ON the second day of June, 186--, a young Norseman, Halfdan Bjerk
by name, landed on the pier at Castle Garden. He passed through the
straight and narrow gate where he was asked his name, birthplace, and
how much money he had,--at which he grew very much frightened.
“And your destination?”--demanded the gruff-looking functionary at the
desk.
“America,” said the youth, and touched his hat politely.
“Do you think I have time for joking?” roared the official, with an
oath.
The Norseman ran his hand through his hair, smiled his timidly
conciliatory smile, and tried his best to look brave; but his hand
trembled and his heart thumped away at an alarmingly quickened tempo.
“Put him down for Nebraska!” cried a stout red-cheeked individual
(inwrapped in the mingled fumes of tobacco and whisky) whose function it
was to open and shut the gate.
“There ain’t many as go to Nebraska.”
“All right, Nebraska.”
The gate swung open and the pressure from behind urged the timid
traveler on, while an extra push from the gate-keeper sent him flying in
the direction of a board fence, where he sat down and tried to realize
that he was now in the land of liberty.
Halfdan Bjerk was a tall, slender-limbed youth of very delicate frame;
he had a pair of wonderfully candid, unreflecting blue eyes, a smooth,
clear, beardless face, and soft, wavy light hair, which was pushed back
from his forehead without parting. His mouth and chin were well cut, but
their lines were, perhaps, rather weak for a man. When in repose, the
ensemble of his features was exceedingly pleasing and somehow reminded
one of Correggio’s St. John. He had left his native land because he was
an ardent republican and was abstractly convinced that man, generically
and individually, lives more happily in a republic than in a monarchy.
He had anticipated with keen pleasure the large, freely breathing life
he was to lead in a land where every man was his neighbor’s brother,
where no senseless traditions kept a jealous watch over obsolete
systems and shrines, and no chilling prejudice blighted the spontaneous
blossoming of the soul.
Halfdan was an only child. His father, a poor government official, had
died during his infancy, and his mother had given music lessons, and
kept boarders, in order to gain the means to give her son what is
called a learned education. In the Latin school Halfdan had enjoyed the
reputation of being a bright youth, and at the age of eighteen, he had
entered the university under the most promising auspices. He could make
very fair verses, and play all imaginable instruments with equal ease,
which made him a favorite in society. Moreover, he possessed that very
old-fashioned accomplishment of cutting silhouettes; and what was more,
he could draw the most charmingly fantastic arabesques for embroidery
patterns, and he even dabbled in portrait and landscape painting.
Whatever he turned his hand to, he did well, in fact, astonishingly
well for a dilettante, and yet not well enough to claim the title of an
artist. Nor did it ever occur to him to make such a claim. As one of
his fellow-students remarked in a fit of jealousy, “Once when Nature had
made three geniuses, a poet, a musician, and a painter, she took all the
remaining odds and ends and shook them together at random and the result
was Halfdan Bjerk.” This agreeable melange of accomplishments, however,
proved very attractive to the ladies, who invited the possessor to
innumerable afternoon tea-parties, where they drew heavy drafts on his
unflagging patience, and kept him steadily engaged with patterns and
designs for embroidery, leather flowers, and other dainty knickknacks.
And in return for all his exertions they called him “sweet” and
“beautiful,” and applied to him many other enthusiastic adjectives
seldom heard in connection with masculine names. In the university,
talents of this order gained but slight recognition, and when Halfdan
had for three years been preparing himself in vain for the examen
philosophicum, he found himself slowly and imperceptibly drifting into
the ranks of the so-called studiosi perpetui, who preserve a solemn
silence at the examination tables, fraternize with every new generation
of freshmen, and at last become part of the fixed furniture of their
Alma Mater. In the larger American colleges, such men are mercilessly
dropped or sent to a Divinity School; but the European universities,
whose tempers the centuries have mellowed, harbor in their spacious
Gothic bosoms a tenderer heart for their unfortunate sons. There the
professors greet them at the green tables with a good-humored smile of
recognition; they are treated with gentle forbearance, and are allowed
to linger on, until they die or become tutors in the families of remote
clergymen, where they invariably fall in love with the handsomest
daughter, and thus lounge into a modest prosperity.
If this had been the fate of our friend Bjerk, we should have dismissed
him here with a confident “vale” on his life’s pilgrimage. But,
unfortunately, Bjerk was inclined to hold the government in some
way responsible for his own poor success as a student, and this, in
connection with an aesthetic enthusiasm for ancient Greece, gradually
convinced him that the republic was the only form of government under
which men of his tastes and temperament were apt to flourish. It was,
like everything that pertained to him, a cheerful, genial conviction,
without the slightest tinge of bitterness. The old institutions were
obsolete, rotten to the core, he said, and needed a radical renovation.
He could sit for hours of an evening in the Students’ Union, and
discourse over a glass of mild toddy, on the benefits of universal
suffrage and trial by jury, while the picturesqueness of his language,
his genial sarcasms, or occasional witty allusions would call forth
uproarious applause from throngs of admiring freshmen. These were the
sunny days in Halfdan’s career, days long to be remembered. They came to
an abrupt end when old Mrs. Bjerk died, leaving nothing behind her but
her furniture and some trifling debts. The son, who was not an eminently
practical man, underwent long hours of misery in trying to settle up her
affairs, and finally in a moment of extreme dejection sold his entire
inheritance in a lump to a pawnbroker (reserving for himself a few rings
and trinkets) for the modest sum of 250 dollars specie. He then took
formal leave of the Students’ Union in a brilliant speech, in which
he traced the parallelisms between the lives of Pericles and
Washington,--in his opinion the two greatest men the world had ever
seen,--expounded his theory of democratic government, and explained the
causes of the rapid rise of the American Republic. The next morning he
exchanged half of his worldly possessions for a ticket to New York, and
within a few days set sail for the land of promise, in the far West.