said: “When would you like to see me again, so I could work out this
dollar?”
A sudden and unreasonable disgust for the character which had given me
so much entertainment succeeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover,
that I had bought the right to use some frankness with the veteran, and
I said to him: “Do you know now, I shouldn't care if I _never_ saw you
again?”
I can only conjecture that he took the confidence in good part, for he
did not appear again after that.
A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.
Walking for walking's sake I do not like. The diversion appears to
me one of the most factitious of modern enjoyments; and I cannot help
looking upon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of a north
wind, and profess to come home all the livelier and better for it,
as guilty of a venial hypocrisy. It is in nature that after such an
exercise the bones should ache and the flesh tremble; and I suspect that
these harmless pretenders are all the while paying a secret penalty
for their bravado. With a pleasant end in view, or with cheerful
companionship, walking is far from being the worst thing in life; though
doubtless a truly candid person must confess that he would rather
ride under the same circumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort
of recreation is necessary after a day spent within doors; and one is
really obliged nowadays to take a little walk instead of medicine; for
one's doctor is sure to have a mania on the subject, and there is no
more getting pills or powders out of him for a slight indigestion than
if they had all been shot away at the rebels during the war. For this
reason I sometimes go upon a pedestrian tour, which is of no great
extent in itself, and which I moreover modify by keeping always within
sound of the horse-car bells, or easy reach of some steam-car station.
I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but that their utter lack
of interest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and any
Master Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I cannot promise
to be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in full
view, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so
to call the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue
against the western sky presently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street,
the whole suburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me,--a vast space upon
which I can embroider any fancy I like as I saunter along. I have no
associations with it, or memories of it, and, at some seasons, I might
wander for days in the most frequented parts of it, and meet hardly any
one I know. It is not, however, to these parts that I commonly turn,
but northward, up a street upon which a flight of French-roof houses
suddenly settled a year or two since, with families in them, and many
outward signs of permanence, though their precipitate arrival might
cast some doubt upon this. I have to admire their uniform neatness and
prettiness, and I look at their dormer-windows with the envy of one
to whose weak sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared the supreme
architectural happiness. But, for all my admiration of the houses, I
find a variety that is pleasanter in the landscape, when I reach, beyond
them, a little bridge which appears to span a small stream. It unites
banks lined with a growth of trees and briers nodding their heads above
the neighboring levels, and suggesting a quiet water-course, though in
fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls between them, with rippling
freight and passenger trains and ever-gurgling locomotives. The banks
take the earliest green of spring upon their southward slope, and on a
Sunday morning of May, when the bells are lamenting the Sabbaths of the
past, I find their sunny tranquillity sufficient to give me a slight
heart-ache for I know not what. If I descend them and follow the
railroad westward half a mile, I come to vast brick-yards, which are
not in themselves exciting to the imagination, and which yet, from an
irresistible association of ideas, remind me of Egypt, and are forever
newly forsaken of those who made bricks without straw; so that I have no
trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out of the kilns; while
the mills for grinding the clay serve me very well for those sad-voiced
_sakias_ or wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard wailing at their
work of drawing water from the Nile. A little farther on I come to the
boarding-house built at the railroad side for the French Canadians who
have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in the toil of the brick-yards,
and who, as they loiter in windy-voiced, good-humored groups about the
doors of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the town of
St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont Cenis tunnel, where so
many peasant folk like them are always amiably quarreling before the
_cabarets_ when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, there must be a
gendarme with a cocked hat and a sword on, standing with folded arms to
represent the Empire and Peace among that rural population; if I
looked in-doors, I am sure I should see the neatest of landladies and
landladies' daughters and nieces in high black silk caps, bearing hither
and thither smoking bowls of _bouillon_ and _café-au-lait_. Well, it
takes as little to make one happy as miserable, thank Heaven! and I
derive a cheerfulness from this scene which quite atones to me for the
fleeting desolation suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad
bank. With repaired spirits I take my way up through the brick-yards
towards the Irish settlement on the north, passing under the long sheds
that shelter the kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths of most,
and the bricks are burnt to the proper complexion; in others these are
freshly arranged over flues in which the fire has not been kindled; but
in whatever state I see them, I am reminded of brick-kilns of boyhood.
They were then such palaces of enchantment as any architect should now
vainly attempt to rival with bricks upon the most desirable corner
lot of the Back Bay, and were the homes of men truly to be envied: men
privileged to stay up all night; to sleep, as it were, out of doors; to
hear the wild geese as they flew over in the darkness; to be waking in
time to shoot the early ducks that visited the neighboring ponds; to
roast corn upon the ends of sticks; to tell and to listen to stories
that never ended, save in some sudden impulse to rise and dance a happy
hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires. If by day they were seen
to have the redness of eyes of men that looked upon the whiskey when
it was yellow and gave its color in the flask; if now and then the
fragments of a broken bottle strewed the scene of their vigils, and
a head broken to match appeared among those good comrades, the boyish
imagination was not shocked by these things, but accepted them merely as
the symbols of a free virile life. Some such life no doubt is still to
be found in the Dublin to which I am come by the time my repertory of
associations with brick-kilns is exhausted, but, oddly enough, I no
longer care to encounter it.
It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality that Dublin is
built around the Irish grave-yard. Most of its windows look out upon
the sepulchral monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the funeral
trains with their long lines of carriages bringing to the celebration of
the sad ultimate rites those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose
that the spectacle of such obsequies is not at all depressing to the
inhabitants of Dublin; but that, on the contrary, it must beget in them
a feeling which, if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of
sub-acute cheerfulness in his presence. None but a Dubliner, however,
would have been greatly animated by a scene which I witnessed during
a stroll through this cemetery one afternoon of early spring. The fact
that a marble slab or shaft more or less sculptured, and inscribed with
words more or less helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom
once we could caress with every tenderness of speech and touch, and
that, after all, the memorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and
is a decency, a mere conventionality,--this is a dreadful fact on
which the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it always seems
a desolation never recognized, an anguish never felt before. Whilst I
stood revolving this thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names
upon the stones and the black head-boards,--the latter adorned with
pictures of angels, once gilt, but now weather-worn down to the yellow
paint,--a wail of intolerable pathos filled the air: “O my darling, O my
darling! O--O--O!” with sobs and groans and sighs; and, looking about, I
saw two women, one standing upright beside another that had cast herself
upon a grave, and lay clasping it with her comfortless arms, uttering
these cries. The grave was a year old at least, but the grief seemed of
yesterday or of that morning. At times the friend that stood beside
the prostrate woman stooped and spoke a soothing word to her, while she
wailed out her woe; and in the midst some little ribald Irish boys came
scuffling and quarreling up the pathway, singing snatches of an obscene
song; and when both the wailing and the singing had died away, an old
woman, decently clad, and with her many-wrinkled face softened by the
old-fashioned frill running round the inside of her cap, dropped down
upon her knees beside a very old grave, and clasped her hands in a
silent prayer above it.
[Illustration: “Looking about, I saw two women.”]
If I had beheld all this in some village _campo santo_ in Italy, I
should have been much more vividly impressed by it, as an aesthetical
observer; whereas I was now merely touched as a human being, and had
little desire to turn the scene to literary account. I could not help
feeling that it wanted the atmosphere of sentimental association, the
whole background was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not
been able to hide from myself so much as I would like certain points of
resemblance between our Irish and the poorer classes of Italians. The
likeness is one of the first things that strikes an American in Italy,
and I am always reminded of it in Dublin. So much of the local life
appears upon the street; there is so much gossip from house to house,
and the talk is always such a resonant clamoring; the women, bareheaded,
or with a shawl folded over the head and caught beneath the chin with
the hand, have such a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from door
to door, or lounging, arms akimbo, among the cats and poultry at their
own thresholds, that one beholding it all might well fancy himself upon
some Italian _calle_ or _vicolo_. Of course the illusion does not hold
good on a Sunday, when the Dubliners are coming home from church in
their best,--their extraordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk
hats. It does not hold good in any way or at any time, except upon the
surface, for there is beneath all this resemblance the difference that
must exist between a race immemorially civilized and one which has
lately emerged from barbarism “after six centuries of oppression.” You
are likely to find a polite pagan under the mask of the modern Italian
you feel pretty sure that any of his race would with a little washing
and skillful manipulation, _restore_, like a neglected painting,
into something genuinely graceful and pleasing; but if one of these
Yankeefied Celts were scraped, it is but too possible that you might
find a kern, a Whiteboy, or a Pikeman. The chance of discovering
a scholar or a saint of the period when Ireland was the centre of
learning, and the favorite seat of the Church, is scarcely one in three.
Among the houses fronting on the main street of Dublin, every other
one--I speak in all moderation--is a grocery, if I may judge by a tin
case of corn-balls, a jar of candy, and a card of shirt-buttons, with an
under layer of primers and ballads, in the windows. You descend from the
street by several steps into these haunts, which are contrived to secure
the greatest possible dampness and darkness; and if you have made an
errand inside, you doubtless find a lady before the counter in the act
of putting down a guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she
neatly wipes her mouth on the back of the other. She has that effect,
observable in all tippling women of low degree, of having no upper
garment on but a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds and
lines. She slinks out directly, but the lady behind the counter gives
you good evening with
“The affectation of a bright-eyed ease,”
intended to deceive if you chance to be a State constable in disguise,
and to propitiate if you are a veritable customer: “Who was that woman,
lamenting so, over in the grave-yard?” “O, I don't know, sir,” answered
the lady, making change for the price of a ballad. “Some Irish folks.
They ginerally cries that way.”
In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I found a depth of mud
appalling even to one who had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The
streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in shifting themselves
along the sides of fences and alert to take advantage of every
projecting doorstep. There were no dry places, except in front of the
groceries, where the ground was beaten hard by the broad feet of loafing
geese and the coming and going of admirably small children making
purchases there. The number of the little ones was quite as remarkable
as their size, and ought to have been even more interesting, if, as
sometimes appears probable, such increase shall--together with the
well-known ambition of Dubliners to rule the land--one day make an end
of us poor Yankees as a dominant plurality.
The town was somewhat tainted with our architectural respectability,
unless the newness of some of the buildings gave illusion of this; and,
though the streets of Dublin were not at all cared for, and though every
house on the main thoroughfare stood upon the brink of a slough, without
yard, or any attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many cottages in
the less aristocratic quarters inclosed in palings, and embowered in
the usual suburban pear-trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, were
dwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been inherited from a
population now as extinct in that region as the Pequots, and they were
not always carefully cherished. On the border of the hamlet is to be
seen an old farm-house of the poorer sort, built about the beginning of
this century, and now thickly peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown
down, and the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected by a
fence, shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity of lawless poultry, as
little like the steady-habited poultry of other times, as the people of
the house are like the former inmates, long since dead or gone West. I
offer the poor place a sentiment of regret as I pass, thinking of
its better days. I think of its decorous, hard-working, cleanly,
school-going, church-attending life, which was full of the pleasure of
duty done, and was not without its own quaint beauty and grace. What
long Sabbaths were kept in that old house, what scanty holidays!
Yet from this and such as this came the dominion of the whole wild
continent, the freedom of a race, the greatness of the greatest people.
It may be that I regretted a little too exultantly, and that out of
this particular house came only peddling of innumerable clocks and
multitudinous tin-ware. But as yet, it is pretty certain that the
general character of the population has not gained by the change. What
is in the future, let the prophets say; any one can see that something
not quite agreeable is in the present; something that takes the wrong
side, as by instinct, in politics; something that mainly helps to prop
up tottering priestcraft among us; something that one thinks of with
dismay as destined to control so largely the civil and religious
interests of the country. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect.
Mrs. Clannahan's kitchen, as it may be seen by the desperate philosopher
when he goes to engage her for the spring house-cleaning, is a strong
argument against his fears. If Mrs. Clannahan, lately of an Irish cabin,
can show a kitchen so capably appointed and so neatly kept as that, the
country may yet be an inch or two from the brink of ruin, and the race
which we trust as little as we love may turn out no more spendthrift
than most heirs. It is encouraging, moreover, when any people can
flatter themselves upon a superior prosperity and virtue, and we may
take heart from the fact that the French Canadians, many of whom have
lodgings in Dublin, are not well seen by the higher classes of the
citizens there. Mrs. Clannahan, whose house stands over against the main
gate of the grave-yard, and who may, therefore, be considered as moving
in the best Dublin society, hints, that though good Catholics, the
French are not thought perfectly honest,--“things have been missed”
since they came to blight with their crimes and vices the once
happy seat of integrity. It is amusing to find Dublin fearful of the
encroachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread the advance of the
Irish. We must make a jest of our own alarms, and even smile--since we
cannot help ourselves--at the spiritual desolation occasioned by the
settlement of an Irish family in one of our suburban neighborhoods. The
householders view with fear and jealousy the erection of any dwelling of
less than a stated cost, as portending a possible advent of Irish; and
when the calamitous race actually appears, a mortal pang strikes to the
bottom of every pocket. Values tremble throughout that neighborhood, to
which the new-comers communicate a species of moral dry-rot. None but
the Irish will build near the Irish; and the infection of fear spreads
to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare to abandon
them,--not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the expense
of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from
Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the
encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a
Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given
to its essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the
poetry that attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of
however poor a sort originally. The fortunes of such a house are, of
course, not to be retrieved. Where the Celt sets his foot, there the
Yankee (and it is perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know that the
Irish citizen whom we do not always honor as our equal in civilization
loves to speak of us scornfully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns.
The place remains to the intruder and his heirs forever. We gracefully
retire before him even in politics, as the metropolis--if it is the
metropolis--can witness; and we wait with an anxious curiosity the
encounter of the Irish and the Chinese, now rapidly approaching each
other from opposite shores of the continent. Shall we be crushed in the
collision of these superior races? Every intelligence-office will soon
be ringing with the cries of combat, and all our kitchens strewn with
pig-tails and bark chignons. As yet we have gay hopes of our Buddhistic
brethren; but how will it be when they begin to quarter the Dragon upon
the Stars and Stripes, and buy up all the best sites for temples, and
burn their joss-sticks, as it were, under our very noses? Our grasp upon
the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps? Is it true that, when
we look so anxiously for help from others, the virtue has gone out of
ourselves? I should hope not.
As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and handsomer; and as I
draw near the Avenue, the Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their
dormer-windows, and welcome me back to the American community. There are
fences about all the houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards; the
children, which had swarmed in the thriftless and unenlightened purlieus
of Dublin, diminish in number and finally disappear; the chickens have
vanished; and I hear--I hear the pensive music of the horse-car bells,
which in some alien land, I am sure, would be as pathetic to me as the
Ranz des Vaches to the Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander: in the
desert, where the traveller seems to hear the familiar bells of his
far-off church, this tinkle would haunt the absolute silence, and recall
the exile's fancy to Charlesbridge; and perhaps in the mocking mirage
he would behold an airy horse-car track, and a phantasmagoric horse-car
moving slowly along the edge of the horizon, with spectral passengers
closely packed inside and overflowing either platform.
But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to me yet again, in the
figure of an old, old man, wearing the clothes of other times, and a
sort of ancestral round hat. In the act of striking a match he asks me
the time of day, and, applying the fire to his pipe, he returns me his
thanks in a volume of words and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old
man! Can age and neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person
was associated with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly
so cheerful; for though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from
far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with
a very lugubrious creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans,
and I was to learn from the old man that there was, and had been, in his
person, for thirteen years, such a thing in the world as a peddler
of buttermilk, and that these cans were now filled with that pleasant
drink. They did not invite me to prove their contents, being cans that
apparently passed their vacant moments in stables and even manure-heaps,
and that looked somehow emulous of that old man's stubble and wrinkles.
I bought nothing, but I left the old peddler well content, seated upon
a thill of his cart, smoking tranquilly, and filling the keen spring
evening air with fumes which it dispersed abroad, and made to itself a
pleasant incense of.
I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the Avenue and lounged
homeward along the stately street. Above the station it is far more
picturesque than it is below, and the magnificent elms that shadow
it might well have looked, in their saplinghood, upon the British
straggling down the country road from the Concord fight; and there
are some ancient houses yet standing that must have been filled with
exultation at the same spectacle. Poor old revolutionaries! they would
never have believed that their descendants would come to love the
English as we do.