It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to be
born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can come
and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the
American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the father
of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile,
but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren, the
first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.
Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and stayed
here. Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--we'd have made a man of
him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as peaceful
as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab
many a time. Meant well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put
a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first
thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down. T'
other fellow's at work now, but he makes more noise about it. When the
linchpin comes out on his side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some
think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are
valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this
is the great Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went
by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign
vermin included,--said the little man.
This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful
of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with
the reply he would have made.
--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially.
I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in
company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of
the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I
maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell
me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought,
I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored
brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will
begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before
he has got to the fifth “says he,” and listen like a three-years' child,
as the author of the “Old Sailor” says. I had rather hear one of those
grand elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious
names, Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our
College days, in which “Tom and Jerry” (“Thomas and Jeremiah,” as the
old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any chance
find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a real
thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy
the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would
n't be talking, but “speaking my piece.” Better, I think, the hearty
abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the risk
of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes,
but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never
saying a foolish thing.
--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing
to do,--and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
“Autocrat's” monologues is over.
--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said,
the boarders call “John,”--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
person who sits at the other end of the table?
What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,
--and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when
they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by
this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported,
fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you know
anything about this deformed person?
About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would not
hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by Nature
to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I could
wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for what
should inspire only pity.
A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
John.
Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's
all right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to
the individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I understand
the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,--it is a
conservative principle in creation.
The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was speaking,
until it became as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a
gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. He had not
taken my meaning.
Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink, as
he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the way
to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man struck up that
well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic
festivals, beginning, “Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
Chrononhotonthologos?”
I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or
injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural
dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of
the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode
spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This
is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in
common with the herds.
--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up, where
there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor man
fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?
I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They call
him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a place
where most are Bostonians?
Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
young fellow.
“L. B. Ob. 1692.”--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him. The
ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little man,
or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old town.
Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?--I said to the
young fellow.
Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more, if
you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
little--
The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or given to
rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words; why, it
is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street by those who speak
of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
fish to the little man from that day forward.
--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house. First, myself, the
Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
looking down, where the “Autocrat” used to sit. At the further end sits
the Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or the
gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a
bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The Divinity Student is
my neighbor on the right,--and further down, that Young Fellow of whom
I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter sits near the
Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the Landlady. At the right
upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose name and history I have
as yet learned nothing. Next the further left-hand corner, near the
lower end of the table, sits the deformed person. The chair at his side,
occupying that corner, is empty. I need not specially mention the other
boarders, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son,
who sits near his mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference
enough and likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something
wanting. The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of
feminine attractions. I am not quite satisfied with this young lady. She
wears more “jewelry,” as certain young ladies call their trinkets, than
I care to see on a person in her position. Her voice is strident, her
laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing
and bobbing like a quill-float with a “minnum” biting the hook below it,
which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions.
I can't help hoping we shall put something into that empty chair yet
which will add the missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a
rare Miss who is expected. Something in the schoolgirl way, I believe.
We shall see.
--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution which
I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of all
concerned.
Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run dry
before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow? Let me
tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a bank,
and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums
to suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as
easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back
to me at last with these two words on it,--NO FUNDS. My check-book was a
volume of waste-paper.
Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO FUNDS,--and then
where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold and
your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up
and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or
rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as
a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with
a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which
we call “asleep,” because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking
points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or
ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of
the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile,
waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with
daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam
of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the
stork,--loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than
the depth of narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for his
contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and
nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star
Lambda of the constellation Hercules;--and the question is, whether
there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation,
after my lively friend has had his straw in the bung-hole of the
Universe!
A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether
he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As to
catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,--the
gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a favorable
intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.--I sow
more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over the desert-sand
along which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall
throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year. All sorts of bodily
and mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our
thought. The pulse-like “fits of easy and difficult transmission” seem
to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are
seen. We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell
a revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring
obscuration.
An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had
told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most
famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first
line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it
at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit
himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer
slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
“Ah!” said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, “if it hadn't
been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had
a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left-the store.” A
passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required
to persuade the accidental human being, X, into a given piece of
broadcloth, A.
We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of
all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
with local circumstances or universal principles.
When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
is an end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and
hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
alkaline unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
covered with lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them,
first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out when
I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature,
when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to
make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as the task is,
they never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive manner,
of the probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad as the
necessity is to their delicate sensibilities, they never hesitate to
advertise him of the decline of his powers, and to press upon him the
propriety of retiring before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their
kind offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil--
--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns Centenary,
(so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will
be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear.
Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present article, which,
by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of Chemistry, will be found
intelligible to the educated classes.