highwaymen (which no few of their comrades did, stopping
coaches at times in the most public streets), would work for such
a pittance as to bring down the wages of all the laboring classes.
Neither was our adventurer the least among the sufferers. Driven out
of his previous employ--a sort of porter in a river-side warehouse--by
this sudden influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with
the ingenuity of his race, he turned his hand to the village art of
chair-bottoming. An itinerant, he paraded the streets with the cry
of “Old chairs to mend!” furnishing a curious illustration of the
contradictions of human life; that he who did little but trudge, should
be giving cosy seats to all the rest of the world. Meantime, according
to another well-known Malthusian enigma in human affairs, his family
increased. In all, eleven children were born to him in certain sixpenny
garrets in Moorfields. One after the other, ten were buried.
When chair-bottoming would fail, resort was had to match-making. That
business being overdone in turn, next came the cutting of old rags,
bits of paper, nails, and broken glass. Nor was this the last step.
From the gutter he slid to the sewer. The slope was smooth. In poverty,
----“Facilis descensus Averni.”
But many a poor soldier had sloped down there into the boggy canal of
Avernus before him. Nay, he had three corporals and a sergeant for
company.
But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently to appear.
In 1793 war again broke out, the great French war. This lighted London
of some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean
society of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering
forlorn through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about
sea prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black Hole of
Calcutta; and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect
strangers, at the more public corners and intersections of sewers--the
Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other by his remainder
button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or
the tide; while through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty
skylights of the realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers’ carts,
with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city
lived.
Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel
returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden
market, at early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he
experienced one of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That
chatting with the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks
yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded
by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those
glimpses of garden produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still
tufting the roots; that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking
him of whence they must have come, the green hedges through which the
wagon that brought them had passed; that trudging home with them as a
gleaner with his sheaf of wheat;--all this was inexpressibly grateful.
In want and bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had
rural returns of his boyhood’s sweeter days among them; and the hardest
stones of his solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone) would
feel the stir of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of
deserted flagging, upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes,
when incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself,
thoughts of home would--either by gradually working and working upon
him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection--overpower him for a
time to a sort of hallucination.
Thus was it:--One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he
was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the
sward in an oval enclosure within St. James’ Park, a little green but
a three-minutes’ walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked
and grimy Old Brewery of the palace which gives its ancient name to
the public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval,
fenced in with iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure
peered forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage.
And alien Israel there--at times staring dreamily about him--seemed
like some amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded
on the shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New England
our exile was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of
home; and thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of
this little oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his
mind settled intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old
Huckleberry, his mother’s favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long,
hearing a sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the
iron pailing), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall,
hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks--his customary trick when hungry--and so, down goes Israel’s
hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he
hurries away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But
soon stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he
bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval, of the ocean,
must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then,
Old Huckleberry would be found long surfeited with clover, since,
doubtless, being dead many a summer, he must be buried beneath it.
And many years after, in a far different part of the town, and in far
less winsome weather too, passing with his bundle of flags through
Red-Cross street, towards Barbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed
and massed blocks of houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy
ranges on ranges of midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort
of sounds--tramplings, lowings, halloos--and was suddenly called to by
a voice to head off certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered
and unruly in the fog. Next instant he saw the white face--white as
an orange-blossom--of a black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove,
gleaming ghost-like through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his
limp, with rapid shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the
troubled farmers, their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back
into Barbican. Monomaniac reminiscences were in him--“To the right, to
the right!” he shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers
beat the drove to the left, towards Smithfield: “To the right! you are
driving them back to the pastures--to the right! that way lies the
barn-yard!” “Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming, old man.”
And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors;
he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains;
ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat,
apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which,
goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms,
broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the
cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.
In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again
drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor
were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.
Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in
_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile
had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An honorable
scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton,
fighting for his most gracious Majesty, King George!” so now, in
presence of the still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended
cry was anew taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, “An
honorable scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at
Trafalgar!” Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside
of the London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who,
without having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no
insignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles
they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave
to beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly
in corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally
characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to
the sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual
beggary.
Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by
the added thousands who contended with him against starvation,
nevertheless, somehow he continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks
of the cliffs, which, though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and
even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped
by rival trees and fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in
keeping the vital nerve of the tap-root alive. And even towards the
end, in his dismallest December, our veteran could still at intervals
feel a momentary warmth in his topmost boughs. In his Moorfields’
garret, over a handful of reignited cinders (which the night before
might have warmed some lord), cinders raked up from the streets, he
would drive away dolor, by talking with his one only surviving, and now
motherless child--the spared Benjamin of his old age--of the far Canaan
beyond the sea; rehearsing to the lad those well-remembered adventures
among New England hills, and painting scenes of nestling happiness and
plenty, in which the lowliest shared. And here, shadowy as it was, was
the second alleviation hinted of above.
To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted by one who
had been there, the poor enslaved boy of Moorfields listened, night
after night, as to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his
father take him there? “Some day to come, my boy,” would be the hopeful
response of an unhoping heart. And “Would God it were to-morrow!” would
be the impassioned reply.
In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of his eventual
return. For with added years, the boy felt added longing to escape his
entailed misery, by compassing for his father and himself a voyage to
the Promised Land. By his persevering efforts he succeeded at last,
against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right quarter to his
extraordinary statements. In short, charitably stretching a technical
point, the American Consul finally saw father and son embarked in the
Thames for Boston.
It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in early manhood,
had sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate from the same port to which
he now was bound. An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed
locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old Ocean seemed as a brother.
CHAPTER XXVII.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE.
It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock
on a Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the
riotous crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run
over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered
banner, inscribed with gilt letters:
“BUNKER-HILL
1775.
GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!”
It was on Copps’ Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy’s
positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose
that day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked
off across Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient
monument, at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of
corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his
now feeble hands had wielded both ends of the musket. There too he
had received that slit upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair
with the Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the
bescarred bearer of a cross.
For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry
July day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising
to return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the
ship-captain. “Nay,” replied the old man, “I shall get no fitter rest
than here by the mounds.”
But from this true “Potter’s Field,” the boy at length drew him away;
and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the
reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country
of the Housatonic. But the exile’s presence in these old mountain
townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew
him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that
more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family
in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of
his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the
west; where exactly, none could say.
He sought to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead. But it had been
burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted,
he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been
changed. The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new one ran
straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards,
planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny
slopes near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel.
At length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of
those fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon
inquiry, that but three summers since a walnut grove had stood there.
Then he vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes talked of
planting such a grove, to defend the neighboring fields against the
cold north wind; yet where precisely that grove was to have been, his
shattered mind could not recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during
his long exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested, as
well as the annual crops preceding and succeeding it, on the very same
soil.
Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient natural
wood, which seemed some way familiar, and midway in it, paused to
contemplate a strange, mouldy pile, resting at one end against a sturdy
beech. Though wherever touched by his staff; however lightly, this pile
would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it preserved the
exact look, each irregularly defined line, of what it had originally
been--namely, a half-cord of stout hemlock (one of the woods least
affected by exposure to the air), in a foregoing generation chopped
and stacked up on the spot, against sledging-time, but, as sometimes
happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned to oblivious
decay--type now, as it stood there, of forever arrested intentions, and
a long life still rotting in early mishap.
“Do I dream?” mused the bewildered old man, “or what is this vision
that comes to me of a cold, cloudy morning, long, long ago, and I
heaving yon elbowed log against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay, I
cannot be so old.”
“Come away, father, from this dismal, damp wood,” said his son, and led
him forth.
Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man ploughing. Advancing
slowly, the wanderer met him by a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry,
like a tumbled chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire-place,
now aridly stuck over here and there, with thin, clinging, round,
prohibitory mosses, like executors’ wafers. Just as the oxen were bid
stand, the stranger’s plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden
contact with some sunken stone at the ruin’s base.
“There, this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old
hearthstone. Ah, old man,--sultry day, this.”
“Whose house stood here, friend?” said the wanderer, touching the
half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.
“Don’t know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know
’em?”
But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious
natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.
“What are you looking at so, father?”
“‘_Father!_’ Here,” raking with his staff, “_my_ father would
sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter
between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the
unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend.”
Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.
Few things remain.
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law.
His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record
of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print--himself out of
being--his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak
on his native hills was blown down.
THE END.
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE SERIES
AE 1 THE NARRATIVE OF COLONEL ETHAN ALLEN. Revolutionary
War experiences of the “Hero of Fort Ticonderoga” and “The Green
Mountain Boys.” Introduction by Brooke Hindle.
AE 2 JOHN WOOLMAN’S JOURNAL _and_ A PLEA FOR
THE POOR. The spiritual autobiography of the great Colonial
Quaker. Introduction by Frederick B. Tolles.
AE 3 THE LIFE OF MRS. MARY JEMISON by James E. Seaver.
The famous Indian captivity narrative of the “White Woman of the
Genesee.” Introduction by Allen W. Trelease.
AE 4 BROOK FARM by Lindsay Swift. America’s most
unusual experiment in establishing the ideal society during the
Transcendentalist 1840’s. Introduction by Joseph Schiffman.
AE 5 FOUR VOYAGES TO THE NEW WORLD by Christopher
Columbus. Selected letters and documents translated and edited by
R. H. Major. Introduction by John E. Fagg.
AE 6 JOURNALS OF MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS. Frontier
campaigning during the French and Indian Wars by the
organizer of “Rogers’ Rangers.” Introduction by Howard H. Peckham.
AE 7 HARRIET TUBMAN, THE MOSES OF HER PEOPLE by Sarah
Bradford. The heroic life of a former slave’s struggle for her
people. Introduction by Butler A. Jones.
AE 8 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE JERSEY PRISON SHIP by Albert
Greene. The “Andersonville” of the Revolutionary War. Introduction
by Lawrence H. Leder.
AE 9 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD by Lucy Larcom. A classic
memoir of life in pre-Civil War America. Introduction by Charles T.
Davis.
AE 10 AMERICAN COMMUNITIES by William Alfred Hinds. First
hand account of the 19th century utopias--Economy, Amana, Shakers,
etc. Introduction by Henry Bamford Parkes.
AE 11 INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN NATIONAL THOUGHT.
Edited, with commentary, by Wilson Ober Clough. Pages from the
books our Founding Fathers read. Second, revised edition.
AE 12 LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS by Lewis Henry Morgan. The
first scientific account of an American Indian tribe by the father
of American ethnology. Introduction by William N. Fenton.
AE 13 MY CAPTIVITY AMONG THE SIOUX INDIANS by Fanny Kelly.
A pioneer woman’s harrowing story of frontier days. Introduction by
Jules Zanger.
AE 14 JOUTEL’S JOURNAL OF LA SALLE’S LAST VOYAGE. The
Mississippi exploration (1684-7) which ended in La Salle’s murder.
Introduction by Darrett B. Rutman.
AE 15 THE DISCOVERY, SETTLEMENT AND PRESENT STATE OF
KENTUCKE ... by John Filson. The historic post-Revolutionary
description, which includes Daniel Boone’s memoir. Introduction by
William H. Masterson.
AE 16 THE LIFE AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL R.
POTTER. The autobiography of America’s first tragic hero--the
basis for Melville’s famous novel. Introduction by Leonard Kriegel.
AE 17 EXCURSIONS by Henry David Thoreau. The famous
posthumous collection, including a biography by Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Introduction by Leo Marx.
AE 18 FATHER HENSON’S STORY OF HIS OWN LIFE. Autobiography
of an escaped Negro slave in pre-Civil War days. Introduction by
Walter Fisher.
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Robert R. Kirsch in THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
THE LIFE AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL R. POTTER