There is, however, another side to the picture, more like currant jelly.
The people generally are as kind as they can be. “We will give you the
best we have,” is what is often told me, and they do it. Here is a house
near Jamestown, where I have stopped a week at a time, or nearly that,
once in six months for about six years, and the people will take nothing
for it. For seventy-five miles west of Dunginess is a region where a
man’s company is supposed to pay for his lodgings at any house. I meet a
man, who offers to go home, a half a mile, and get me a dinner, if I
will only accept it. A girl, with whose family I was only slightly
acquainted, stood on the porch one day as I passed, and said: “Mister,
have you been to dinner? You had better stop and have some.” A
hotel-keeper, who had sold whiskey for fifteen years, put me in his best
room, one which he had fitted up for his own private use, and then would
take nothing for it. The Superintendent of the Seabeck Mills, Mr. R.
Holyoke, invited me to go to his house whenever I was in the place, and
would never take any thing for it. It amounted to about four weeks’ time
each year for five or six years, and yet he would hardly allow me to
thank him. Others, too, at the same place, have been very kind. The
steamer _St. Patrick_ for two years and a half always carried myself and
family free, whenever we wished to travel on it, and during that time it
gave us sixty or seventy-five dollars’ worth of fare. Captain J. G.
Baker, of the _Colfax_, said to me, six or seven years ago: “Whenever
you or your family, or an Indian whom you have with you to carry you,
wish to travel where I am going, I will take you free.” He has often
done it, sometimes making extra effort with his steamer in order to
accommodate me. The steamers _Gem_ and _McNaught_ also made a rule to
charge me no fare when I traveled on them.
Indians, too, are not wholly devoid of gratitude. It is the time of a
funeral. They are often accustomed at such times to make presents to
their friends who attend and sympathize with them. “Take this money,”
they have often said to me at such times, as they have given me from one
to three dollars. “Do not refuse--it is our custom; for you have come
to comfort us with Christ’s words.” At a great festival, where I was
present to protect them from drunkenness, and other evils equally bad,
they handed me seven dollars and a half, saying, “You have come a long
distance to help us; we can not give you food as we do these Indians, as
you do not eat with us; take this money, it will help to pay your
board.” But when I offered to pay the gentleman with whom I was staying,
Mr. B. G. Hotchkiss, he too would take nothing for the board. The good
people of the Pearl Street Church in Hartford, Connecticut, sent us a
barrel of things in the early spring of 1883, whose money value I
estimated at considerably over a hundred dollars, and whose good cheer
was inestimable in money, because it came when our days were the
darkest.
God has been very good to put it into the hearts of so many people to be
so kind, and not the least good thing that he has done is that he has
put that verse in the Bible about the giving a cup of cold water and the
reward that will follow.