“There goes Patches!”
“Hallo, Patches!”
Sitting in the porch, in the twilight of a June afternoon, Kate overhears
those cruel taunts. “Oh-h-h!” she exclaims in smothered indignation, the
hot flush mounting up her forehead.
“What is it, sister?” asks the Lieutenant.
“Oh, Walter, there are some boys down there in the street, calling names
at a little newsboy, and making sport of his poor, patched clothes. And
he looks so downhearted and discouraged—poor little fellow! Oh, it’s
_too_ bad! I wish you could say something to him to comfort him. Mrs.
McAllister was telling me about them the other day. His mother is a
widow and does washings, and there are other children—he the eldest; and
he is so kind and thoughtful, and does everything he can to help her;
goes around town, out of school-hours, running on errands and carrying
newspapers. I know what I’ll do”—but her plan for a new suit of clothes
is suddenly broken in upon by the boy approaching, and handing her the
evening paper, damp, just from the press.
“How many more of those have you to deliver?” Walter inquires.
“Only about a dozen.”
“Well, when you get through, and if you are not otherwise engaged, I’d
like to have your company for a walk. You see,” he adds, with a smile,
“I haven’t any eyes, myself, to find the way with; and it’s such a fine
evening I believe I’d like to go—yes, as far as the Park.”
The boy looks up into the blind man’s face, Kate thinks, as if he would
be willing to go to the ends of the earth with him.
“Yes, sir, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he says, hurrying away.
In one corner of the Park there is a shady, secluded nook—a clump of
trees all overgrown with vines, with rustic seats underneath. As Walter
and his companion rest there after their long walk, the moonbeams
shining softly down between the leaves, all at once a sob breaks the
stillness, followed by another and another, and then they come thick and
fast. Now the Lieutenant does not ask, “What’s the matter, little boy?”
as a great many thoughtless people would; for he remembers very well
that one doesn’t like to be asked such questions when one is crying.
Besides, doesn’t he know what the matter is? He can picture to himself
the wearisome life the poor child leads—ill-fed, ill-sheltered, ill-clad,
half the year pinched with hunger and cold, half the year breathing the
close, pent-up air of some wretched tenement—in his brave struggle to
help his widowed mother, not always able to find work; knocked about by
ruffian newsboys, sneered at by thoughtless schoolmates, little heeded
or noticed by anybody; till he looks downhearted, as Kate says, and the
very tones of his voice are grown dreary and sorrowful. Thinking of all
this, the Lieutenant cannot sit there like a block of stone, and listen
to those stifled sobs. So, as there is nothing to be said, he leans over,
and with that one arm of his about the slight figure, draws it close to
his side.
“Oh, you’re so good!” murmurs the tearful voice, as the lad rests his
head against the friendly shoulder. “It’s that that makes such a baby
of me. I can’t help it. Other folks ain’t like that. Other folks don’t
talk to me pleasant about this and that as you did all the way. Other
folks—oh!” and with that the slender form is shaken again with sobs.
“Ah, but those other folks who treat you so, you are going to make them
sorry for it, some day.”
“How?” The dreary young voice is full of wonder.
“How? Let me tell you a little story. Years ago a young printer went to
New York City to find work. He hadn’t any fine clothes, and scarcely any
money, and I doubt if in all that great city there was a single person
that he knew. After much searching he found something to do; and in the
office where he was employed the other printers delighted in annoying
him, playing jokes upon him, and daubing his light-colored hair with
ink. I wouldn’t wonder if this sort of treatment made him feel sad and
homesick, sometimes, and wish he was back again among the mountains
where he came from. However, he paid little attention to it; he worked
all day, faithfully, and at night he read and studied a good deal; and
when he couldn’t afford to pay for a light to study by, he would take
his book out by the street-lamp and study there—sometimes when it was
cold, too. Wasn’t he persevering? Well, he worked, and read, and studied,
and persevered, till he got to be an editor; yes, in time he became the
most famous editor—or journalist, some would call it—the most famous one
that ever lived. Last fall he died—this man who was once a penniless,
friendless boy—and at the news of his death there was sadness all over
the country; and, at his burial, thousands and thousands of people
crowded those same streets where he used to read, shivering, by the
lamp-light; thousands and thousands went to get a glimpse of his dead
face, and wept over it, because he had helped them and they loved him and
were sorry he was gone.
“Oh, was it Horace Greeley?” the lad whispers. (He has stopped crying
now.)
“You have guessed.”
“I’ve thought, sometimes,” says the boy, presently, in a hesitating
way—“I never told it to anybody before—but I’ve thought I’d like to be
great, too, some time, to be a lawyer—and—and go to Congress—and—oh,
I never told it to anybody before, because it’s foolish, I know, and
they’d laugh at me. I can’t help thinking about it, though. But of course
there’s no hope for _me_.”
“Ah, but there _is_, though! I doubt if our Vice-President thought there
was much hope of his ever going to Congress when, in his youth, he was
earning his livelihood in a shoemaker’s shop. But, you see, he kept
pegging away; when it wasn’t at boots and shoes it was at books, at
gaining knowledge, and making the most of the talents that were given
him, working his way up, inch by inch, till he became congressman,
surely, till now he presides over the Senate. And our President, at
your age, little dreamed that he would ever be called upon to control a
great army, to plan campaigns and sieges, to ‘fight it out all summer on
this line,’ as you have heard about—persevering, you see—and so to put
an end to the bloody war, and be chosen once and again to the highest
office in the land—like Washington, long ago. Yes, it’s perseverance that
does it. Did you ever hear of Cyrus Field, the man who brought the Old
World and the New nearer together by his Atlantic cable? When he first
proposed to do it, to send dispatches through two thousand miles of
water, that seemed to every one a very absurd idea. But when his cable
was finished and ready to be laid, then people began to be interested;
indeed, they were really excited over it, and it was quite the fashion
to wear attached to one’s watch-chain a bit of that gutta-percha cable,
set in gold. But the cable, or telegraph, was a failure, after all; it
didn’t ‘work.’ So people disbelieved once more, and lost interest in the
enterprise, and took the bits of gutta-percha from their watch-chains,
and put them away out of sight and of mind. And it fared with the
experimenter just as it fared with those trinkets. But years passed by,
and lo! one day, to everybody’s surprise, the President received from
Queen Victoria a polite message that had taken but a few moments to cross
the wide Atlantic. And now, you know, Europe and America can talk with
each other almost as easily as you and I here, sitting side by side.
For what had Cyrus Field been doing all that time that nobody took any
notice of him? He had been making trial after trial, and failure after
failure, and losing fortune, and, very likely, friends, but never losing
hope. So he persevered—and succeeded, at last. And who does your history
say discovered America?”
“Christopher Columbus.”
“Well, this Christopher Columbus of whom all the histories tell and
everybody knows, he was only a sailor boy, once, roving about in the
Mediterranean, with small chance of ever becoming noted. As little chance
would it seem there was when, years later, he went from court to court,
vainly asking aid to carry out his project. People had hardly begun, yet,
to credit the notion that the world was round; and this tall, sad-eyed,
white-haired, shabbily dressed stranger, with his maps and his charts,
and his plans for sailing straight West to India, who was going to
listen to him? Kings and queens were unwilling to see him or give him an
opportunity to explain, courtiers ridiculed him, children in the street
would point to their foreheads, as he passed by, and call out to each
other, ‘Look at the crazy Italian!’ But often disappointed, always hoping
and persevering, he stuck to his project, and finally, after eighteen
long years of waiting and fruitless effort, he got the help he wanted and
started on his voyage, and so found—not India, but America.”
And as the Lieutenant and his young guide walk slowly homeward through
the silent, moonlit avenues, he speaks of Lincoln, of Herder, of
Ferguson, of Beethoven, of Sir William Herschel, and of others who have
risen from poverty and obscurity to honor and renown; many of them
“self-made,” as it is called, toiling patiently and unaided up that steep
hill where the laurels grow.
Kate hears the hopeful ring in the lad’s voice as he says “Good night” to
his friend, and through the open window she sees the hopeful expression
upon his face as he turns away, glancing down rather proudly at the
jacket that is mended with pieces of many shades, and the boots that have
been patched and patched again. “What can you have been saying to him,
Walter?” she wonders. “Oh, if you could only have seen his face just now!
He doesn’t look like the same boy.” And Walter musingly repeats those
lines with which every “wide-awake” American boy and girl is familiar.
For was it not Longfellow who wrote them?
“Lives of great men all remind us
We may make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
“Footprints that perchance another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”
When, just before breakfast, Kate opens the door to look for the morning
paper, what does she find lying there on the threshold beside it? Fresh
water-lilies—the like of which are not to be found nearer than the
lake—miles away. “He has been all that way and back, this morning! bless
his little heart!” she exclaims, in astonishment, as she carries them
to her brother, breathing a thousand sweetest “Thank-you’s,” from among
their snowy petals. And you may be sure that those patched garments will
soon be replaced by others nice and new.