MY LIFE TO ITS CRISIS.
New-Yorkers of to-day see so many processions, and live through so many
sensations, and hurrah for so many heroes in every year, that it is only
the oldest of fogies who tells you of the triumphant procession of
steamboats which, in the year 1824, welcomed General Lafayette on his
arrival from his tour through the country he had so nobly served.
But, if the reader wishes to lengthen out this story he may button the
next silver-gray friend he meets, and ask him to tell of the broken
English and broken French of the Marquis, of Levasseur, and the rest of
them; of the enthusiasm of the people and the readiness of the visitors,
and he will please bear in mind that of all that am I.
For it so happened that on the morning when, for want of better lions to
show, the mayor and governor and the rest of them took the Marquis and
his secretary, and the rest of them, to see the orphan asylum in Deering
Street,--as they passed into the first ward, after having had "a little
refreshment" in the managers' room, Sally Eaton, the head nurse, dropped
the first courtesy to them, and Sally Eaton, as it happened, held me
screaming in her arms. I had been sent to the asylum that morning with a
paper pinned to my bib, which said my name was Felix Carter.
"Eet ees verra fine," said the Marquis, smiling blandly.
"Ràvissant!" said Levasseur, and he dropped a five-franc piece into
Sally Eaton's hand. And so the procession of exhibiting managers talking
bad French, and of exhibited Frenchmen talking bad English, passed on;
all but good old Elkanah Ogden--God bless him!--who happened to have
come there with the governor's party, and who loitered a minute to talk
with Sally Eaton about me.
Years afterwards she told me how the old man kissed me, how his eyes
watered when he asked my story, how she told again of the moment when I
was heard screaming on the doorstep, and how she offered to go and bring
the paper which had been pinned to my bib. But the old man said it was
no matter,--"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his
name was not provided for him. We must not leave him here," he said; "he
shall grow up a farmer's lad, and not a little cockney." And so, instead
of going the grand round of infirmaries, kitchens, bakeries, and
dormitories with the rest, the good old soul went back into the
managers' room, and wrote at the moment a letter to John Myers, who took
care of his wild land in St. Lawrence County for him, to ask him if Mrs.
Myers would not bring up an orphan baby by hand for him; and if, both
together, they would not train this baby till he said "stop"; if, on the
other hand, he allowed them, in the yearly account, a hundred dollars
each year for the charge.
Anybody who knows how far a hundred dollars goes in the backwoods, in
St. Lawrence County, will know that any settler would be glad to take a
ward so recommended. Anybody who knew Betsy Myers as well as old Elkanah
Ogden did, would know she would have taken any orphan brought to her
door, even if he were not recommended at all.
So it happened, thanks to Lafayette and the city council! that I had not
been a "Child of the Public" a day, before, in its great, clumsy,
liberal way, it had provided for me. I owed my healthy, happy home of
the next fourteen years in the wilderness to those marvellous habits,
which I should else call absurd, with which we lionize strangers.
Because our hospitals and poorhouses are the largest buildings we have,
we entertain the Prince of Wales and Jenny Lind alike, by showing them
crazy people and paupers. Easy enough to laugh at is the display; but
if, dear Public, it happen, that by such a habit you ventilate your
Bridewell or your Bedlam, is not the ventilation, perhaps, a
compensation for the absurdity? I do not know if Lafayette was any the
better for his seeing the Deering Street Asylum; but I do know I was.
This is no history of my life. It is only an illustration of one of its
principles. I have no anecdotes of wilderness life to tell, and no
sketch of the lovely rugged traits of John and Betsy Myers,--my real
father and mother. I have no quest for the pretended parents, who threw
me away in my babyhood, to record. They closed accounts with me when
they left me on the asylum steps, and I with them. I grew up with such
schooling as the public gave,--ten weeks in winter always, and ten in
summer, till I was big enough to work on the farm,--better periods of
schools, I hold, than on the modern systems. Mr. Ogden I never saw.
Regularly he allowed for me the hundred a year till I was nine years
old, and then suddenly he died, as the reader perhaps knows. But John
Myers kept me as his son, none the less. I knew no change until, when I
was fourteen, he thought it time for me to see the world, and sent me to
what, in those days, was called a "Manual-Labor School."
There was a theory coming up in those days, wholly unfounded in
physiology, that if a man worked five hours with his hands, he could
study better in the next five. It is all nonsense. Exhaustion is
exhaustion; and if you exhaust a vessel by one stopcock, nothing is
gained or saved by closing that and opening another. The old up-country
theory is the true one. Study ten weeks and chop wood fifteen; study ten
more and harvest fifteen. But the "Manual-Labor School" offered itself
for really no pay, only John Myers and I carried over, I remember, a
dozen barrels of potatoes when I went there with my books. The school
was kept at Roscius, and if I would work in the carpenter's shop and on
the school farm five hours, why they would feed me and teach me all they
knew in what I had of the day beside.
"Felix," said John, as he left me, "I do not suppose this is the best
school in the world, unless you make it so. But I do suppose you can
make it so. If you and I went whining about, looking for the best school
in the world, and for somebody to pay your way through it, I should die,
and you would lose your voice with whining, and we should not find one
after all. This is what the public happens to provide for you and me. We
won't look a gift-horse in the mouth. Get on his back, Felix; groom him
well as you can when you stop, feed him when you can, and at all events
water him well and take care of him well. My last advice to you, Felix,
is to take what is offered you, and never complain because nobody offers
more."
Those words are to be cut on my seal-ring, if I ever have one, and if
Dr. Anthon or Professor Webster will put them into short enough Latin
for me. That is the motto of the "Children of the Public."
John Myers died before that term was out. And my more than mother,
Betsy, went back to her friends in Maine. After the funeral I never saw
them more. How I lived from that moment to what Fausta and I call the
Crisis is nobody's concern. I worked in the shop at the school, or on
the farm. Afterwards I taught school in neighboring districts. I never
bought a ticket in a lottery or a raffle. But whenever there was a
chance to do an honest stroke of work, I did it. I have walked fifteen
miles at night to carry an election return to the _Tribune's_ agent at
Gouverneur. I have turned out in the snow to break open the road when
the supervisor could not find another man in the township.
When Sartain started his magazine, I wrote an essay in competition for
his premiums, and the essay earned its hundred dollars. When the
managers of the "Orphan Home," in Baltimore, offered their prizes for
papers on bad boys, I wrote for one of them, and that helped me on four
hard months. There was no luck in those things. I needed the money, and
I put my hook into the pork-barrel,--that is, I trusted the Public. I
never had but one stroke of luck in my life. I wanted a new pair of
boots badly. I was going to walk to Albany, to work in the State library
on the history of the Six Nations, which had an interest for me. I did
not have a dollar. Just then there passed Congress the bill dividing the
surplus revenue. The State of New York received two or three millions,
and divided it among the counties. The county of St. Lawrence divided it
among the townships, and the township of Roscius divided it among the
voters. Two dollars and sixty cents of Uncle Sam's money came to me, and
with that money on my feet I walked to Albany. That I call luck! How
many fools had to assent in an absurdity before I could study the
history of the Six Nations!
But one instance told in detail is better than a thousand told in
general, for the illustration of a principle. So I will detain you no
longer from the history of what Fausta and I call
THE CRISIS.