CONCLUSION.
The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune came
out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in marriage to Mr.
Clement Lindsay. But her friends hardly knew how to congratulate her on
this last event. Her lover was gone, to risk his life, not improbably to
lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by wounds, or worn out with
disease.
Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of trial.
They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's determination had
nerved her for womanly endurance. They had not learned that a great
cause makes great souls, or reveals them to themselves,--a lesson taught
by so many noble examples in the times that followed. Myrtle's only
desire seemed to be to labor in some way to help the soldiers and their
families. She appeared to have forgotten everything for this duty; she
had no time for regrets, if she were disposed to indulge them, and she
hardly asked a question as to the extent of the fortune which had fallen
to her.
The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two announcements
which she read with some interest when her attention was called to them.
They were as follows:
"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property estimated at
a million of dollars or more. It consists of a large tract of land
purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers, now become of
immense value by the growth of a city in its neighborhood, the opening of
mines, etc., etc. It is rumored that the lovely and highly educated
heiress has formed a connection looking towards matrimony with a certain
distinguished artist."
"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
been among the first to respond to the call of the country for champions
to defend her from traitors. We understand that he has obtained a
captaincy in the __th regiment, about to march to the threatened seat of
war. May victory perch on his banners!"
The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the very
hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for the
common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the camp
and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the good
women carried on at home, or wherever their services were needed.
Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his first campaign
charged with a special office. Some months later, after one of the great
battles, he was sent home wounded. He wore the leaf on his shoulder
which entitled him to be called Major Lindsay. He recovered from his
wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle had visited him daily in the military
hospital where he had resided for treatment; and it was bitter parting.
The telegraph wires were thrilling almost hourly with messages of death,
and the long pine boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking
what they held.
Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the eagle
on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay. The lovers could not part
again of their own free will. Some adventurous women had followed their
husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she could play the part of
the Maid of Saragossa on occasion. So Clement asked her if she would
return with him as his wife; and Myrtle answered, with as much
willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly show under such
circumstances, that she would do his bidding. Thereupon, with the
shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton was sent for, and the
ceremony was performed in the presence of a few witnesses in the large
parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with flowers, and hung round
with all the portraits of the dead members of the family, summoned as
witnesses to the celebration. One witness looked on with unmoved
features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more heavenly smile on her faded
lips than she had ever seen before beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann
Holyoake, the martyr to her faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's
visions, who seemed to breathe a holier benediction than any words--even
those of the good old Father Pemberton himself--could convey.
They went back together to the camp. From that period until the end of
the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of
the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick
and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be
burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No
lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown
strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called
now to die for any worthy cause, her race would have been ennobled by a
second martyr, true to the blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.
Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten. An officer was brought
into the ward where she was in attendance. "Shot through the
lungs,--pretty nearly gone."
She went softly to his bedside. He was breathing with great difficulty;
his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she recognized him in
a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain Bradshaw, as she knew by the
bars on his coat flung upon the bed where he had just been laid.
She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother; she
saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would ever
hear.
He turned his glazing eyes upon her. "Who are you?" he said in a feeble
voice.
"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."
He started. "You by my bedside! You caring for me!--for me, that burned
the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes! You can't forgive
that,--I won't believe it! Don't you hate me, dying as I am?"
Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down. "I have nothing to
forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw. You may have meant to do me wrong, but
Providence raised up a protector for me. The paper you burned was not
the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"
"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising suddenly
in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a few more
gasps of breath. "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I was his match.
It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else. And so the old man beat
me after all, and saved you from ruin! Thank God that it came out so!
Thank God! I can die now. Give me your hand, Myrtle."
She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and he
ceased to breathe. Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of trust
and love in it than of systematized articles of belief. She cherished
the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so miserably
were a token of some blessed change which the influences of the better
world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the sins and the
weaknesses of his earthly career.
Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp. From time to time
they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to Myrtle
especially, were full of interest, even to the last advertisement. A few
paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate to persons who have
figured in this narrative.
"TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth. The editor of this paper returns
his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-cake. May their
shadows never be less!"
Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel Hurlbut,
M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.
"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"
Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the tribute
of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like his to call
for any aching regret.
The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the village
paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and shocked by
receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house was
struck by lightning about a month ago. The frame of the building was a
good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended from the
injury it had received. On Sunday last the congregation came together as
usual. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit, the Rev. Doctor
Pemberton having been detained by slight indisposition. The sermon was
from the text, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
shall lie down with the kid." (Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the
millennium as--the reign of love and peace, in eloquent and impressive
language. He was in the midst of the prayer which follows the sermon,
and had jest put up a petition that the spirit of affection and faith and
trust might grow up and prevail among the flock of which he was the
shepherd, more especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm,
and carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which had
fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a loud
crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its ruins. The
scene that followed beggars description. Cries and shrieks resounded
through the horse. Two or three young women fainted entirely away. Mr.
Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward
immediately, and after much effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the
sounding-board, and extricating their unfortunate pastor. He was not
fatally injured, it is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a
violent blow upon the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower
extremities is like to ensue. He is at present lying entirely helpless.
Every attention is paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."
Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this unfortunate
occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the following
pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent number of the
village paper:
IMPOSING CEREMONY.
"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of baptism
upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman, Gifted Hopkins,
Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P. Hopkins, his amiable
and respected lady. The babe conducted himself with singular propriety
on this occasion. He received the Christian name of Byron Tennyson
Browning. May be prove worthy of his name and his parentage!"
The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
unharmed survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and
they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in
the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous
allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she
had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a
convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them
for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same
roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat
sharply remarked.
Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector, and,
with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she
inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when
Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at
least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself to
sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to pinch
the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own
likeness.
Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
responsibility. She embellished her spare person a little more than in
former years. These young people looked so happy! Love was not so
unendurable, perhaps, after all. No woman need despair,--especially if
she has a house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a
former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and
good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with
the not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their
mutual advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father
Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his
unfortunate disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was brisk
enough; for the good man knew there was no time to lose at his period of
life,--or hers either, for that matter. It was a rather odd specimen of
love-making; for he was constantly trying to subdue his features to a
gravity which they were not used to, and she was as constantly
endeavoring to be as lively as possible, with the innocent desire of
pleasing her light-hearted suitor.
"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee." Silence was ten years younger as a
bride than she had seemed as a lone woman. One would have said she had
got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half a
dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably cheerful
conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable
amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and
where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four
waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in the
house of mourning. But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two
families, with all the possible complications which time might bring,
would be better in separate establishments. She therefore proposed
selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and removing to a house in
the village, which would be large enough for them, at least for the
present. So the young folks bought the old house, and paid a mighty good
price for it; and enlarged it, and beautified and glorified it, and one
fine morning went together down to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence
seemed in danger of being a little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with
his Susan,--and what had happened might happen again,--and gave Master
Byles Gridley a formal and most persuasively worded invitation to come up
and make his home with them at The Poplars.
Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking
upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his
face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received
this kind proposition. It is enough, that, when he found that a new
study had been built on purpose for him, and a sleeping-room attached to
it so that he could live there without disturbing anybody if he chose, he
consented to remove there for a while, and that he was there established
amidst great rejoicing.
Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health. She found at last
that she was going; and as she had a little property of her own,--as
almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of it,--she was
much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements to be made
respecting its disposition. The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was one day surprised
by a message, that she wished to have an interview with him. He rode
over to the town in which she was residing, and there had a long
conversation with her upon this matter. When this was settled, her mind
seemed too be more at ease. She died with a comfortable assurance that
she was going to a better world, and with a bitter conviction that it
would be hard to find one that would offer her a worse lot than being a
poor relation in this.
Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes as
they should elect, educational or other. Father Pemberton preached an
admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her virtues, known to this
people among whom she had long lived, and especially that crowning act by
which she devoted all she had to purposes of charity-and benevolence.
The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the misfortune
of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor. He generally preached
in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance of the people,--for the
truth was that the honest minister who had married Miss Silence was not
young enough or good-looking enough to be an object of personal
attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, and the old minister
appeared to great advantage contrasted with him in the pulpit. Poor Mr.
Stoker was now helpless, faithfully and tenderly waited upon by his own
wife, who had regained her health and strength,--in no small measure,
perhaps, from the great need of sympathy and active aid which her
unfortunate husband now experienced. It was an astonishment to herself
when she found that she who had so long been served was able to serve
another. Some who knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment;
but others believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched
him roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
repentance and better thoughts. Bathsheba had long ago promised herself
to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector of a parish
in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.
How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing! Clement
loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength and fine
humanity blended in them. He was so fascinated by their noble expression
that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and looked at him more like
an artist taking his portrait than like an admiring friend. He
maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as
large a one of cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size of
these organs on the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it, or
nearly proved it, by careful measurements of his head. Master Gridley
laughed, and read him a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the village.
Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the foundations of a public
library. Others thought it should be applied for the relief of the
families of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Still another set would
take it to build a monument to the memory of those heroes. The trustees
listened with the greatest candor to all these gratuitous hints. It was,
however, suggested, in a well-written anonymous article which appeared in
the village paper, that it was desirable to follow the general lead of
the testator's apparent preference. The trustees were at liberty to do
as they saw fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object
should be selected.
If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be very
proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them. The
trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion. Why not apply it to
the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and promising
children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs. Hopkins had cared
for so long without any recompense, and at a cost which would soon become
beyond her means? The good people of the neighborhood accepted this as
the best solution of the difficulty. It was agreed upon at length by the
trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam Fund for Educational Purposes should be
applied for the benefit of the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and
Helminthia Hopkins.
Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two "preposterous
names," as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had
given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs.
Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about
as pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was
so handy, spoke short, Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to
call 'em anything else.
"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the
meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did very
wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures, and that
I am bound to rectify my error. More than that, my dear madam, I mean to
consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix upon proper and
pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty legacy in my will to
these interesting children."
"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or
ever shall see, . . . except my poor dear Ammi . . . . I 'll do
jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this livin'
world."
"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"
"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.
"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam. I will
not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name that will
not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."
She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud, "Abraham
Lincoln Hopkins."
"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past year,
on a moderate computation."
"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything that
you like. To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's the
right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope they
won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"
"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins? That means the
gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather than a
burden."
Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes. She was weeping.
"Theodore!" she said, "Theodore! My little brother's name, that I buried
when I was only eleven year old. Drownded. The dearest little child
that ever you see. I have got his little mug with Theodore on it now.
Kep' o' purpose. Our little Sossy shall have it. Theodore P.
Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"
"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins? Theodore Parker, is
it?"
"Doesn't P. stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best man
in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"
"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am. Now
about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to call
her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in naming one of
the objects of her charity."
"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is
that what you mean?"
"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many. I think the
general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of her two
benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."
"Why, law! Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
ain't but one letter of difference! Poor Cynthy would be pleased if she
could know that one of our babes was to be called after her. She was
dreadful fond of children."
On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely, the
Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three most
interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of the
latter a double one.
The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between the
Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
clergyman. He could not be present on account of his great infirmity,
but the door of his chamber was left open that he might hear the marriage
service performed. The old, white-haired minister, assisted, as the
papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted the ceremony according
to the Episcopal form. When he came to those solemn words in which the
husband promises fidelity to the wife so long as they both shall live,
the nurse, who was watching, near the poor father, saw him bury his face
in his pillow, and heard him murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a
sinner!"
The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the old
meeting-house. Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came in, and
stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms. A slip of paper
was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words were
written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."
The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of its
consecration.
Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the broad
aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted Hopkins
bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as Isosceles and
Helminthia. They had been well schooled, and, as the mysterious and to
them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted, maintained the most stoical
aspect of tranquillity. In Mrs. Hopkins's words, "They looked like
picters, and behaved like angels."
That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of some
few friends at The Poplars. It was such a great occasion that the
Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was, strictly
speaking, secular time,--were relaxed. Father Pemberton was there, and
Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, with his
son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her mother, now in
comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband, Doctor Hurlbut and his
wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her
son and his wife (Susan Posey that was), the senior deacon of the old
church (the admirer of the great Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the
"Banner and Oracle," and in the background Nurse Byloe and the privileged
servant, Mistress Kitty Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not
mention.
The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of two
long services repaired by such simple refections as would not turn the
holy day into a day of labor. A large paper copy of the new edition of
Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table. He never looked
so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller? In the course of the
evening Clement spoke of the many trials through which they had passed in
common with vast numbers of their countrymen, and some of those peculiar
dangers which Myrtle had had to encounter in the course of a life more
eventful, and attended with more risks, perhaps, than most of them
imagined. But Myrtle, he said, had always been specially cared for. He
wished them to look upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had
been faithful to her in her gravest hours of trial and danger. If they
would follow him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would
have an opportunity to do so.
Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest. They all ascended
to the little projecting chamber, through the window of which her scarlet
jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about on the river in those
early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the name of the Fire-hang-bird's
Nest.
The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from which
looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued
presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath
it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered
object upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any
knowledge on her part.
"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.
Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward, and
removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object. It was a lifelike
marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?"
Myrtle said.
"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered, smiling.
Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel." forehead,
saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
PREFACE.
"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and
very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he
is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to
this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did not explain
himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of
the, physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is
founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered
plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my readers,
and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of
extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character
that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a
narrative.
I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not
to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the
reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured me
that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable terror.
While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall clocks had
fallen with aloud crash and produced an impression on his nervous system
which he had never got over.
The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of
hearing is conceivable enough.
But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation
with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the
associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the
olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as
related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as every
other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere. If a
man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him anywhere
by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and conditions of
the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, a source of attraction
or repulsion, but its influence is not less real, though far less obvious
and less dominant, than in the lower animals. It was an atmospheric
impression of this nature which associated itself with a terrible shock
experienced by the infant which became the subject of this story. The
impression could not be outgrown, but it might possibly be broken up by
some sudden change in the nervous system effected by a cause as potent as
the one which had produced the disordered condition.
This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have
puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did not
suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.
BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891.
O. W. H.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.
INTRODUCTION.
"And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?"
Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in
which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly
spoken of as a baby? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all
conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the
baby? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of as
a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no
other in existence?
Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born
thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and show them to
callers, namely, to the whole family of readers belonging to my list of
intimates, and such other friends as may drop in by accident. And so it
shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its
fellows as a portfolio.
There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to say
something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever these
may be. I have had other portfolios before this,--two, more especially,
and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.
Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell you
that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak, was
opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession,
for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, without giving
it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my
readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but
fifty years ago,--there are too many talkative old people who know all
about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware.
A coin-fancier would say that your fifty-year-old facts have just enough
of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them--the
delicate and durable patina which is time's exquisite enamel.
When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its
legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could
have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Caesar. Aug.
Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with
that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with
the precious metals at that period of my career, and, there might have
been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or
knowing much about it.
Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.
In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of
attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our
first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the
comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in
that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.
How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in
the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in
it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait
of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated
gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and ladies,
too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and
Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women,
not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable
rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival
landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in
those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the
portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a
hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and
dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's
coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing;
and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with
the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the
Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or
criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in
those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned
fish-horns?
If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
butterflies. The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very
respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by
that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of
the week as "the Sahbuth." The son was the editor of several different
periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of
many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he
studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a
certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat
frothed over by his worldly experiences.
Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first
Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published
in his father's paper, I think, and signed "Roy." He had started the
"American Magazine," afterwards merged in the "New York Mirror." He had
then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of
verse. He had just written
"I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two,
They idly give me joy,
As if I should be glad to know
That I was less a boy."
He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being
very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in
luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to
show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was
something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of
Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture
of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had
kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded
me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared
with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but
the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded
out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me at this
moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of
Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year
1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young
American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all
done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a
school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his
way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which
have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books
depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the
orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's Thanatopsis,
his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck's Marco
Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American Flag, and Percival's
Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,--and not getting
very wide awake, either. These could be depended upon. A few other
copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's "Columbia, Columbia," and
Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the
favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave
which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are
legible.
About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
"Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and is
now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read
the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The
"London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk
sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was
familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners.
Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West
Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an
article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," and another on
the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he
tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an
incident of a fight with the Osages.
"Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the
scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously
upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance
through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my
father. He said nothing, but looked pleased."
This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary
warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very
much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked him
in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous
epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one
else escaped.
If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating,
some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find
in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard
of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the
little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read
the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing
in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating onslaught. Time dealt as hardly
with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had
dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter at last under a roof
which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of
whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its
friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least, was the story I
heard after he disappeared from general observation.
That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all
that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel
engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising
establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations of
this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.
The "Scarlet Letter" was an unhinted possibility. The "Voices of the
Night" had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still
in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes,
which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk
into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a
scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.
What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating
in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other
in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any
against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the
small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His
attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little
discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with
it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer
Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or
equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors
before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the
Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, an
American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which must
have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify
him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not
wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable
writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the keeping of that
venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load
that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making
a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept
in sight.
It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship I
had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with demolition;
a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked
hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first
Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the
duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which
would have been otherwise expended in filling it.
During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the
greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and
opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
member.
In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had
the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips &
Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought
that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not
unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle,
which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness,
and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the
new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of
American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where the
emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded; not
wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim!---how was the most fine
gold changed! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time for
literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old Portfolio had
done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of supply
was still in existence. I looked at the old Portfolio, and said to
myself, "Too late! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten,
these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and
leave them to the spider and the book-worm."
In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had
condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When,
a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the "Saturday
Club" gathered about the long table at "Parker's," such a representation
of all that was best in American literature had never been collected
within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom educated
foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration official
dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of
curiosity--were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist,
and the "Atlantic Monthly" was an experiment. There had already been
several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent, among
which "Putnam's Magazine" was conspicuous, owing its success largely to
the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful writer, Mr.
George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat prolonged and
very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals go when they
die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording angel whose
name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live that its death was a
surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly take its place
and keep it when that, with all its attractions and excellences, had died
out, and left a blank in our periodical literature which it would be very
hard to fill as well as that had filled it?
This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon,
and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the
scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other
studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my
becoming a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I could not
understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a
part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the
new magazine.
That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my table,
and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was already at
least
'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'
when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what
looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not
meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most
dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion.
The second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly
worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me,
and I hope I may find something between its covers which will justify me
in coming once more before my old friends. But before I open it I want
to claim a little further indulgence.
There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I might
say to almost every human being. No matter what his culture or
ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character, the
subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if
opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing
else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes
electric with vivacity, and alive all over with interest.
The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude. He is
accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a
subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing
disclosure of his real errand. He is not unacquainted with the
conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who,
having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of
having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means
of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its
luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and
twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart
would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and
its repayment.
I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in
my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences
through which I have been passing.
What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if it
were his private correspondent? There are at least three sufficient
reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to
hear,--if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has
witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it;
secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not
already well told, so that readers will say, "Why, yes! I have had that
sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard it spoken
of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;" and thirdly,
anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it interesting.
I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim
any general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain
literary experience upon myself,--a series of partial metempsychoses of
which I have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the
memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been
parted. The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory
of my birthplace.
I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is
written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in
the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts
continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's
life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter
how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who
writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the
person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of
Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had
a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his
personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must
this identification of "subject" and "object" take place when one is
writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.
Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I called A
Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a born
observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of great
enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what others
passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only
pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his companion
would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a prize at the
end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous sagacity
and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them, described
them, studied them in their relations, and before those around him were
aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist. When--he died
his collections remained, and they still remain, as his record in the
hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the spirit of his
quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained possession of my
own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed
spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had
myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt wise with his wisdom,
fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his
placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature "slid into my soul,"
and if I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected
to see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was
sketching.
A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a
Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful,
bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first at
Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of
Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist, and
showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a
larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying his fresh
young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to come forth in
the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of the
time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and manners,
an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent
advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit of his
ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I seemed to
share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester,
and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the
palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which struck him
from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later
years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after
a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate
daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own
consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this
brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed
to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the
charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his
heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was
honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was
wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his
sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I
felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my
self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.
The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships
I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being.
Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent
member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long
period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a
work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the
subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal
disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were
not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on
a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to
bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out
to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing
it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of
pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at
a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a
more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour
of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of
happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled
and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt
that my, friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many
afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: "I was
at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck
and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass
me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he
poureth out my gall upon the ground."
I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow.
What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful
description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have
been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his
faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious
resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison:
but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months,
even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the
light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly
extinguished.
There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my
consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful
experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of
suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to kill
in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes which
make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but one
answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in every
thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of God to men." So
must it be until that
"one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves"
has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note
shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through
sufferings."
Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of
companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which
I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy
with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was
here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I
had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost
all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom
very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so
forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper
editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of
other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been
said of "transcendentalism" and of him who was regarded as its prophet;
of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or
thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and
admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond
admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him
as "the greatest man that ever lived," another, a friend, famous in the
world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of
overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American
Montaigne, and nothing more.
After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would
gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought
which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and
the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle
of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of
prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity
of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not
ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline
intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long
before they were due,--all this made the task a grave one. But when I
found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering
judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from
under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill;
the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical,
estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they
whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very
difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.
It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a
man. "He nothing common" said, "or mean." He was always the same pure
and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural
to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to
let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own
poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and
spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in it.
It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so far
short of the superior being who has been so long the object of his
contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's
personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his
own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may
be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting
was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that
he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far
as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of
the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune
for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble
thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant
soul,--this is indeed the highest form of teaching and discipline.
I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they
have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers
who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person
himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer
cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing but
the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of his own
hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental phrase,
"Live forever!" Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not have to
wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.
In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in which
I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will indulge me
in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored
contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December
13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel
Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English
biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm
was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when
those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth,
August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary
entered this un-Christian universe and was made a member of the Christian
church on the same day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of
September.
Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great
English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by
month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last
century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what
Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing;
what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in
his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It
was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that
old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an
oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace
with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the
thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment
rolls out its thunder no more.
I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has
left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many
of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I
can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr.
Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,--he
hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too,
I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and
beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in
front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence,
involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the
strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the
massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear
him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened
to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says Sir Joshua.
"Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and
the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his
trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.
Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
I shall find when it is opened.
Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has
been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house,
precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war
of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my
boyhood.
The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the soul
dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who
has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in
dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real, I
say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must
outlast its perishing frame.
The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit, a
case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored by all
who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are obliterated
some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps
in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the
promised land of independent nationality. Personally, I have a right to
mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My private grief for its
loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the
experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my
fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am
repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the
misfortune to outlive their birthplace.
It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The
Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural
objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and
some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a
century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and
the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view.
But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which
the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line with it,
spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away
rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of
the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,
half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier
remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails
gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible.
So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to
wander over.
I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all
our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their
fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window,
across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of
my early visions. The "clouds of glory" which we trail with us in after
life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account
for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we
have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months in
which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in
sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the
letter." I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not
passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and
unsympathetic pavement.
Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of
which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries
within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the fields,
acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among the
branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the
barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form of
that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good half
mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively
agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre
has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian
warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever
roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.
Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far
distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender
reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with its
haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our
apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;
the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism
that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the paved
yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the hint
of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more
familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that
quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust.
It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of
the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder;
the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the
straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if
it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that
mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen
to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men
and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose
parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"
How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the
family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more
than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot
summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could
not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to
the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too
clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious,
rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles
and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge
bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other
exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon,
the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as
much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in
Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It
takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us,
for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but
that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem to
us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the
sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb
and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it
from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned,
puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud
christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration,
or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe?
When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid
of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute,
does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the
blackamoor by a similar proceeding? For space is the fluid in which he
is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the process, and
he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental
vacuum.
In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago,
I said,
"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on
this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those
who cherished them."
What strides the great University has taken since those words were
written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still
and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once,
like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall
of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus
played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and
the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few
plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my
school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which
have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble
structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the
portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.
For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I
have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has
cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if I have
overcome them, which others must decide. And I feel exactly as honest
Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a
good deal of up-hill work. He wants to rest a little, then to feed a
little; then, if you will turn him loose in the pasture, he wants to
roll. I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,--not for a long
time, I hope, for it has lifted me above my common self, but for a while.
And now I want, so to speak, to roll in the grass and among the
dandelions with the other pachyderms. So I have kept to the outside of
the portfolio as yet, and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and
fancies, and vagaries, and parentheses.
How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their
vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo
Santo with that sacred soil! The old house stood upon about as perverse
a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm.
It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus. The rustic
aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters
"leached" through it. I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it
with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced that I
was feeding the tea-plants of China, and then I gave over the attempt.
And yet I did love, and do love, that arid patch of ground. I wonder if
a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that
Campo Santo of my childhood! One noble product of nature did not refuse
to flourish there,--the tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired,
many-jointed, generous maize or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and
defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer. What child but loves to
wander in its forest-like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the
lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him! There are two aspects
of the cornfield which always impress my imagination: the first when it
has reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on
the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when, after
the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of
slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the crazy widows
and daughters of the dead soldiery.
Once more let us come back to the old house. It was far along in its
second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.
The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human
tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age.
Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards
that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or
the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the
floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale
off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop
from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl
their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last
there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had
been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its
own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by
little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their
chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty
wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic
crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human
habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of
the soil sinking gradually below it,
Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.
But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall
by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept
out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork,
the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the
progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and
flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed
and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of
destruction it seems!
Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it
more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but
once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should
say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But
there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be
found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which
it occupies the opening chapter.
In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me
remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the
breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's
Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the
floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts
of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren probably
passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold
must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.
But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day
came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little
universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity,
with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable
existence,--that house does not ask for any historical associations to
make it the centre of the earth for him.
If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is
born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and the
means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own
taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which
surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a
nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles.
If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:
His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-hearted
country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament that
predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer instincts which
direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the gratification of pure
and elevated tastes and the carrying out of plans for the good of his
neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should, if possible, have been
born, at any rate have passed some of his early years, or a large part of
them, under the roof of the good old minister. His father should be, we
will say, a business man in one of our great cities,--a generous
manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered to his private
fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His heir, our
ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old house, the home
of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the
Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as he remembers it. He can
add as many acres as he will to the narrow house-lot. He can build a
grand mansion for himself, if he chooses, in the not distant
neighborhood. But the old house, and all immediately round it, shall be
as he recollects it when he had to stretch his little arm up to reach the
door-handles. Then, having well provided for his own household, himself
included, let him become the providence of the village or the town where
he finds himself during at least a portion of every year. Its schools,
its library, its poor,--and perhaps the new clergyman who has succeeded
his grandfather's successor may be one of them,--all its interests, he
shall make his own. And from this centre his beneficence shall radiate
so far that all who hear of his wealth shall also hear of him as a friend
to his race.
Is not this a pleasing programme? Wealth is a steep hill, which the
father climbs slowly and the son often tumbles down precipitately; but
there is a table-land on a level with it, which may be found by those who
do not lose their head in looking down from its sharply cloven
summit.---Our dangerously rich men can make themselves hated, held as
enemies of the race, or beloved and recognized as its benefactors. The
clouds of discontent are threatening, but if the gold-pointed
lightning-rods are rightly distributed the destructive element may be
drawn off silently and harmlessly. For it cannot be repeated too often
that the safety of great wealth with us lies in obedience to the new
version of the Old World axiom, RICHESS oblige.
THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
I
GETTING READY.
It is impossible to begin a story which must of necessity tax the powers
of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to which its
central point of interest belongs without some words in the nature of
preparation. Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah Battle insisted
on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her favorite game of
whist.
The narrator wishes to sweep the hearth, as it were, in these opening
pages, before sitting down to tell his story. He does not intend to
frighten the reader away by prolix explanation, but he does mean to warn
him against hasty judgments when facts are related which are not within
the range of every-day experience. Did he ever see the Siamese twins, or
any pair like them? Probably not, yet he feels sure that Chang and Eng
really existed; and if he has taken the trouble to inquire, he has
satisfied himself that similar cases have been recorded by credible
witnesses, though at long intervals and in countries far apart from each
other.
This is the first sweep of the brush, to clear the hearth of the
skepticism and incredulity which must be got out of the way before we can
begin to tell and to listen in peace with ourselves and each other.
One more stroke of the brush is needed before the stage will be ready for
the chief characters and the leading circumstances to which the reader's
attention is invited. If the principal personages made their entrance at
once, the reader would have to create for himself the whole scenery of
their surrounding conditions. In point of fact, no matter how a story is
begun, many of its readers have already shaped its chief actors out of
any hint the author may have dropped, and provided from their own
resources a locality and a set of outward conditions to environ these
imagined personalities. These are all to be brushed away, and the actual
surroundings of the subject of the narrative represented as they were, at
the risk of detaining the reader a little while from the events most
likely to interest him. The choicest egg that ever was laid was not so
big as the nest that held it. If a story were so interesting that a
maiden would rather hear it than listen to the praise of her own beauty,
or a poet would rather read it than recite his own verses, still it would
have to be wrapped in some tissue of circumstance, or it would lose half
its effectiveness.
It may not be easy to find the exact locality referred to in this
narrative by looking into the first gazetteer that is at hand. Recent
experiences have shown that it is unsafe to be too exact in designating
places and the people who live in them. There are, it may be added, so
many advertisements disguised under the form of stories and other
literary productions that one naturally desires to avoid the suspicion of
being employed by the enterprising proprietors of this or that celebrated
resort to use his gifts for their especial benefit. There are no doubt
many persons who remember the old sign and the old tavern and its four
chief personages presently to be mentioned. It is to be hoped that they
will not furnish the public with a key to this narrative, and perhaps
bring trouble to the writer of it, as has happened to other authors. If
the real names are a little altered, it need not interfere with the
important facts relating to those who bear them. It might not be safe to
tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight
change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think
of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them. The
same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from the
Thomsons without that letter.
There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer
residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the
name of Arrowhead Village. The Indians had found it out, as the relics
they left behind them abundantly testified. The commonest of these were
those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from Which
the place took its name,--the heads of arrows, of various sizes,
material, and patterns: some small enough for killing fish and little
birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say
nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now
and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper.
The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have
been a kind of factory village of the stone age,--which lasted up to near
the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics
are met with close to the surface of the ground.
No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one of
the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that
those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms
of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself,
and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.
There is the lake, in the first place,--Cedar Lake,--about five miles
long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from
north to south. Near the northern extremity are the buildings of
Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious name,
but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the water.
At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna
Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of the
daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for all
stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in Nevada
to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House at
Washington.
Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake, is
a valley between two hills, which come down to the very edge of the lake,
leaving only room enough for a road between their base and the water.
This valley, half a mile in width, has been long settled, and here for a
century or more has stood the old Anchor Tavern. A famous place it was
so long as its sign swung at the side of the road: famous for its
landlord, portly, paternal, whose welcome to a guest that looked worthy
of the attention was like that of a parent to a returning prodigal, and
whose parting words were almost as good as a marriage benediction; famous
for its landlady, ample in person, motherly, seeing to the whole
household with her own eyes, mistress of all culinary secrets that
Northern kitchens are most proud of; famous also for its ancient servant,
as city people would call her,--help, as she was called in the tavern
and would have called herself,--the unchanging, seemingly immortal
Miranda, who cared for the guests as if she were their nursing mother,
and pressed the specially favorite delicacies on their attention as a
connoisseur calls the wandering eyes of an amateur to the beauties of a
picture. Who that has ever been at the old Anchor Tavern forgets
Miranda's
"A little of this fricassee?-it is ver-y nice;"
or
"Some of these cakes? You will find them ver-y good."
Nor would it be just to memory to forget that other notable and noted
member of the household,--the unsleeping, unresting, omnipresent Pushee,
ready for everybody and everything, everywhere within the limits of the
establishment at all hours of the day and night. He fed, nobody could
say accurately when or where. There were rumors of a "bunk," in which he
lay down with his clothes on, but he seemed to be always wide awake, and
at the service of as many guest, at once as if there had been half a
dozen of him.
So much for old reminiscences.
The landlord of the Anchor Tavern had taken down his sign. He had had
the house thoroughly renovated and furnished it anew, and kept it open in
summer for a few boarders. It happened more than once that the summer
boarders were so much pleased with the place that they stayed on through
the autumn, and some of them through the winter. The attractions of the
village were really remarkable. Boating in summer, and skating in
winter; ice-boats, too, which the wild ducks could hardly keep up with;
fishing, for which the lake was renowned; varied and beautiful walks
through the valley and up the hillsides; houses sheltered from the north
and northeasterly winds, and refreshed in the hot summer days by the
breeze which came over the water,--all this made the frame for a pleasing
picture of rest and happiness. But there was a great deal more than
this. There was a fine library in the little village, presented and
richly endowed by a wealthy native of the place. There was a small
permanent population of a superior character to that of an everyday
country town; there was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a
good-hearted rector, broad enough for the Bishop of the diocese to be a
little afraid of, and hospitable to all outsiders, of whom, in the summer
season, there were always some who wanted a place of worship to keep
their religion from dying out during the heathen months, while the
shepherds of the flocks to which they belonged were away from their empty
folds.
What most helped to keep the place alive all through the year was the
frequent coming together of the members of a certain literary
association. Some time before the tavern took down its sign the landlord
had built a hall, where many a ball had been held, to which the young
folks of all the country round had resorted. It was still sometimes used
for similar occasions, but it was especially notable as being the place
of meeting of the famous PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
This association, the name of which might be invidiously interpreted as
signifying that its members knew everything, had no such pretensions,
but, as its Constitution said very plainly and modestly, held itself open
to accept knowledge on any and all subjects from such as had knowledge to
impart. Its President was the rector of the little chapel, a man who, in
spite of the Thirty-Nine Articles, could stand fire from the
widest-mouthed heretical blunderbuss without flinching or losing his
temper. The hall of the old Anchor Tavern was a convenient place of
meeting for the students and instructors of the University and the
Institute. Sometimes in boat-loads, sometimes in carriage-loads,
sometimes in processions of skaters, they came to the meetings in
Pansophian Hall, as it was now commonly called.
These meetings had grown to be occasions of great interest. It was
customary to have papers written by members of the Society, for the most
part, but now and then by friends of the members, sometimes by the
students of the College or the Institute, and in rarer instances by
anonymous personages, whose papers, having been looked over and discussed
by the Committee appointed for that purpose, were thought worth listening
to. The variety of topics considered was very great. The young ladies of
the village and the Institute had their favorite subjects, the young
gentlemen a different set of topics, and the occasional outside
contributors their own; so that one who happened to be admitted to a
meeting never knew whether he was going to hear an account of recent
arctic discoveries, or an essay on the freedom of the will, or a
psychological experience, or a story, or even a poem.
Of late there had been a tendency to discuss the questions relating to
the true status and the legitimate social functions of woman. The most
conflicting views were held on the subject. Many of the young ladies and
some of the University students were strong in defence of all the
"woman's rights" doctrines. Some of these young people were extreme in
their views. They had read about Semiramis and Boadicea and Queen
Elizabeth, until they were ready, if they could get the chance, to vote
for a woman as President of the United States or as General of the United
States Army. They were even disposed to assert the physical equality of
woman to man, on the strength of the rather questionable history of the
Amazons, and especially of the story, believed to be authentic, of the
female body-guard of the King of Dahomey,--females frightful enough to
need no other weapon than their looks to scare off an army of Cossacks.
Miss Lurida Vincent, gold medallist of her year at the Corinna Institute,
was the leader of these advocates of virile womanhood. It was rather
singular that she should have elected to be the apostle of this extreme
doctrine, for she was herself far better equipped with brain than
muscles. In fact, she was a large-headed, large-eyed, long-eyelashed,
slender-necked, slightly developed young woman; looking almost like a
child at an age when many of the girls had reached their full stature and
proportions. In her studies she was so far in advance of her different
classes that there was always a wide gap between her and the second
scholar. So fatal to all rivalry had she proved herself that she passed
under the school name of The Terror. She learned so easily that she
undervalued her own extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration
for those of her friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different
and almost opposite nature. After sitting at her desk until her head was
hot and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming
young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if she
would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange tongues and
history, all those accomplishments that made her the encyclopaedia of
every class she belonged to, if she could go through the series of
difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her schoolmates
delighting.
One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she was
of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which nature had
specially organized her. All the physical perfections which Miss Lurida
had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower, whose school name was
The Wonder. Though of full womanly stature, there were several taller
girls of her age. While all her contours and all her movements betrayed
a fine muscular development, there was no lack of proportion, and her
finely shaped hands and feet showed that her organization was one of
those carefully finished masterpieces of nature which sculptors are
always in search of, and find it hard to detect among the imperfect
products of the living laboratory.
This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her
performances in the gymnasium. She commonly contented herself with the
same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her
dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too
heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the
floor. She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be
checked in her indulgence in them. The Professor of gymnastics at the
University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a source
of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in which the
young lady showed her remarkable muscular strength and skill in managing
herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked impossible at first
sight. How often The Terror had thought to herself that she would gladly
give up all her knowledge of Greek and the differential and integral
calculus if she could only perform the least of those feats which were
mere play to The Wonder! Miss Euthymia was not behind the rest in her
attainments in classical or mathematical knowledge, and she was one of
the very best students in the out-door branches,--botany, mineralogy,
sketching from nature,--to be found among the scholars of the Institute.
There was an eight-oared boat rowed by a crew of the young ladies, of
which Miss Euthymia was the captain and pulled the bow oar. Poor little
Lurida could not pull an oar, but on great occasions, when there were
many boats out, she was wanted as coxswain, being a mere feather-weight,
and quick-witted enough to serve well in the important office where
brains are more needed than muscle.
There was also an eight-oared boat belonging to the University, and rowed
by a picked crew of stalwart young fellows. The bow oar and captain of
the University crew was a powerful young man, who, like the captain of
the girls' boat, was a noted gymnast. He had had one or two quiet trials
with Miss Euthymia, in which, according to the ultras of the woman's
rights party, he had not vindicated the superiority of his sex in the way
which might have been expected. Indeed, it was claimed that he let a
cannon-ball drop when he ought to have caught it, and it was not disputed
that he had been ingloriously knocked over by a sand-bag projected by the
strong arms of the young maiden. This was of course a story that was
widely told and laughingly listened to, and the captain of the University
crew had become a little sensitive on the subject. When there was a
talk, therefore, about a race between the champion boats of the two
institutions there was immense excitement in both of them, as well as
among the members of the Pansophian Society and all the good people of
the village.
There were many objections to be overcome. Some thought it unladylike
for the young maidens to take part in a competition which must attract
many lookers-on, and which it seemed to them very hoidenish to venture
upon. Some said it was a shame to let a crew of girls try their strength
against an equal number of powerful young men. These objections were
offset by the advocates of the race by the following arguments. They
maintained that it was no more hoidenish to row a boat than it was to
take a part in the calisthenic exercises, and that the girls had nothing
to do with the young men's boat, except to keep as much ahead of it as
possible. As to strength, the woman's righters believed that, weight for
weight, their crew was as strong as the other, and of course due
allowance would be made for the difference of weight and all other
accidental hindrances. It was time to test the boasted superiority of
masculine muscle. Here was a chance. If the girls beat, the whole
country would know it, and after that female suffrage would be only a
question of time. Such was the conclusion, from rather insufficient
premises, it must be confessed; but if nature does nothing per
saltum,--by jumps,--as the old adage has it, youth is very apt to take
long leaps from a fact to a possible sequel or consequence. So it had
come about that a contest between the two boat-crews was looked forward
to with an interest almost equal to that with which the combat between
the Horatii and Curiatii was regarded.
The terms had been at last arranged between the two crews, after cautious
protocols and many diplomatic discussions. It was so novel in its
character that it naturally took a good deal of time to adjust it in such
a way as to be fair to both parties. The course must not be too long for
the lighter and weaker crew, for the staying power of the young persons
who made it up could not be safely reckoned upon. A certain advantage
must be allowed them at the start, and this was a delicate matter to
settle. The weather was another important consideration. June would be
early enough, in all probability, and if the lake should be tolerably
smooth the grand affair might come off some time in that month. Any
roughness of the water would be unfavorable to the weaker crew. The
rowing-course was on the eastern side of the lake, the starting-point
being opposite the Anchor Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to
the south, where the turning-stake was fixed, so that the whole course of
one mile and a half would bring the boats back to their starting-point.
The race was to be between the Algonquin, eight-oared boat with
outriggers, rowed by young men, students of Stoughton University, and the
Atalanta, also eight-oared and outrigger boat, by young ladies from the
Corinna Institute. Their boat was three inches wider than the other, for
various sufficient reasons, one of which was to make it a little less
likely to go over and throw its crew into the water, which was a sound
precaution, though all the girls could swim, and one at least, the bow
oar, was a famous swimmer, who had pulled a drowning man out of the water
after a hard struggle to keep him from carrying her down with him.
Though the coming trial had not been advertised in the papers, so as to
draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-on,
there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the villagers and
the students of the two institutions. Among them were a few who were
disposed to add to their interest in the trial by small wagers. The bets
were rather in favor of the "Quins," as the University boat was commonly
called, except where the natural sympathy of the young ladies or the
gallantry of some of the young men led them to risk their gloves or
cigars, or whatever it might be, on the Atalantas. The elements of
judgment were these: average weight of the Algonquins one hundred and
sixty-five pounds; average weight of the Atalantas, one hundred and
forty-eight pounds; skill in practice about equal; advantage of the
narrow boat equal to three lengths; whole distance allowed the Atalantas
eight lengths,--a long stretch to be made up in a mile and a half.
And so both crews began practising for the grand trial.
II
THE BOAT-RACE.
The 10th of June was a delicious summer day, rather warm, but still and
bright. The water was smooth, and the crews were in the best possible
condition. All was expectation, and for some time nothing but
expectation. No boat-race or regatta ever began at the time appointed
for the start. Somebody breaks an oar, or somebody fails to appear in
season, or something is the matter with a seat or an outrigger; or if
there is no such excuse, the crew of one or both or all the boats to take
part in the race must paddle about to get themselves ready for work, to
the infinite weariness of all the spectators, who naturally ask why all
this getting ready is not attended to beforehand. The Algonquins wore
plain gray flannel suits and white caps. The young ladies were all in
dark blue dresses, touched up with a red ribbon here and there, and wore
light straw hats. The little coxswain of the Atalanta was the last to
step on board. As she took her place she carefully deposited at her feet
a white handkerchief wrapped about something or other, perhaps a sponge,
in case the boat should take in water.
At last the Algonquin shot out from the little nook where she lay,
--long, narrow, shining, swift as a pickerel when he darts from the reedy
shore. It was a beautiful sight to see the eight young fellows in their
close-fitting suits, their brown muscular arms bare, bending their backs
for the stroke and recovering, as if they were parts of a single machine.
"The gals can't stan' it agin them fellers," said the old blacksmith from
the village.
"You wait till the gals get a-goin'," said the carpenter, who had often
worked in the gymnasium of the Corinna Institute, and knew something of
their muscular accomplishments. "Y' ought to see 'em climb ropes, and
swing dumb-bells, and pull in them rowin'-machines. Ask Jake there
whether they can't row a mild in double-quick time,--he knows all abaout
it."
Jake was by profession a fisherman, and a freshwater fisherman in a
country village is inspector-general of all that goes on out-of-doors,
being a lazy, wandering sort of fellow, whose study of the habits and
habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as
dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race
of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a
rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation all its own.
Jake made his usual preliminary signal, and delivered himself to the
following effect:
"Wahl, I don' know jest what to say. I've seed 'em both often enough
when they was practisin', an' I tell ye the' wa'n't no slouch abaout
neither on 'em. But them bats is all-fired long, 'n' eight on 'em
stretched in a straight line eendways makes a consid'able piece aout 'f a
mile 'n' a haaf. I'd bate on them gals if it wa'n't that them fellers is
naterally longer winded, as the gals 'll find aout by the time they git
raound the stake 'n' over agin the big ellum. I'll go ye a quarter on
the pahnts agin the petticoats."
The fresh-water fisherman had expressed the prevailing belief that the
young ladies were overmatched. Still there were not wanting those who
thought the advantage allowed the "Lantas," as they called the Corinna
boatcrew, was too great, and that it would be impossible for the "Quins"
to make it up and go by them.
The Algonquins rowed up and down a few times before the spectators. They
appeared in perfect training, neither too fat nor too fine, mettlesome as
colts, steady as draught-horses, deep-breathed as oxen, disciplined to
work together as symmetrically as a single sculler pulls his pair of
oars. The fisherman offered to make his quarter fifty cents. No takers.
Five minutes passed, and all eyes were strained to the south, looking for
the Atalanta. A clump of trees hid the edge of the lake along which the
Corinna's boat was stealing towards the starting-point. Presently the
long shell swept into view, with its blooming rowers, who, with their
ample dresses, seemed to fill it almost as full as Raphael fills his
skiff on the edge of the Lake of Galilee. But how steadily the Atalanta
came on!---no rocking, no splashing, no apparent strain; the bow oar
turning to look ahead every now and then, and watching her course, which
seemed to be straight as an arrow, the beat of the strokes as true and
regular as the pulse of the healthiest rower among them all. And if the
sight of the other boat and its crew was beautiful, how lovely was the
look of this! Eight young girls,--young ladies, for those who prefer that
more dignified and less attractive expression,--all in the flush of
youth, all in vigorous health; every muscle taught its duty; each rower
alert, not to be a tenth of a second out of time, or let her oar dally
with the water so as to lose an ounce of its propelling virtue; every eye
kindling with the hope of victory. Each of the boats was cheered as it
came in sight, but the cheers for the Atalanta were naturally the
loudest, as the gallantry of one sex and the clear, high voices of the
other gave it life and vigor.
"Take your places!" shouted the umpire, five minutes before the half
hour. The two boats felt their way slowly and cautiously to their
positions, which had been determined by careful measurement. After a
little backing and filling they got into line, at the proper distance
from each other, and sat motionless, their bodies bent forward, their
arms outstretched, their oars in the water, waiting for the word.
"Go!" shouted the umpire.
Away sprang the Atalanta, and far behind her leaped the Algonquin, her
oars bending like so many long Indian bows as their blades flashed
through the water.
"A stern chase is a long chase," especially when one craft is a great
distance behind the other. It looked as if it would be impossible for
the rear boat to overcome the odds against it. Of course the Algonquin
kept gaining, but could it possibly gain enough? That was the question.
As the boats got farther and farther away, it became more and more
difficult to determine what change there was in the interval between
them. But when they came to rounding the stake it was easier to guess at
the amount of space which had been gained. It was clear that something
like half the distance, four lengths, as nearly as could be estimated,
had been made up in rowing the first three quarters of a mile. Could the
Algonquins do a little better than this in the second half of the
race-course, they would be sure of winning.
The boats had turned the stake, and were coming in rapidly. Every minute
the University boat was getting nearer the other.
"Go it, Quins!" shouted the students.
"Pull away, Lantas!" screamed the girls, who were crowding down to the
edge of the water.
Nearer,--nearer,--the rear boat is pressing the other more and more
closely,--a few more strokes, and they will be even, for there is but one
length between them, and thirty rods will carry them to the line. It
looks desperate for the Atalantas. The bow oar of the Algonquin turns
his head. He sees the little coxswain leaning forward at every stroke,
as if her trivial weight were of such mighty consequence,--but a few
ounces might turn the scale of victory. As he turned he got a glimpse of
the stroke oar of the Atalanta. What a flash of loveliness it was! Her
face was like the reddest of June roses, with the heat and the strain and
the passion of expected triumph. The upper button of her close-fitting
flannel suit had strangled her as her bosom heaved with exertion, and it
had given way before the fierce clutch she made at it. The bow oar was a
staunch and steady rower, but he was human. The blade of his oar
lingered in the water; a little more and he would have caught a crab, and
perhaps lost the race by his momentary bewilderment.
The boat, which seemed as if it had all the life and nervousness of a
Derby three-year-old, felt the slight check, and all her men bent more
vigorously to their oars. The Atalantas saw the movement, and made a
spurt to keep their lead and gain upon it if they could. It was of no
use. The strong arms of the young men were too much for the young
maidens; only a few lengths remained to be rowed, and they would
certainly pass the Atalanta before she could reach the line.
The little coxswain saw that it was all up with the girls' crew if she
could not save them by some strategic device.
"Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?"
she whispered to herself,--for The Terror remembered her Virgil as she
did everything else she ever studied. As she stooped, she lifted the
handkerchief at her feet, and took from it a flaming bouquet. "Look!" she
cried, and flung it just forward of the track of the Algonquin. The
captain of the University boat turned his head, and there was the lovely
vision which had a moment before bewitched him. The owner of all that
loveliness must, he thought, have flung the bouquet. It was a challenge:
how could he be such a coward as to decline accepting it.
He was sure he could win the race now, and he would sweep past the line
in triumph with the great bunch of flowers at the stem of his boat, proud
as Van Tromp in the British channel with the broom at his mast-head.
He turned the boat's head a little by backing water. He came up with the
floating flowers, and near enough to reach them. He stooped and snatched
them up, with the loss perhaps of a second in all,--no more. He felt sure
of his victory.
How can one tell the story of the finish in cold-blooded preterites? Are
we not there ourselves? Are not our muscles straining with those of
these sixteen young creatures, full of hot, fresh blood, their nerves all
tingling like so many tight-strained harp-strings, all their life
concentrating itself in this passionate moment of supreme effort? No!
We are seeing, not telling about what somebody else once saw!
--The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of the Atalanta!
--The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with the middle of the Atalanta!
--Three more lengths' rowing and the college crew will pass the girls!
--"Hurrah for the Quins!" The Algonquin ranges up alongside of the
Atalanta!
"Through with her!" shouts the captain of the Algonquin.
"Now, girls!" shrieks the captain of the Atalanta.
They near the line, every rower straining desperately, almost madly.
--Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta's captain, and up flash its
splintered fragments, as the stem of her boat springs past the line,
eighteen inches at least ahead of the Algonquin.
Hooraw for the Lantas! Hooraw for the Girls! Hooraw for the Institoot!
shout a hundred voices.
"Hurrah for woman's rights and female suffrage!" pipes the small voice of
The Terror, and there is loud laughing and cheering all round.
She had not studied her classical dictionary and her mythology for
nothing. "I have paid off one old score," she said. "Set down my damask
roses against the golden apples of Hippomenes!"
It was that one second lost in snatching up the bouquet which gave the
race to the Atalantas.
III
THE WHITE CANOE.
While the two boats were racing, other boats with lookers-on in them were
rowing or sailing in the neighborhood of the race-course. The scene on
the water was a gay one, for the young people in the boats were, many of
them, acquainted with each other. There was a good deal of lively talk
until the race became too exciting. Then many fell silent, until, as the
boats neared the line, and still more as they crossed it, the shouts
burst forth which showed how a cramp of attention finds its natural
relief in a fit of convulsive exclamation.
But far away, on the other side of the lake, a birchbark canoe was to be
seen, in which sat a young man, who paddled it skillfully and swiftly.
It was evident enough that he was watching the race intently, but the
spectators could see little more than that. One of them, however, who
sat upon the stand, had a powerful spy-glass, and could distinguish his
motions very minutely and exactly. It was seen by this curious observer
that the young man had an opera-glass with him, which he used a good deal
at intervals. The spectator thought he kept it directed to the girls'
boat, chiefly, if not exclusively. He thought also that the opera-glass
was more particularly pointed towards the bow of the boat, and came to
the natural conclusion that the bow oar, Miss Euthymia Tower, captain of
the Atalantas, "The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute, was the attraction
which determined the direction of the instrument.
"Who is that in the canoe over there?" asked the owner of the spy-glass.
"That's just what we should like to know," answered the old landlord's
wife. "He and his man boarded with us when they first came, but we could
never find out anything about him only just his name and his ways of
living. His name is Kirkwood, Maurice Kirkwood, Esq., it used to come on
his letters. As for his ways of living, he was the solitariest human
being that I ever came across. His man carried his meals up to him. He
used to stay in his room pretty much all day, but at night he would be
off, walking, or riding on horseback, or paddling about in the lake,
sometimes till nigh morning. There's something very strange about that
Mr. Kirkwood. But there don't seem to be any harm in him. Only nobody
can guess what his business is. They got up a story about him at one
time. What do you think? They said he was a counterfeiter! And so they
went one night to his room, when he was out, and that man of his was away
too, and they carried keys, and opened pretty much everything; and they
found--well, they found just nothing at all except writings and
letters,--letters from places in America and in England, and some with
Italian postmarks: that was all. Since that time the sheriff and his
folks have let him alone and minded their own business. He was a
gentleman,--anybody ought to have known that; and anybody that knew about
his nice ways of living and behaving, and knew the kind of wear he had
for his underclothing, might have known it. I could have told those
officers that they had better not bother him. I know the ways of real
gentlemen and real ladies, and I know those fellows in store clothes that
look a little too fine,--outside. Wait till washing-day comes!"
The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were
not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be
relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his
accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the
village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps,
with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.
Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search among
his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had constructed
several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger. He was an agent
of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to several important
periodicals; the author of that anonymously published novel which had
made so much talk; the poet of a large clothing establishment; a spy of
the Italian, some said the Russian, some said the British, Government; a
proscribed refugee from some country where he had been plotting; a
school-master without a school, a minister without a pulpit, an actor
without an engagement; in short, there was no end to the perfectly
senseless stories that were told about him, from that which made him out
an escaped convict to the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric
heir to a great English title and estate.
The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion.
Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history.
No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him.
Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning
at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing into the shadows as
they drew near it. Sometimes on a moonlight night, when a party of the
young ladies were out upon the lake, they would see the white canoe
gliding ghost-like in the distance. And it had happened more than once
that when a boat's crew had been out with singers among them, while they
were in the midst of a song, the white canoe would suddenly appear and
rest upon the water,--not very near them, but within hearing
distance,--and so remain until the singing was over, when it would steal
away and be lost sight of in some inlet or behind some jutting rock.
Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man. The
landlady had told her story, which explained nothing. There was nobody
to be questioned about him except his servant, an Italian, whose name was
Paolo, but who to the village was known as Mr. Paul.