While the conversation was thus kept up with wonderful pertinacity,
considering that our vehicle was reeling and tumbling along the
detestable road, pitching like a scow among the breakers in a
lake-storm, our driver stopped before a vile little log-hut, over the
door of which hung, crooked-wise, a board, setting forth that "wiskey
and tabacky" were to be had there. The windows were broken, and the loud
voice of some intoxicated wretch was heard from within, in one
uninterrupted, torrent of oaths and blasphemies, so shocking in their
variety, and so new to my ears, that I was really horror-struck.
After leaving the hut, the coach stopped again. I called to the driver
in some terror, "You are not surely going to admit that drunken man into
the coach?" He replied coolly, "O no, I an't; don't you be afeard!" In
the next moment he opened the door, and the very wretch I stood in fear
of was tumbled in head foremost, smelling of spirits, and looking--O
most horrible! Expostulation was in vain. Without even listening, the
driver shut the door, and drove on at a gallop. The rain was at this
time falling in torrents, the road knee-deep in mud, the wild forest on
either side of us dark, grim, impenetrable. Help there was none, nor
remedy, nor redress, nor hope, but in patience. Here then was one of
those inflictions to which speculative travellers are exposed now and
then, appearing, _for the time_, to outweigh all the possible advantages
of experience or knowledge bought at such a price.
I had never before in my whole life been obliged to endure the presence
or proximity of such an object for two minutes together, and the
astonishment, horror, disgust, even to sickness and loathing, which it
now inspired, are really unspeakable. The Englishman placing himself in
the middle seat, in front of his wife and myself, did his best to
protect us from all possibility of contact with the object of our
abomination; while the wretched being, aware of our adverse feeling, put
on at one moment an air of chuckling self-complacency, and the next
glared on us with ferocious defiance. When I had recovered myself
sufficiently to observe, I could see that the man was not more than
five-and-twenty, probably much younger, with a face and figure which
must have been by nature not only fine, but uncommonly fine, though now
deformed, degraded, haggard with filth and inflamed with inebriety--a
dreadful and humiliating spectacle. Some glimmering remains of sense and
decency prevented him from swearing and blaspheming when once in the
coach; but he abused us horribly: his nasal accent, and his drunken
objurgations against the old country, and all who came from it, betrayed
his own birth and breeding to have been on the other side of the
Niagara, or "down east." Once he addressed some words to me, and,
offended by my resolute silence, he exclaimed with a scowl, and a hiccup
of abomination at every word, "I should like--to know--madam--how--I
came under your diabolical influence?" Here my friend the emigrant,
seeing my alarm, interposed, and a scene ensued, which, in spite of the
horrors of this horrible propinquity, was irresistibly comic, and not
without its pathetic significance too, now I think of it. The
Englishman, forgetting that the condition of the man placed him for the
time beyond the influence of reasoning or sympathy, began with grave and
benevolent earnestness to lecture him on his profligate habits,
expressing his amazement and his pity at seeing such a fine young man
fallen into such evil ways, and exhorting him to amend,--the fellow,
meanwhile, rolling himself from side to side with laughter. But suddenly
his countenance changed, and he said, with a wistful expression, and the
tears in his eyes, "Friend, do you believe in the devil?"
"Yes, I do," replied the Englishman with solemnity.
"Then it's your opinion, I guess, that a man may be tempted by the
devil?"
"Yes, and I should suppose as how that has been your case, friend;
though," added he, looking at him from head to foot with no equivocal
expression, "I think the devil himself might have more charity than to
put a man in such a pickle."
"What do you mean by that?" exclaimed the wretch fiercely, and for the
first time uttering a horrid oath. The emigrant only replied by shaking
his head significantly; and the other, after pouring forth a volley of
abuse against the insolence of the "old country folk," stretched himself
on his back, and kicking up his legs on high, and setting his feet
against the roof of the Coach, fell asleep in this attitude, and snored,
till, at the end of a long hour, he was tumbled out at the door of
another drinking hovel as he had tumbled in, and we saw him no more.