"Pd. Expences maintaining them two Nights
in the Dungeon ...................... -/2/-
"To Ann Duncan very ill to take her over into
Ireland ............................. -/4/-
"To Straw for the Dungeon ............... -/4/-
"To Belman sundry public Cries .......... -/7/6
"To three pair of Stockings and dying for the
Beedle .............................. -/9/-
"To Wine drinking Royal healths the Prince's
birthday at his full age ............ 3/16/6
"To a distressed Sailor to Leverpoole ... -/1/-
"Pd. Boonfire on King's Coronation Day .. -/6/6
"Gave Nancy Mackeen a Stroller .......... -/-/6
"Pd. Musicians at rejoicing for good news
from Germany, and on birth of the Prince
of Wales ............................ 2/7/-
"Pd. for a Cat with nine Tails .......... -/3/-
"To a lame Stranger ..................... -/1/-
"Pd. lighting Lamps last Dark ........... -/2/6
"Several Fortune Tellers Indicted, etc... -/12/-
"Pd. Lawyer Nagave advising Roger Blomely's
Case bringing Actions agt. the Constable
for putting him in the Dungeon for being
drunk on Sunday in time of divine
Service .............................. l/l/-"
It is interesting to note in this connection that on August 16, 1762, was
"Pd." one "Barnard Shaw maintenance of Rioters and Evidence, 1-11-6."
A circumstance of considerable human interest, too, and one possibly
little known, is the great aversion to the sight of bears held by the
inhabitants of the Isle of Wight, at least in the year 1891. A copy of
the "Bye-Laws" of the "Administrative County of the Isle of Wight,"
issued that year, contains, following articles relating to "Regulating
the Sale of Coal" and "Spitting," this:
"As to Bears.
"1. No bear shall be taken along or allowed to be upon any highway,
unless such bear shall be securely confined in a vehicle closed so as to
completely hide such bear from view.
"2. Any person who shall offend against this Bye-law shall be liable to a
fine not exceeding in any case five pounds."
"Atti del Municipale! Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Siena. Bollettino
Degli atti Pubblicati Dalla Giunta Municipale di Roma." It is fitting
that quartos of such titles as these, containing addresses beginning
Signori Consiglieri and Onorevoli Signori, should look something like
Italian opera, and be bound in vellum, title and date stamped in gold on
bright red and purple labels, with sides of mottled purple boards, and
imprints such as "Bologna. Regia Tipografia Fratelli Merlani," and of
typography the best. And on genuine paper, far from the woodpulp of
American municipal graft contracts.
Once, indeed, municipal documents were august pages. Some of the early
Italian and German are on paper that will last as long as the law. And
in these times the title pages of municipal documents were Piranesiesque:
massive architectural scroll work framing stone tablets, hung with
garlands of fruit and grain, and decorated with carved lions, human
heads, and histrionic masks. And initial letters throughout to
correspond.
Now who but France would bind her municipal documents in heavily tooled,
full levant morocco, with grained silk inside covers?
XVIII
AS TO PEOPLE
It is a very pleasant thing to go about in the world and see all the
people.
Among the finest people in the world to talk with are scrubwomen.
Bartenders, particularly those in very low places, are not without
considerable merit in this respect. Policemen and trolley-car conductors
have great social value. Rustic ferry-men are very attractive
intellectually. But for a feast of reason and a flow of soul I know of
no society at all comparable to that of scrubwomen.
It is possible that you do not cultivate scrubwomen. That is your
misfortune. Let me tell you about my scrubwoman. I know only this one,
I regret to say, but she, I take it, is representative.
Her name--ah, what does it matter, her name? The thing beyond price is
her mind. There is stored, in opulence, all the ready-made language, the
tag-ends of expression, coined by modern man. But she does not use this
rich dross as others do. She touches nothing that she does not adorn.
She turns the familiar into the unexpected, which is precisely what great
writers do. To employ her own expression, she's "a hot sketch, all
right."
She did not like the former occupant of my office. No; she told me that
she "could not bear a hair of his head." It seems that some altercation
occurred between them. And whatever it was she had to say, she declares
that she "told it to him in black and white." This gentleman, it seems,
was "the very Old Boy." Though my scrubwoman admits that she herself is
"a sarcastic piece of goods." By way of emphasis she invariably adds to
her assertions, "Believe _me_!"
Her son--she has a son--has much trouble with his feet. His mother says
that if he has gone to one "shoeopodist" he has gone to a dozen. My
scrubwoman tells me that she is "the only fair one" of her family. Her
people, it appears, "are all olive." My scrubwoman is a widow. She has
told me a number of times of the last days of her husband. It is a
touching story. She realised that the end was near, and humoured him in
his idea of returning before it was too late to "the old country." One
day when he had asked her again if she had got the tickets, and then
turned his face to the wall to cough, she said to herself,
"_Good_-night--shirt."
But most of the discourse of my scrubwoman is cheerful. She is a valiant
figure, a brave being very fond of the society of her friends (of whom I
hold myself to be one), who works late at night, and talks continually.
I know that if you would contrive to find favour with your scrubwoman you
would often be like that person told of by mine who "laughed until she
thought his heart would break."
The most brotherly car-conductors, naturally, are those with not over
much business, those on lines in remote places. I remember the loss I
suffered not long ago on a suburban car, which results, I am sorry to
say, in your loss also.
The bell signalling to stop rang, and a vivaciously got-up woman with an
extremely broad-at-the-base, pear-shaped torse, arose and got herself
carefully off the car. The conductor went forward to assist her. When
he returned aft he came inside the car and sat on the last seat with two
of us who were his passengers. The restlessness was in him which betrays
that a man will presently unbosom himself of something. This finally
culminated in his remarking, as if simply for something to say to be
friendly, "You noticed that lady that just got off back there? Well," he
continued, leaning forward, having received a look intended to be not
discouraging, "that's the mother of Cora Splitts, the little
actress;--that lady's the mother of Cora Splitts, the little actress."
"Is that so!" exclaimed one who was his passenger, not wishing to deny
him the pleasure he expected of having excited astonishment. A car
conductor leads a hard life, poor fellow, and one should not begrudge him
a little pleasure like that.
The conductor twisted away his face for an instant while he spat
tobacco-juice. Thus cleared for action, he returned to the subject of
his thoughts. "That's the mother of Cora Splitts," he repeated again.
"She's at White Plains tonight, Cora is. Cora and me," he said, as one
that says, "ah, me, what a world it is!"--"Cora and me was chums once.
Yes, sir; we was chums and went to school together." Some valuable
reminiscences of the distinguished woman, dating back to days before the
world dreamed of what she would become, by one who played with her as a
child, doubtless would have been told, but the conductor was interrupted;
a great many people got off, some others got on the car just then, and he
went forward to collect fares from these, and the thread was broken.
At my journey's end, I recollect, I went into a public-house. There was
a person there whose presence made a deep impression upon my memory. A
fine stocky lad, with a great square jaw, heavy beery jowls, and a
blue-black, bearded chin; in a blue striped collar. He put both hands
firmly on the bar-rail at a good distance apart; straightened his arms
taut and his body at right angles with them, so that he resembled a huge
carpenter's square; then curled his back finely in, and said, with a
significant look at the man behind the bar, "Gimme one o' them shells."
A thin glass of beer was set before him; he relaxed, straightened up, and
drank off its contents. Then, apparently, feeling that he was observed,
he looked very unconcernedly all about the room and appeared to be bored.
He then examined very attentively a picture on the wall, and his neck
seemed to be temporarily stiff. I can see him now, I am happy to say, as
plain as print.
One's mind is, indeed, a grand photograph album. How precious to one it
will be when one is old and may sit all day in a house by the sea and, so
to say, turn the leaves. That is why one should be going about all the
while in one's vigour with an alert and an open mind.
Wives are picturesque characters, too. I mind me of my friend Billy
Henderson's new wife. Billy Henderson's wife looks like a balloon.
She's so fat that she has busted down the arches of her feet. In order
to "fight flesh" she walks a great deal. She walks a mile every day, and
then takes a car back home. Her father comes over from Philadelphia once
every week to see her, because she is so homesick. For months after she
was married she just cried all the time, she was so homesick. She never
goes to the movies. The movies make her cry. One time she saw at the
movies a hospital scene. It horrified her for days. A friend of hers is
about to be married. But she has told her friend that she cannot go to
the wedding. Weddings always make her cry so. She just can't read the
war news; it is too terrible; it affects her so that she can't sleep a
bit. She hasn't read any of it at all, and, she says, she has no idea
who is winning the war. She takes some kind of capsules to reduce flesh,
which cost six dollars for fifty. She has taken twenty-five. The
extension of the draft age being spoken of, she said to Billy:
"Dearie, I'll put you under the bed where they won't get you." She
doesn't want to vote, and she can't understand why any one should want to
go to poles and vote and all that kind of thing.
Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent
cook; she loves Billy Henderson.
XIX
HUMOURS OP THE BOOK SHOP
The panorama before his view is the human mind. He panders to its
divers follies, consults its varied wisdom. He stands umbrellaless in
the rain of all its idiosyncrasies. Why has he not lifted up his
voice? He, the book clerk, that lives among countless volumes of
confessions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living
Comedie Humaine! Has the constant spectacle of so many books been
astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse? Or has he
been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr.
Whistler's guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered booksellers"
of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and
its humours. But they were the old boys. They belonged to an old
order and reflected another day. "As physicians are called 'The
Faculty' and counsellors-at-law 'The Profession,'" writes Boswell, "the
booksellers of London are called 'The Trade.'" Let us look into this
Trade as it is to-day, we said. So for a space we played we were a
book clerk.
There are two, decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man
whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of
an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who
keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in
the pages of Anatole France. He is a man of much erudition. And books
are his wife and family, food and drink. Then there is the other idea.
"Why is it," we report the remark of an important looking gentleman in
a high hat, "that clerks in book stores never know anything about
books?" (or anything else, was perhaps not far from his thought.) This
gentleman, it was readily perceived, had an idea that he had said
something rather good. But it was not new. This conception of the
book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes--brother to that of the
mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the
pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the
vaudeville stage--a stock character. His illiteracy is classic; his
ignorant sayings irresistable. He was sired by Charles Keene and
damned by Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious
humourist employs him periodically. These two ideas of the book
business are perhaps reconciled by the popularly cherished sentiment
that book sellers are not what they were. Newspapers from time to time
print feature articles about the days "When Book Sellers Knew Books."
If you ask a salesman in a modern book shop if he has "Praed," you of
course expect him to reply, "I have, sir (or madam), but it doesn't
seem to do any good."
Well, at the Zoo there is humour from the inside looking out, as well
as from the outside looking in. The book clerk is in the position to
remark certain human phenomena patent to him beyond the view of any
other, most curious, perhaps, among them a pleasant hypocrisy. "Oh!"
purls a sweet lady, pausing to glance for the space of a second at her
surroundings, "I think books are just fine!" "I love to be in a book
store," rattles a vivacious young woman. "Books have the greatest
fascination for me," says another. A young lady waiting for friends
looks out of the front door the entire time. Her friends express
regret at having kept her waiting. "Oh!" she exclaims, "I have been so
happy here"--glancing quickly around at the books--"I should just like
to be left here a couple of years." There is a respectful pause by all
for an instant, each bringing into her face an expression of adoration
for the dear things of the mind. Then, chatting gaily, the party
hastens away. We turn to hear, "Oh, wouldn't you love to live in a
book shop!"
What is it that all men say in a book shop? The great say it, even,
and the far from great. Each in his turn looks solemnly at his
companion or at the salesman and says: "Of the making of books there is
no end." Then each in his turn lights into a smile. He has said
something pretty good.
"There are persons esteemed on their reputation," says the "Imitation
of Christ," "who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of
them." Though one might think it would be the other way, it is
difficult, indeed, to sell a book to a friend of the author. "Oh, I
know the man who wrote that," is the reply. "I wouldn't read a book of
his." You see, a great writer must be dead. A common error of book
buyers is to confuse the words edition and copy. "Let me have a clean
edition of this," is frequently asked. Once a lady asked for something
"bound in gingham." No one, it is our belief, ever sold a light book
to a Japanese. They are the book clerk's dread. Terribly intelligent,
somewhat unintelligible in their handling of our language, they always
want something exceedingly difficult to find, something usually on
military or political science, harbour construction or the most
recondite form of philosophy.
Then there are the remarkable people who "keep up" with the flood of
fiction; who say, "Oh, I've read that," in a tone which implies that
they are not so far behind as that! "Have you no new novels?" they
inquire. Novels get "old," one might suppose, like eggs, in a couple
of days. The quest of these seekers of books suggests the story of the
lady at a public library who, upon being told that seven new novels had
come in that morning, said, "Give me, please, the one that came in
last." There are, too, those singular folks who appear regularly every
year just before Christmas, buy a great quantity of books for presents,
and disappear again until the next year just before the holiday season.
What, we have wondered, do they do about books the rest of the time?
Ministers are always very trying characters to book clerks. "Beware of
the gallery," says a fellow serf to us, "there's a minister browsing
around up there." The official servants of the Lord fall, in the book
clerk's mind, into that class technically described by him as
"stickers." All gentlemen wearing high hats also belong to this
classification. Deaf customers are embarrassing, for the reason that
one always addresses one's next customer as though he were deaf, too.
Foreigners are invariably very polite to clerks. They bow when they
enter and take off their hats upon leaving. Very respectful people.
"There," said a fellow thrall, "come two old women in at the door.
Now, if I were my ancestor, I'd dance around that table with a stone
club and brain them." As it is, they ask, "Have you Hopkinson Smith's
'Gondola Days'?" He says, "I think so." A lady, very rich and
important looking, wants a book "without an unpleasant ending." "I
wonder how this is" (looking at the last page). "No" (closing the book
with a thump), "that won't do." A gentleman orders two sets of the
Prayer Book and Hymnal, to be marked upon the cover with his name, the
words Grace Church and his pew number. He informs us that every year
while he is away in the summer his set of these books is stolen.
'Tis a merry life, the book clerk's, and a hard one. Customers: Two
youngish women. "Can you wait on us?" They want to get something, do
not know just what, for a present. "Oh, no!" they say, "we don't want
anything like so big a set as that. Something nicely bound." A copy
of "Cranford" is near by. "Oh, when I read it I didn't think it much
good." "Poetry?" "No, I don't think she is much interested in poetry."
"Do you suppose an art book?"------"No, she is not interested in art."
"Memoirs, then?" "No, she would not care for that." "Why, I had no
idea," said one somewhat reprovingly to us, "that it would be as hard
as this."
A calling which requires the practitioner to turn easily from the
recondite gentleman inquiring the author of "Religious Teachers of
Ancient Greece" to consideration of the problem (no less recondite) of
a lady anxious to find something to entertain a child of five and a
half inculcates some degree of mental agility. "I want," said the very
fashionable lady, "to get a book for an old man--a" (with some
petulance) "very stupid old man." "I want," from a serious old lady,
"to get a book for a young man studying for the ministry." "I want,"
exclaimed a very smart apparition, "a dashing book for a man!" "What
is the best book on Russia?" "Do you know, now, if this is a good
story?--there are so many poor books nowadays." Says a large,
uncommonly black lady, "I want 'Spears of Wheat, No. 3.'" (Discovered
to be a prayer book.) "I want the latest book, please, on how to bring
up a baby." "I'd like to see what you have on 'physical research.'"
"Can you recommend a book for a young man with softening of the brain?
Poor fellow, he's in Bloomingdale." "Is there any discount to
Christian workers?" "Do you know," a demure person, an awful blank
look coming over her face, "what I want has gone quite out of my head."
There is an appealing look for help. "Something American," in a
patrician voice, "for the ladies to read going over on the boat. This
is American, now, is it? New York society? Ah, very good! Have you
anything about the Rocky Mountains, or that sort of thing?"
Now we see coming the man who has been directed in a letter from his
wife to get a certain book, about which he knows nothing, and the title
of which he can not decipher. Here is a person asking for "comfort
books" for the sick. Here is Mrs. So-and-So, who tells us her husband
is very ill, unconscious; she has to sit up by him all night, and must
have something "very amusing" to divert her mind. Here is the angry
man to whom by mistake was sent a book inscribed "to my good wife and
true." Heaven help the poor book clerk when the same good wife and true
comes in with her present of a naughty book with humorous remarks
written in it!
Now, how do you like the job?
XX
THE DECEASED
I think it was William Hazlitt's brother who remarked that "no young
man thinks he will ever die." Whoever it was he was a mysterious
person who lives for us now in that one enduring observation. That is
his "literary remains," his "complete works." And many a man has
written a good deal more and said a good deal less than that concerning
that "animal, man" (in Swift's phrase), who, as Sir Thomas Browne
observes, "begins to die when he begins to live."
No young man, I should say, reads obituary notices. They are hardly
"live news" to him. Most of us, I fancy, regard these "items" more or
less as "dead matter" which papers for some reason or other are obliged
to carry. But old people, I have noticed, those whose days are
numbered, whose autumnal friends are fast falling, as if leaf by leaf
from the creaking tree, those regularly turn to the obituary column,
which, doubtless, is filled with what are "personals" for them.
And yet, if all but knew it, there is not in the press any reading so
improving as the "obits" (to use the newspaper term), none of so
softening and refining a nature, none so calculated to inspire one with
the Christian feelings of pity and charity, with the sentiment of
malice toward none, to bring anon a smile of tender regard for one's
fellow mortals, to teach that man is an admirable creature, full of
courage and faith withal, constantly striving for the light,
interesting beyond measure, that his destiny is divinely inscrutable,
that dust unto dust all men are brothers, and that he, man, is (in the
words of "Urn Burial") "a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous
in the tomb." I doubt very much indeed whether any one could read
obituaries every day for a year and remain a bad man or woman.
In many respects, the best obituaries are to be found in country
papers. There, in country papers, none ever dies. It may be because,
as it is said, the country is nearer to God than the town. But so it
is that there, in country papers, in the fulness of time, or by the
fell clutch of chance, one "enters into his final rest," or "passes
from his earth life," or one "on Wed. last peacefully accepted the
summons to Eternity," or "on Thurs." (it may be) "passed to his eternal
reward." "Died" is indeed a hard word. It has never found admittance
to hearts that love and esteem. Whitman (was it not?) when he heard
that Carlyle was dead went out in the night and looked up at the stars
and said that he did not believe it. Even so, are not all who take
their passing "highly esteemed" in country papers? In small places,
doubtless, death wears for the community a more tragic mein than in
cities, where it is more frequent and where we knew not him that lies
on his bier next door but one away. In the country places this man who
is now no longer upright and quick was a neighbour to all. And the
provincial writer of obituaries follows a high authority, another
rustic poet, deathless and known throughout the world, who sang of his
Hoosier friend "he is not dead but just away."
When one enters upon his last role in this world, which all fill in
their turn, he becomes in rural journals that personage known
throughout the countryside as "the deceased." It might be argued that,
alas! the only thing you can do with one deceased is to bury him. It
might be held that you cannot educate him. That he, the deceased,
cannot enter upon the first steps of his career as a bookkeeper. That
he cannot marry the daughter of the Governor of the State. That
whatever happened to him, whatever he accomplished, enjoyed, endured,
in his pilgrimage through this world he experienced before he became,
as it is said, deceased. That, in short, he is now dead. And that it
should be said of him, as we say in the Metropolitan press, as a young
man Mr. Doe did this and later that. But in places simpler, and so
more eloquent, than the Metropolis the final fact of one's existence
colours all the former things of his career. In country obituaries all
that has been done was done by the deceased. In this association of
ideas between the prime and the close of life is to be felt a sentiment
which knits together each scene. This Mr. Some One did not merely
apprentice himself to a printer at fourteen (as city papers say it) and
marry at twenty-one. But he that is now deceased was once full of hope
and strength (at fourteen), and in the brave days of twenty-one did he,
that is now struck down, plight his troth. So, doubtless, runs the
thought in that intimate phrase so dear to country papers, "the
deceased."