WINCHESTER.
Having followed the Indian boy from Apple Orchard to his lodge in the
wilderness, and shown how he passed many of his hours in the hills, it
is proper now that we should mount--in a figurative and metaphorical
sense--behind Mr. Rushton, and see whither that gentleman also bends
his steps. We shall thus arrive at the real theatre of our brief
history--we mean at the old town of Winchester,
Every body knows, or ought to know, all about Winchester. It is not a
borough of yesterday, where the hum of commerce and the echo of the
pioneer's axe mingle together, as in many of our great western cities
of the Arabian Nights:--Winchester has recollections about it, and
holds to the past--to its Indian combats, and strange experiences
of clashing arms, and border revelries, and various scenes of wild
frontier life, which live for us now only in the chronicles;--to
its memories of Colonel Washington, the noble young soldier, who
afterwards became, as we all have heard, so distinguished upon a
larger field;--to Thomas Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, who came
there often when the deer and the wolves of his vast possessions
would permit him--and to Daniel Morgan, who emptied many fair cups on
Loudoun-street, and one day passed, with trumpets sounding, going
to Québec; again on his way to debate questions of importance with
Tarleton, at the Cowpens--lastly, to crush the Tory rising on Lost
River, about the time when "it pleased heaven so to order things,
that the large army of Cornwallis should be entrapped and captured at
Yorktown, in Virginia," as the chronicles inform us. All these men of
the past has Winchester looked upon, and many more--on strange, wild
pictures, and on many histories. For you walk on history there and
drink the chronicle:--Washington's old fort is crumbling, but still
visible;--Morgan, the strong soldier, sleeps there, after all his
storms;--and grim, eccentric Fairfax lies where he fell, on hearing of
the Yorktown ending.
When we enter the town with Mr. Rushton, these men are elsewhere, it
is true; but none the less present. They are there forever.
The lawyer's office was on Loudoun-street, and cantering briskly along
the rough highway past the fort, he soon reached the rack before his
door, and dismounted. The rack was crooked and quailed--the house was
old and dingy--the very knocker on the door frowned grimly at the
wayfarer who paused before it. One would have said that Mr. Rushton's
manners, house, and general surrounding, would have repelled the
community, and made him a thousand enemies, so grim were they. Not at
all. No lawyer in the town was nearly so popular--none had as much
business of importance entrusted to them. It had happened in his
case as in a thousand others, which every one's experience must have
furnished. His neighbors had discovered that his rude and surly
manners concealed a powerful intellect and an excellent heart--and
even this rudeness had grown interesting from the cynical dry humor
not unfrequently mingled with it.
A huge table, littered with old dingy volumes, and with dusty rolls
of papers tied with red tape--a tall desk, with a faded and
ink-bespattered covering of brown cloth--a lofty set of "pigeon
holes," nearly filled with documents of every description--and a set
of chairs and stools in every state of dilapidation:--there was the
ante-room of Joseph Rushton, Esq., Attorney-at-Law and Solicitor in
Chancery.
No window panes ever had been seen so dirty as those which graced the
windows--no rag-carpet so nearly resolved into its component elements,
had ever decorated human dwelling--and perhaps no legal den, from
the commencement of the world to that time, had ever diffused so
unmistakeable an odor of parchment, law-calf, and ancient dust!
The apartment within the first was much smaller, and here Mr. Rushton
held his more confidential interviews. Few persons entered it,
however; and even Roundjacket would tap at the door before entering,
and generally content himself with thrusting his head through the
opening, and then retiring. Such was the lawyer's office.