The Rev. Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
Mrs. Overcome, by his estimable lady.
Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
interesting children.
Peggy, by the female help.
The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
relief. He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
chokes,--and bursts into tears. That is the great effect of the evening.
The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and counts the
strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the other. The
children stand ready for a spring at the apples. The female help weeps
after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry
crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real
hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting,
but sobbing in earnest?
All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a
surprise-party where I read these few lines that follow:
We will not speak of years to-night;
For what have years to bring,
But larger floods of love and light
And sweeter songs to sing?
We will not drown in wordy praise
The kindly thoughts that rise;
If friendship owns one tender phrase,
He reads it in our eyes.
We need not waste our schoolboy art
To gild this notch of time;
Forgive me, if my wayward heart
Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
Enough for him the silent grasp
That knits us hand in hand,
And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
That locks our circling band.
Strength to his hours of manly toil!
Peace to his starlit dreams!
Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
The music-haunted streams!
Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
The sunshine on his lips,
And faith, that sees the ring of light
Round Nature's last eclipse!
--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I am
almost afraid to report it. However, as he seems to be really honest and
is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't believe anybody will
be very angry with him.
It is here, Sir! right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--in
this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and was
fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are dead
and gone,--please God! The battle goes on everywhere throughout
civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying which
proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next to
that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each individual
immortal soul! The three-hilled city against the seven-hilled city! That
is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you know what that means, I
don't think you'll ask for anything more. I swear to you, Sir, I believe
that these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points
that close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And
I believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and
unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and
Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent
in the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with
what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery
fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself,
Sir,--the stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is,
if the three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the
seven-hilled city!
--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch. Let him blow her
off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and a
charge of cavalry.
But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if to
speak.
Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name. And then,
in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am Allen!
But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with rage,
that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against
it. He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed
his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it.
It was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;--over in five seconds,
but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and
ten;--one trial enough,--settles the whole matter,--just as when
two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks,
there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten
party in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.
I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though
a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference
was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in
respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why
he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to
it or its authoress.
I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
has undergone a singular change of late years,--his hair losing its
original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another
has ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the
head. So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of
the Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not
pigmentary. But I can't think why he got so angry.
The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck.
So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not,
interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto remarks of
mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.
The “Sir” of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than
anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking
with some imaginary opponent.
--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is
full-grown!
He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round
of his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
little figure to the view of the boarders.
It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
strange an illustration of the text! I thought it was time to put in
a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
cosmopolitan.
I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
England,--I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and
politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and where
and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking
sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he
lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is
not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the
soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it
antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is
congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element
blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of
his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You
may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting
to be on all fours. Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like
the atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards. The
American baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he
hangs.
--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked, as
if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did when the
wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc. If he winked,
however, he did not dodge.
A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked the
blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir! The Milesian wet-nurse
is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant gets the
life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over again, on
the sunset pattern! You don't think what we are doing and going to
do here. Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with
interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new
earth over us and under us! Was there ever anything in Italy, I should
like to know, like a Boston sunset?
--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost smiled.
Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
but I know 'em best here. Anyhow, the American skies are different from
anything they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are different,
and the soil is different, and everything that comes out of the soil,
from grass up to Indians, is different. And now that the provisional
races are dying out--
--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the
divinity-student, interrupting him.
Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
manhood were ready.