him, has had his court-painter, who took the portraits of several
of his eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and exposed them
for sale in Covent Garden under the title: "Etchings of Remarkable
Beggars, Itinerant Traders, and other persons of Notoriety," drawn
from the life in London town. There glisten perennially the seraphic
upturned eyes of "Hot Peas!" there you may see the Hogarthian face
and attitude of the one-armed vender of gasping "Live Haddock!" the
pastoral cousin offering "Young (toy) Lambs!" the dealer in pickled
cucumbers, his arms akimbo, a fork stuck in the dish on his head, and
a surreptitious wink in his well-conducted eye; the flying pie-man,
smirking like Malvolio, and starched and skirted like a dignitary
of bluff Hal's; the reduced beau, sweeping crossings, with his yet
fastidious air; and the humble bespectacled painter, his own drayman,
changing quarters on holy Luke's day, so festooned with torsos,
casts, brushes, phials, easels, that he seems a perambulating studio.
The vagabondistic sect is of exceedingly mutable nature. It distends,
it contracts; it swears in, now a person of probity, not of wealth;
now a sinner, like the rest of us, who seldom moves in good society:
an odd congregation, comprising dozens that have no business among
the elect, and lacking a proportionate number who stray untethered
into other folds. On this showing, not only all mendicants, pedlers,
street-singers, pick-pockets, and uneasy minds are accepted rascals,
but poor queer B., who wrote poetry, and went veiled like the great
Mokanna, distraught to know whether the aggregate stare of her
fellow-citizens was attributable to her renown, or to her scarce
Hellenic beauty, falls into the same category; and the venerable
campaigner, who tacks on to her hurdy-gurdy a certificate of army
membership signed by Napoleon (presumably to be referred to her
fighting spouse, deceased),--that wrinkled and taciturn spook of what
was once French vivacity and grace, faithfully grinding "_Partant
pour la Syrie_," in snow and sun, within a fixed radius of Boston
Common,--even she must emerge, despite the music of Austerlitz and
Jena, nothing short of a naturalized Yankee vagabond! There are laws
yet unrepealed, Céleste! for thy suppression; prices set on the
innocuous heads of "minstrels and useless persons."
We could wish that a new Plutarch should write up the patron-saint
of vagabonds,--one Bampfylde Moore Carew, a Devonshire celebrity
born under William and Mary, a most conscientious, well-bred person,
and of good parts, who became a gentleman at large only under
irresistible conviction; and who, after a series of adventures
before which an Arabian tale covers its head, rose to be king of the
gypsies, and Great High Joss of beggars and mimics, henceforward:
a pleasant, adroit creature, familiar with the wildernesses of
what were not yet the Atlantic States, reckless enough to be
kindly-disposed towards his fellows, and successful in everything he
undertook, living, "gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as the devil," to
a consistent and edifying old age.
We have a sneaking kindness for him and his votaries. A congenital
affinity softens us towards suspicious characters. We were early
aware that we startled shop-keepers with our roving thumb, how or
whence we know not; but we have come to love the indiscreet something
in us which calls forth Puritan vigilance, and we should violently
resent a change of tactics. More than once a jeweller (who might have
made a mad wag if he had not been so choked with virtue) refused
to give back our repaired watch, eying us with grewsome distrust,
and absolutely disclaimed having beheld our cockney countenance
before! We enter a warehouse, only to await identification, as they
are pleased to call it, from Tom, Dick, and Harry, and only by force
of eloquence, or by literal making of faces (honest, ingenuous,
reliable, unevasive faces, out of use, but quite as good as new, and
triumphantly effective), do we succeed in securing the household
necessities. Reading once, of a windy day, seated on the sea-wall of
the Charles, through a chance waiting-hour, in cloistral privacy, we
were accosted across lots by a sombre policeman, and mysteriously
lured back to the confines of civilization; whereupon the misguided
creature, scanning our cheerful lineaments,--cheerful from the
pages of "Travels with a Donkey,"--burst into uncanny laughter, and
presently explained that he had been detailed to save yon despondent
crank from plunging into the hungry river!
Our career of vagabond by brevet had wellnigh closed. Seriously, sir
or madam, you may stand by that harbor-mouth, and have an inkling
into the tragedies of the strollers of whom "men wot not whence they
come, nor whither they go." But, to keep you on the liberal side of
compassion, you who are not of the faith must also be made aware
that Aldebaran is a gracious star to his own; and that "wild and
noble sights" are vouchsafed to the outer and inner eye of shabbiest
Bohemianism, "such as they that sit in parlors never dream of."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
MATHEMATICS.
RHADAMANTHUS is so old by this time, and so hardened into his own
way of thinking, that I suppose it is useless to wish he were
of my mind. What I look upon as justice, he may, moreover, call
spitefulness, or worse. But I dearly desire to sit enthroned by Styx
in his stead, that I might adjudge dire reparative torments to old
Euclid and to Eaton, that modern figurative fiend, and to the entire
tribe of evil-inventing Arabs. What hope is there in this world for
redress? Such creatures have been lauded as friends of civilization
and of human progress. Tens of thousands, mostly helpless minors,
and stray rebels of all ages, among whom I am but a meek atom, make
passionate protest. We go about, with an ancient school-rhyme for our
Marseillaise:--
"Multiplication's a vexation,
Subtraction's just as bad;
The Rule of Three, it puzzles me,
And Fractions drive me mad."
We aspire to be moderate. We handle a slate and pencil forgivingly.
We consider that history is somewhat against us; for Cæsar believed
doggedly in addition; and the generals of the great Alexander were
fond of division all their days. We try to get over our distrust of
the Book of Numbers, and to think it quite canonical; vainly, vainly.
We are still the army of the disaffected; and your numeric blood,
which was transfused into us by main force, seethes and hisses in our
unproselytized veins.
Mine antipathy to a unit, like an ancestral prejudice, developed in
infancy. I cannot reconcile myself to that persistent squandering of
my capabilities--and nothing shall persuade me that they were not
fine, primarily--on insufferable jargon of twice two, and thirteen
times twenty-seven; on angles, polygons, hypothenuses, and roots of
diabolic cubes; on halving and cancelling everything Solomon in his
wisdom had never heard of, save the growing, intact, substantial
aversion outlasting all else. What glory and honor did it bring
me? The singular privilege of taking and giving money on faith; of
confusing ounces, yards, and quarts, and of being "circumvented," as
Burton scornfully put it, "by every base tradesman."
The Vallais cretins, it is confidently asserted, cannot be taught
mathematics. If so, the Vallais cretin is my cousin-german. My heart
warms to him. I am his transatlantic affinity. He is the happier,
inasmuch as his little eccentricity is recognized, and no tampering
follows; whereas I fell heir to years of crazy importunities. I
bethink me with anguish of so many precious hours spent between
sunrise and sunset, in compulsory handling of snaky arithmetical
characters, when I might have mastered the literature of Timbuctoo,
or successfully dug out, in a mellower land, the hoary toy-pistols
of little child Astyanax. It is drilled into my younger brethren and
sistren (such is their venerable and true English title!) that a
cipher to right of them, or a cipher to left of them, under certain
circumstances which happily I forget, make vast differences with
silly figures. Not one of the unfortunates is a stranger to such
dogmas. A visitor of classrooms, with a proper dash of vinegar in
him, knows nevertheless that the tender geometric parrot-prodigy
shall scarce be taught some more curious problems: why political
bribery is not a state-prison crime, nor oppression of dumb beasts,
nor marriage--_O tempora!_--without love. Therefore the cretin
wears his rue with a difference, and is enviable. He is not chained
up (simply because it is the general barbaric custom) to "the
hard-grained muses of the cube and square;" that is, not unless he
gets astray on the educational world, and finds it quite useless to
proclaim his identity.
If any one take kindly to the Black Art (as he might to the
small-pox), he must, of course, be humored. Believe him sincerely
mistaken. Perhaps he may not ripen into a college professor whose
business it is to disseminate his evil lore. Perhaps, Heaven assoil
him! he may.
[Illustration]
A CHILD IN CAMP.
LIKE the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage
of life, literally, with flourish of trumpets. The Civil War was
at its bursting-point, the President calling for recruits: it was
impertinent of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the
world. And since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned
to love with incredible quickness,
"O bella Libertà! O bella!"--
rocked my fortunate cradle. She gave me a little flag for toy,
instead of coral-and-bells; and filled my virginal ear with the
classic strains of "John Brown's Body," ere yet I had heard a secular
lullaby. She it was who dyed my infant mind in her own tri-color,
and whose exciting companionship roused me surprisingly early into
wide-awake consciousness and speculation. In laughing recognition of
her old, old favor, these confused twilight memories (Impressions of
America, as it were, _ab ovo_) may be recorded.
A young person some twenty-four years my senior, for whom I had a
violent liking, had preceded me "to the warres." I saw his ship sail
away, at that exceedingly tender age when a human being is involved
in mummy-like cerements, and cannot properly be said to exist at all.
In the winter of 1864--he had been away during that long interval--I
enlisted and went South to visit him. I had thrived at home through
the distended agony of those days. I had a general idea that my cue
in life was to fight; and I would smile endearingly over a colored
plate of the Battle of Trafalgar, whose smoky glare, and indications
of turmoil and slaughter, were supremely to my mind. Red, however,
by some process of mistaken zeal, I came to regard as inimical to
the party to which, as catechumen, I belonged. I had not then a
very copious vocabulary at my command; but I soon indicated my
convictions by screeching like a young eagle at the most innocent
auction-flag that ever floated out of a Boston door of a sunny
morning, or flushing with unmistakable wrath at a casual visitor who
bore a trace of that outrageous color in anything worn or carried.
It was long, indeed, before I was persuaded to transfer my misguided
sentiment to A.D. 1775, and to believe that the neighboring
rebel had no especial affinity with the hue in question. Prior to
my memorable journey to Virginia, I had spent a few months in camp
the year before. A slight epidemic ran the rounds of the tents, and
took in ours. The only recollection which survives is a vivid one
of neighboring trees, and a distant hill, visible as I lay facing
the narrow door; a view which included the ever-flitting figure of
the sentinel, his steady, silent tread, musket on shoulder, and the
kind rustic face in profile, which turned, ever and anon, smilingly
about, like the moon at her merriest. That welcome shadow which fell
before him in the broad light was cut down in the ranks at Malvern
Hill.
But my earliest real experiences began in '64. Hostilities had been
some weeks suspended; yet the headquarters of a Southern regiment
lay within gun-shot, and thither my delighted terrors reverted. Was
Jeff Davis lurking on the other bank of the stream? Might they creep
over by night and fall upon us? If I should be allowed to venture
alone into the thicket, would the fiery eyes of the "reb" glare upon
me? Please could I settle difficulties with any little boy in the
opposing camp? in the admirable Roman fashion, of whose precedent I
was yet ignorant.
How they would laugh, those bearded and epauletted guests of our
exceptionally elegant log-house! And how uproariously they often
planted me, regardless of ink and paper, on the table, and toasted me
in some cordial beverage until I pranced in glee!
Be it humbly admitted that the freedom I enjoyed among officers and
men of several organizations, and the indulgence which they showed,
tended not to improve my scarce seraphic disposition. More than once
was I called to order for some breach of discipline, the most venial
of which were cutting the tent-strings, hanging about the sentry and
impeding his progress with efforts to relieve him of his musket, or
concealing the drum-sticks to postpone an anticipated signal. The
dark-eyed young man to whom I owed allegiance--
"Ay me! while life did last that league was tender,"
--would exclaim, with the awful sense of a newly acquired dignity:
"Disobey a colonel if you dare!" and threaten me, not with vulgar
deprivations of supper, or trivial captivity in closets, but with a
veritable court-martial for my predestined doom, when I should be so
bad again.
Our family retinue consisted of a cook of jolly and rubicund
exterior, and a pleasant lad, who, among his other duties, cared for
my glossy-coated Arabian, and led him about like a circus-master,
while I "snatched a fearful joy" upon his back. The memory of the
former personage is embalmed in the fragrance of roast beef and
mashed potatoes, edibles which he announced frequently with a
melodramatic flourish and intonation never to be forgotten. Burly old
Bush! He had a quaint way of delivering his best things, _stans pede
in uno_, with a sidelong light of the eye to let you into the secret
of his rich hyperboles.
Another favorite of mine was an adjutant, owner of two sociable King
Charles spaniels, which I was permitted to endow with portions of
my supper, and which I visited as regularly as a country lover his
sweetheart, when the general evening relaxation set in. Captain J.,
too, stern, reticent, and little popular with his men, was strangely
gentle to one that rode on his arm, and fell asleep, many a time, at
his knee. He was a fascinating story-teller, and held my fancy longer
than any soldier-playmate of his day. He had the absolute confidence
of my infallible young man. The old figure, "true as steel," was made
for him. They forbore to tell me till long afterwards, that he fell,
shot through and through, at the Wilderness, with his face to the foe.
He had a brother, a mere boy, whose sunny hair I can remember under
the military cap. But him I may come across any hour, prosperous and
sunny-haired still. The only other figures plain to my mind's eye
are F., the sweet-mannered gentleman who took care of me in a long
railway journey; S., the surgeon, maker of jokes and of whistles;
W., who used to sing "Malbrook s'en va-t en guerre," with immense
satisfaction to himself, at least; and C., an inveterate patriot, who
gave his good right arm for the asking, at touch of a cannon-ball.
During that stay there was much gayety and little mishap. My elders
rode off to many a hunt, or held tournaments with all the tilting and
fair ladies' smiles incidental, nay, essential, to their success.
Twice, in the midst of less serious things, the men were called to
sleep under arms. I can very well remember, another time, ominous
talk of Mosby and his guerillas, and a cloud of dust on the horizon
which seemed to betoken his restless squadron. But these were
variations on a winter full of pastime, and uncommonly clement and
merry. The campaign that followed was so arduous, and involved such
heavy losses, that it is cheering to remember the hearty voices of
old play-fellows during that genial holiday, to take down the books
they used to read from their anchorage on a shelf, and to treasure up
the gay incidents that brightened their tragic story.
I recall a waiter of exceeding blackness who impressed me in a
Washington hotel, and a sandwich, uncommonly sharp with mustard,
obtained on the homeward journey at the Baltimore station, where the
city seemed to turn out to feed the very hungry in my person; and
nothing at all further, beyond these unspiritual details, till the
war drew to a close. For then my best-beloved soldier came home. He
was terribly shattered with suffering and fatigue,--how irrevocably
hurt I knew not. If "the stars had fallen from heaven to light upon
his shoulders," the thunderbolt had fallen too; and the general's
insignia was sealed with a minie-ball. After a series of escapes
thrilling enough for a dime novel, after a plunge, horse and man,
into a ravine, a solitary stampede in a swamp, the loss of a scabbard
and a patch of clothing by the familiar brushing of a bomb, and a
hole through a cap neatly made by an attentive sharp-shooter, the
charmed bullets had hit at last. It was my earliest glimpse of the
painful side of the war, when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting
recognition with a weary smile, at the door of the sunny little
house we all loved. Instantly, heedless of any persuasive arms or
voices, I slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the rocks, and
disappeared under the table. Such was my common mode of receiving
strangers; and here, indeed, was a most bewildering and appalling
stranger. In vain my soldier called me by the most endearing names;
even the whimsical nomenclature of camp-life failed to convince
me that this was no imposition. I shut my disbelieving eyes, and
crouched on the carpet. For two long hours I did not capitulate, and
then but warily. What was this spectre with whom I must not frolic,
on whose shoulders I must not perch, whose head, bound in bandages, I
must not handle? What was he, in place of my old-time comrade, blithe
and boyish, and how could he expect to inherit the confidence I had
given to quite another sort of person? Unhallowed Dixie! How it had
cozened me out of what I prized most!
The wound that jarred upon me, I quickly came to consider as an
admirable distinction, and altogether proper and desirable. I longed
to be shot, in the interests of my native land; and presently, "by
the foot of Pharaoh!" so I was, thanks to a pistol in the hands
of a maladroit little neighbor. I underwent the ether-sponge and
the knife, and my chubby cheek displayed with pride the reduced
fac-simile of the parental scar. It was my day of jubilee, ere
the cicatrice had vanished, when I might lean against that elder
veteran's knee, and recount Munchausen-like tales of "our" prowess in
the war.
I remember the shock of national loss when the President
was assassinated; and, after that, the coming and going of
army-faces,--some strange, some familiar. It was like Virginia once
more, to hear the band march, serenading, up the quiet street; to
recognize hearty voices at the garden gate; to command my most
dutiful to "shoulder arms!" and "right wheel!" and, waking from
slumber, to creep to the head of the stairs, and surreptitiously
greet dear M. and B. and broad-shouldered A., as they passed below.
Not only these my childish fancy saw, but there seemed to gather with
them many, many others, bearing names that sometime had been cited
in my presence from the bright annals of Massachusetts; and out of
their syllables I framed a ghostly pageant, following ever, like a
breath of wind, close on the footsteps of their living peers. The
dream-cohorts, too, smiled up at me, and swept by. "Trenmor came, the
tall form of vanished years, his blue hosts behind him."
I went to camp several times thereafter, though never with my own
brigade; but having outlived its enchantment, inasmuch as I were
now conscious of "playing soldier" merely, I took a stand on my war
record, and decided to withdraw from the militia. That was long
ago. But the old prepossessions are immortal. The smell of powder
is sweeter to me than Oriental lilies. I resent the doctrine of
absorption into the restful bosom of Brahma. An it please you, I
aspire to Mars.
I used to love the sight of those shabby warriors, dolefully
bewailing their forlorn condition, and mildly suggesting their
eligibility to a bounteous dinner, who prowled, in long succession,
about our side door. I thrilled with indignation at their
counterfeited wrongs. I brought them my sweetmeats, to throw a halo
about their sober meal. Do I not take kindly yet to the battered
coat bedizened with bright buttons, on the back of M., grimy vender
of coal? Do I not encourage the handsome charges of our grocer,
solely because I know his antecedents, and can trace his limp to
Ball's Bluff?
It was an article of belief, in my Utopian childhood, that a
soldier could do no wrong. It went hard with me, in my eleventh
year, to catch a glimpse of the silver Maltese cross, the badge
of the impeccable Fifth Corps, on the breast of a scowling state
prisoner, the hero "shorn of his beams." His arm no longer rested on
a howitzer; he wielded a crowbar. He might have hallowed Libby or
Andersonville with his passing, and now,--O Absalom!
The warden, the benignant warden, himself of the "trade of war," did
he know what he was doing, when he assured me that the cells were
peopled with ex-Federal knights? Men have tried vainly to restore
the lost completeness of the glorious statue of Melos. Even so with
a broken faith. What it might have been is out of the province of
diviners.
[Illustration]
ON GRAVEYARDS.
A KINDNESS for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old,
battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest
spirit. A marked distinction is to be drawn between the amateur and
the professional haunter of the _coemetrion_, the place of sleep.
If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot be an impersonal matter, pray,
sweet reader, keep to the courts of the living. The intolerable
pain of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name; the chance of
stumbling on some parody of the departed, under a glass case, or of
brushing against the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving,--these
are things whose risk one would not willingly run. Therefore stick
to antiquities, and let thy fastidious eye look with favor at no
carven mortuary date that was cut later than under the third of the
Georges. If there be a suspicion of Scotch granite, or of landscape
gardening in any God's acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to
windward. But where there stand, in honest slate, armorial ensigns,
gaping cherubs, and cheerful scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as
a child labels his drawing, "This is a cow") with "Memento mori," or
the scarcely less admirable truism, "Fugit hora," then enter in, and
read that chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the centuries have
written.
Here is the great dormitory; here sits the little god Harpocrates,
swinging on the lotos-leaf, his finger on his lips.
"No noyse here
But the toning of a teare."
Thousands possess the earth in peace. Are not Spurius Cassius and the
Gracchi vindicated, when the Agrarian law prevails at last?
How paltry a thing is a monument to the dead, save as expressing the
affection of survivors! Cannot the liberal soil absorb, without
comment, the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to the
world's growth and beauty? It must needs forever be placarded to the
stranger, who would fain not be critical concerning the failings
of these old hearts, where John Smith lies. It is not the chisel
which keeps a memory alive. An inscription is superfluous for him
whose deeds are graven in the book of life. Many another, who has
but elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is laid under all
the figures of rhetoric, and is beholden to nothing better than an
obelisk to speak him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant," says Sir
Thomas Browne, "is a fallacy in duration." A monument, "a stone to a
bone," shows the terminus of the corporeal journey, and serves merely
to mark the gateway through which something perishable, that was
dear, has passed away.
Think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the Puritan colonists,
surmounting every grave with a grinning skull, in tracery, when the
benighted pagans, ages before, crushed out the material aspects of
death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, and myrtle; imagery of
the liberated insect, leaping to the sun with impetuous wings; poesy
full of hopefulness and cheer; and the symbolic figure of an inverted
torch over the burial pile! It might disparage the acrid sanctity of
the forefathers to ask which of the two seemed worthiest to inherit
immortality.