Sometimes I become disgusted with myself. Not very often, it is true,
for I don't understand the self-abhorrence that I occasionally see long
drawn out in the strictly private printed diaries of good dead people.
A man's self-knowledge, as regards his Maker, is a matter that lies
only between his Maker and himself, of which no printed or written
(scarcely even spoken) words can give, or ought to give, a true
transcript; but in respect of our relations to other people I suppose
we may take tolerably accurate views, and state them without
wickedness, if it comes in the way; and since the general trend of
opinion seems to be towards excessive modesty, I will sacrifice myself
to the good of society, and say that, in the main, I think I am a
rather "nice" sort of person. Of course I do a great many things, and
say a great many things, and think a great many things, that I ought
not; but when I think of the sins that I don't commit,--the many times
when I feel cross enough to "bite a ten-penny nail in two," and only
bite my lips,--the sacrifices I make for other people, and don't
mention it, and they themselves never know it,--the quiet cheerfulness
I maintain when the fire goes out, or unexpected guests arrive and
there is no bread in the house, or my manuscript is respectfully
declined by that infatuated editor,--when I reflect upon these things,
and a thousand others like unto them, I must say, I am lost in
admiration of my own virtues. You may not like me, but that is a mere
difference of taste. At any rate, I like myself very well, and find
myself very good company. Many a laugh, and "lots" or "heaps"
(according as you are a Northern or a Southern provincial) of
conversation we have all alone, and are usually on exceeding good
terms, which is a pleasure, even when other people like me, and an
immense consolation when they don't. But as I was saying, I do
sometimes fall out with myself, and with human nature in general (and,
in fact, I rather think the secret of self-complacence lurks somewhere
hereabouts,--in a mental assumption that our virtues are our own, but
our faults belong to the race). But to think that we were so puny and
puerile that we could not stand the beauty that breathed around us! I
do not mean that it killed us, but it drained us. It did not cease to
be beautiful, but we ceased to be overpowered. When the day began, eye
and soul were filled with the light that never was on sea or shore. We
spoke low and little, gazing with throbbing hearts, breathless,
receptive, solemn, and before twelve o'clock we flatted out and made
jests. This is humiliation,--that our dullard souls cannot keep up to
the pitch of sublimity for two hours; that we could sail through Glory
and Beauty, through Past and Present, and laugh. Low as I sank with
the rest, though, I do believe I held out the longest: but what can
one frail pebble do against a river? "How pretty cows look in a
landscape," I said; for you know, even if you must come down, it is
better to roll down an inclined plane than to drop over a precipice;
and I thought, since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at
least engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns. So I said,
"How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and reflective, and sheep
harmoniously happy in the summer-tide."
"Yes," said the Anakim, who is New Hampshire born; "but you ought to
see the New Hampshire sheep, if you want the real article."
"I don't," I responded. "I only want the picture."
"Ever notice the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire sheep?"
struck up Halicarnassus, who must always put in his oar.
"No," I said, "and I don't believe there is any."
"Pooh! Tell New Hampshire sheep as far off as you can see 'em," he
persisted, "by their short legs and long noses. Short legs to bring
'em near the grass, and long noses to poke under the rocks and get it."
"Yes, my boy, yes," said the Anakim pleasantly. "I O U 1"
"He hath made everything beautiful in his time," murmured Grande,
partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and
partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the
slough into which we had fallen.
"I have heard," said Halicarnassus, who is always lugging in little
scraps of information apropos to everything,--"I have been told that
Dr. Alexander was so great an admirer of the Proverbs of Solomon, that
he used to read them over every three months."
"I beg your pardon," I interposed, glad of the opportunity to correct
and humiliate him, "but that was not one of the Proverbs of Solomon."
"Who said it was?" asked the Grand Mogul, savagely.
"Nobody; but you thought it was when she said it," answered his
antagonist, coolly.
"And whose proverb is it, my Lady Superior?"
"It is in Ecclesiastes," I said.
"Well, Ecclesiastes is next door to Solomon. It's all one."
Halicarnassus can creep through the smallest knot-hole of any man of
his size it has ever been my lot to meet, provided there is anything on
the other side he wishes to get at. If there is not, and especially if
anything is there which he wishes to shun, a four hundred and fifty
pounder cannot crash a hole large enough for you to push him through.
By such a pitiful chink as that did his Infallible Highness wriggle
himself out of the range of my guns, and pursue his line of remark.
"But I really cannot say that I have been able to detect the excessive
superiority of Solomon's proverbs. If it were not for the name of it,
I think Sancho Panza's much better."
"Taisez-vous. Hold your tongue," I said, without mitigation. If there
is anything I cannot away with, it is trivial apostasy. I tolerate
latitudinarianism when it is hereditary. Where people's fathers and
mothers before them have been Pagans, and Catholics, and Mohammedans,
you don't blame THEM for being so. You regret their error, and strive
to lead them back into the right path; only they are not inflammatory.
But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice
aforethought and their eyes open--well, that is not exactly what I mean
either. That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating
thing. What I mean is this: I see people Orthodox from their cradles,
(and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their
brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic.
They don't become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they
have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything;
but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think
it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view,
to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing
this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking
devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity. Now for
good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect; and for good Unitarian
Christians I have a great respect; and for sincere, sad seekers, who
can find no rest for the sole of their foot, I have a great respect;
but for these Border State men, who are neither here nor there, on whom
you never can lay your hand, because they are twittering everywhere, I
have a profound contempt. I wish people to be either one thing or
another. I desire them to believe something, and know what it is, and
stick to it. I have no patience with this modern outcry against
creeds. You hear people inveigh against them, without for a moment
thinking what they are. They talk as if creeds were the head and front
of human offending, the infallible sign of bigotry and hypocrisy,
incompatible alike with piety and wisdom. Do not these wise men know
that the thinkers and doers of the earth, in overwhelming majority,
have been creed men? Creeds may exist without religion, but neither
religion, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor society, can exist without
creeds. There must be a creed in the head, or there cannot be religion
in the heart. You must believe that Deity exists, before you can
reverence Deity. You must believe in the fact of humanity, or you
cannot love your fellows. A creed is but the concentration, the
crystallization, of belief. Truth is of but little worth till it is so
crystallized. Truth lying dissolved in oceans of error and nonsense
and ignorance makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but
to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of
the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous,
awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately
it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful. Even before they set foot on
these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was
born in that day. It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and
that which nourishes the leaders into eminence is necessary to keep the
masses from sinking. A man who really thinks, will think his way into
light. He may turn many a somersault, but he will come right side up
at last. But people in general do not think, and if they refuse to be
walled in by other people's thoughts, they inevitably flop and flounder
into pitiable prostration. So important is it, that a poor creed is
better than none at all. Truth, even adulterated as we get it, is a
tonic. Bring forward something tangible, something positive, something
that means something, and it will do. But this flowery, misty, dreamy
humanitarianism,--I say humanitarianism, because I don't know what that
is, and I don't know what the thing I am driving at is, so I put the
two unknown quantities together in a mathematical hope that minus into
minus may give plus,--this milk-and-watery muddle of dreary negations,
that remits the world to its original fluidic state of chaos, I spew it
out of my mouth. It was not on such pap our Caesars fed that made them
grow so great. I believe that the common people of early New England
were such lusty men, because they strengthened themselves by gnawing at
their tough old creeds. Give one something to believe, and he can get
at it and believe it; but set out butting your head against nothing,
and the chances are that you will break your neck. Take a good stout
Christian, or a good sturdy Pagan, and you find something to bring up
against; but with nebulous vapidists you are always slumping through
and sprawling everywhere.
Of course, I do not mean that sincere and sensible people never change
nor modify their faith. I wish to say, for its emphasis, if you will
allow me, that they never do anything else; but generally the change is
a gradual and natural one,--a growth, not a convulsion,--a reformation,
not a revolution. When it is otherwise, it is a serious matter, not to
be lightly done or flippantly discussed. If you really had a religious
belief, it threw out roots and rootlets through all your life. It
sucked in strength from every source. It intertwined itself through
love and labor, through suffering and song, about every fibre of your
soul. You cannot pull it up or dig it up, or in any way displace it,
without setting the very foundations of your life a-quivering. True,
it may be best that you should do this. If it was but a cumberer of
the ground, tear it up, root and branch, and plant in its stead the
seeds of that tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
But such things are done with circumspection,--not as unto man. If you
are gay and jovial about it, if you feel no darts of torture flashing
through be fastnesses of your life, do not flatter yourself that you
are making radical changes. You are only pulling up pig-weed to set
out smart-weed, and the less you say about it the better.
Now Halicarnassus is really just as Orthodox as I. He would not lie or
steal any quicker than I. He would not willingly sacrifice one jot or
tittle of his faith, and yet he is always startling you with small
heresies. He is like a calf tied to a tree in the orchard by a long
rope. In the exuberance of his glee Bossy starts from the post, tail
up, in a hand gallop. You would think, from the way he sets out, that
he was going to race around the whole orchard, and probably he thinks
he is himself. But by the time he is fairly under full headway, his
rope tightens up with a jerk, and away he goes heels over head. The
only difference is, that Halicarnassus knows the length of his tether,
and always fetches up in time to escape an overturn; but other people
do not know it, and they imagine he is going pell-mell into infidelity.
Now I was determined to have none of this trash in a steamboat. One
has no desire to encounter superfluous risks in a country where life
and limb are held on so uncertain a tenure as in this. There are quite
chances enough of shipwreck without having any Jonahs aboard. Besides,
in point of the fine arts, heterodoxy is worse than puns. So I headed
him off at the first onset. But I should not have been so entirely
successful in the attempt had I not been assisted by a pair of birds
who came to distract his and our attention from a neighboring thicket.
They wheeled--the gentle, graceful, sly, tantalizing things--in circles
and ellipses, now skimming along the surface of the water, now swooping
away in great smooth curves, then darting off in headlong flight and
pursuit. "My kingdom for a gun!" exclaimed Halicarnassus with amateur
ardor.
"I am glad you have no gun," said compassionate Grande. "Why should
you kill them?"
"Do not be alarmed," I said, soothingly, "a distaff would be as deadly
in his hands."
"Do you speak by the book, Omphale?" asked the Anakim, who still
carried those New Hampshire sheep on his back.
"We went a-ducking once down in Swampshire," I answered.
"Did you catch any?" queried Grande.
"Duckings? no," said Halicarnassus.
"Nor ducks either," I added. "He made great ado with his guns, and his
pouches, and his fanfaronade, and knocking me with his elbows and
telling me to keep still, when no mouse could be more still than I, and
after all he did not catch one."
"Only fired once or twice," said Halicarnassus, "just for fun, and to
show her how to do it."
"How not to do it, you mean," said the Anakim.
"You fired forty times," I said quietly, but firmly, "and the ducks
would come out and look at you as interested as could be. You know you
didn't scare a little meadow-hen. They knew you couldn't hit."
"Trade off your ducks against my sheep, and call it even?" chuckled the
Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided along, enjoying, not
entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny
sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of
being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness,
purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal
delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the
influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint
and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be
satisfactorily accomplished than something would turn up and set our
calculations and islands adrift, and we would have to begin new. Dome
Island we made out by its shape, unquestionably; Whortleberry we
hazarded on the strength of its bushes; "Hen and Chicks," by a biggish
island brooding half a dozen little ones; Flea Island, from a certain
snappishness of aspect; Half-Way Island, by our distance from dinner;
Anthony's Nose, by its unlikeness to anything else, certainly not from
its resemblance to noses in general, let alone the individual nose of
Mark Antony, or Mad Anthony, or any Anthony between. And then we
disembarked and posted ourselves on the coach-top for a six-mile ride
to Champlain; and Grande said, her face still buried in the map, "Here
on the left is 'Trout Brook' running into the lake, and a cross on it,
and 'Lt. Howe fell, 1758.' That is worth seeing."
"Yes," I said, "America loved his brother."
"America loved HIM," howled Halicarnassus, thinking to correct me and
avenge himself. Now I knew quite well that America loved him, and did
not love his brother, but with the mention of his name came into my
mind the tender, grieved surprise of that pathetic little appeal, and I
just said thought it aloud,--assuming historic knowledge enough in my
listeners to prevent misconception. But to this day Halicarnassus
persists in thinking or at least in asserting, that I tripped over Lord
Howe. As he does not often get such a chance, I let him comfort
himself with it as much as he can; but that is the way with your
whippersnapper critics. They put on their "specs," and pounce down
upon some microscopic mote, which they think to be ignorance, but which
is really the diamond-dust of imagination. "But let us see the place,"
said Grande. "We must drive within sight of it."
"Yes," I said. "Halicarnassus, ask the driver to be sure to tell us
where Lord Howe fell."
"Fell into the brook," said that Oracle, and sat as stiff as a post.
Ticonderoga,--up-hill and down-hill for six miles, white houses and
dark, churches and shops, and playing children and loungers, and mills,
and rough banks and haggard woods, just like any other somewhat
straggling country village. O no! O no! There are few like this.
_I_ have seen no other. Churches and shops and all the paraphernalia of
busy, bustling common life there may be, but we have no eyes for such.
Yonder on the green high plain which we have already entered is a
simple guide-post, guiding you, not on to Canada, to New York, to
Boston, but back into the dead century that lived so fiercely and lies
so still. We stand on ground over-fought by hosts of heroes. Here
rise still the breastworks, grass-grown and harmless now, behind which
men awaited bravely the shock of furious onset, before which men rushed
as bravely to duty and to death. Slowly we wind among the little
squares of intrenchments, whose deadliest occupants now are peaceful
cows and sheep, slowly among tall trees,--ghouls that thrust out their
slimy, cold fingers everywhere, battening on horrid banquets,--nay,
sorrowful trees, not so. Your gentle, verdant vigor nourishes no lust
of blood. Rather you sprang in pity from the cold ashes at your feet,
that every breeze quivering through your mournful leaves may harp a
requiem for Polydorus. Alighting at the landing-place we stroll up the
hill and among the ruins of the old forts, and breast ourselves the
surging battle-tide. For war is not to this generation what it has
been. The rust of long disuse has been rubbed off by the iron hand of
fate,--shall we not say, rather, by the good hand of our God upon
us?--and the awful word stands forth once more, red-lettered and real.
Marathon, Waterloo, Lexington, are no longer the conflict of numbers
against numbers, nor merely of principles against principles, but of
men against men. And as we stand on this silent hill, the prize of so
many struggles, our own hearts swell with the hopes and sink with the
fears that its green old bluffs have roused. Up from yon water-side
came stealing the Green-Mountain Boys, with their grand and
grandiloquent leader, and, at the very gateway where we stand, as
tradition says, (et potius Dii numine firment,) he thundered out, with
brave, barbaric voice, the imperious summons, "In the name of the great
Jehovah and the Continental Congress." No wonder the startled,
half-dressed commander is confounded, and "the pretty face of his wife
peering over his shoulder" is filled with terror. Well may such a
motley crew frighten the fair Europeanne. "Frenchmen I know, and
Indians I know, but who are ye?" Ah! Sir Commander, so bravely
bedight, these are the men whom your parliamentary knights are to sweep
with their brooms into the Atlantic Ocean. Bring on your besoms, fair
gentlemen; yonder is Champlain, and a lake is as good to drown in as an
ocean. Look at them, my lords, and look many times before you leap.
They are a rough set, roughly clad, a stout-limbed, stout-hearted race,
insubordinate, independent, irrepressible, almost as troublesome to
their friends as to their foes; but there is good stock in them,--brain
and brawn, and brain and brawn will yet carry the day over court and
crown, in the name of the right, which shall overpower all things. We
clamber down into arched passages, choked with debris, over floors
tangled with briers, and join in the wild wassail of the bold outlaw,
fired by his victorious career. We clamber up the rugged sides and wind
around to the headland. Brilliant in the "morning-shine," exultant in
the pride and pomp of splendid preparation, ardent for conquest and
glory, Abercrombie sails down the lovely inland sea, to sail back
dismantled and disgraced. The retrieving fleet of Amherst follows, as
brilliant and as eager,--to gain the victory of numbers over valor, but
to lose its fruit, as many a blood-bought prize has since been lost,
snatched from the conqueror's hand by the traitor, doubt. But this is
only the prologue of our great drama. Allen leaps first upon the
scene, bucklered as no warrior ever was since the days of Homer or
before. Then Arnold comes flying in, wresting laurels from
defeat,--Arnold, who died too late. Here Schuyler walks up at night,
his military soul vexed within him by the sleeping guards and the
intermittent sentinels, his gentle soul harried by the rustic
ill-breeding of his hinds, his magnanimous soul cruelly tortured by the
machinations of jealousy and envy and evil-browed ambition. Yonder on
the hill Burgoyne's battery threatens death, and Lincoln avenges us of
Burgoyne. Let the curtain fall; a bloodier scene shall follow.
* * * * *
And then we re-embark on Lake Champlain, and all the summer afternoon
sail down through phantom fleets, under the frowning ramparts of
phantom forts, past grim rows of deathful-throated cannon, through
serried hosts of warriors, with bright swords gleaming and strong arms
lifted and stern lips parted; but from lips of man or throat of cannon
comes no sound. A thousand oars strike through the leaping waves, but
not a plash breaks on the listening ear. A thousand white sails swell
to the coming breeze, that brings glad greeting from the inland hills,
but nothing breaks the silences of time.
And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or hoped
for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a thunder-storm, a
most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling up from the west its
grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged, bulging with impatient, prisoned
thunder biding their time, sharp and fierce against the brilliant sky,
spreading swiftly over the heavens, fusing into one great gray pall,
dropping a dim curtain of rain between us and the land, closing down
upon us a hollow hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and deafening
with unseen thunders, wresting us off from the friendly skies and
shores, wrapping us into an awful solitude. O Princess Rohan, come to
me! come from the hidden caves, where you revel in magical glories,
come up from your coralline caves in the mysterious sea, come from
those Eastern lands of nightingale, roses, and bulbuls, where your
tropical soul was born and rocked in the lap of the lotus! O sunny
Southern beauty, lost amongst Northern snows, flush forth in your
mystical splendor from the ruby wine of Hafiz, float down from your
clouds of the sunset with shining garments of light, open the golden
door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over these inky waves, O my
queen of all waters, come to me wherever you are, with your pencil
dipped in darkness, starry with diamond dews and spanned with the
softness of rainbows, and set on this land-locked Neptune your cross of
the Legion of Honor, assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that
the thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!
But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the
glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent waters catch its
gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright.
So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters,
completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pass through
our triumphal gateway "deep into the dying day," and are presently
doused in the mud at Rouse's Point. Rouse's Point is undoubtedly a
very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of
us; but Rouse's Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have
been in Dream-Land,--especially when a circus is there, singing and
shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people
sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and
lofty tumbling? From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through
endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the
dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked
rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of,
whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and
fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,--a snort, a rush, a
shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at
Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome
residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops,
and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable
citizens,--one at least,--and all the implements and machinery of
government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political
speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert,
public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch. All this is
interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look
away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river
stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence. Up this river, on
the day of St. Lawrence, three hundred years ago, came the mariner of
St. Malo,--turning in from the sea till his straining eyes beheld on
both sides land, and planted the lilies of France. Now it is the
boundary line of empires. Those green banks on the other side are a
foreign country, and for the first time I am not monarch of all I
survey. That fine little city, with stately trees towering from the
midst of its steeples and gray roofs, is Prescott. At the right rise
the ramparts of Fort Wellington, whence cannon-balls came hissing over
to Ogdensburg some fifty years ago. We stand within a pretty range,
suppose they should try it again! Farther on still is a plain, gray
tower, where a handful of "patriots" intrenched and destroyed
themselves with perverse martyrophobia in a foolish and fruitless
endeavor. The afternoon is before us; suppose we row over; here is a
boat, and doubtless a boatman, or the ferry-steamer will be here
directly. By no means; a ferry-steamer is thoroughly commonplace; you
can ferry-steam anywhere. Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never
have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of
the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank grass that wave
still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rushing
billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly: but I am not
afraid,--for I can swim.
"You can, can you?" says the Anakim, incredulously.
"Indeed I can, can't I, Halicarnassus?" appealingly.
"Like a brick!" ejaculates that worthy, pulling away at the oars, and
on we shoot, steadily nearing the rustic stone city that looks so
attractive, so different from our hasty, brittle, shingly American
half-minute houses,--massive, permanent, full of character and solid
worth. And now our tiny craft butts against the pier, and we ascend
from the Jesuit river and stand on British soil. No stars and stripes
here, but Saint George and his dragon fight out their never-ending
brawl. No war, no volunteering, no Congress here; but peace and a
Parliament and a Queen, God bless her! and this is her realm, a
kingdom. Now if it had been a year ago I do not know that I should
not, like Columbus, have knelt to kiss these dingy stones, so much did
I love and reverence England, and whatever bore the dear English name.
But we--they, rather--have changed all that. Among the great gains of
this memorable year,--among the devotions, the sacrifices, the
heroisms,--all the mighty, noble, and ennobling deeds by which we stand
enriched forevermore,--there broods the shadow of one irreparable
loss,--the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference
there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as
always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where
are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the
substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a
miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get
into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age
is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer
for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room,
famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don't
remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a
thing, and we enter,--they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make
observation of the surroundings. We take position in the passage
between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with
bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door,
and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward
glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old
English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and
modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and
comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought
into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot
stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O,
you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the
British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. "I remember
those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous
friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord
Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out
over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing
letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious
kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and
Christmas slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out
what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in
pounds, shillings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my harangue,
so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this
British institution, proceed to investigate another British
institution,--the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort
Wellington. A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a
stile lets the world in,--over which stile we step and stand on the
fort grounds. A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of
the pasture,--perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel
accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He
does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the
hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to
a great gate, but it refuses to turn. The walls are too high to scale,
besides possible pickets on the other side. I have no doubt in the
world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was
made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of
dignity? Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see
if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance. Halicarnassus
fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules
the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning
drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main
fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that
a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I
energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of
the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning.
"What about the fruit-knife?" inquires Halicarnassus as I pass in. The
reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are
electrified to find the victory already gained.
"See the good of having been through college," exults Halicarnassus.
"How did you do it?" asks Grande, admiringly.
"By genius and assiduity," answers Halicarnassus.
"And lifting the latch," I append, for I have been examining the
mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which
dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening
on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense
enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and
battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I
therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter about the place,
and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we
show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we
have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we
mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the
North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime"
upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore
of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another,
but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will,
heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before. O my
country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my
crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your bloody
sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the
first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and
forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.