Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3,
1783, and died at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, New York,
November 28, 1859. Irving is frequently spoken of as the
founder of American literature. Though fond of reading, he
had little taste for study in his youth, and did not attend
college.
Failing health caused him to go to Europe, where he traveled
for several years. His first literary work of importance was
his "Knickerbocker's History of New York." Shortly
afterward, while engaged in a commercial venture with his
brothers, he found it necessary to make a second visit to
England. The firm failed, and, while still in England,
Irving again devoted all his attention to literature.
The "Sketch Book" was the first of the young author's works
to win favor on the other side. This was followed by
"Bracebridge Hall" and "Tales of a Traveler." Irving then
went to Spain, and in the course of the several years that
he spent there he wrote "A Life of Columbus," the "Conquest
of Granada," and "The Alhambra." Subsequently he wrote his
two most celebrated biographical works--"The Life of
Washington" and "The Life of Goldsmith."
Irving was noted principally for his quaint humor and
graceful literary expression. The following story, "The
Devil and Tom Walker," is taken from "The Tales of a
Traveler."
A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding
several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and
terminating in a thickly wooded swamp, or morass. On one side of this
inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises
abruptly from the water's edge, into a high ridge on which grow a few
scattered oaks of great age and immense size.
It was under one of these gigantic trees, according to old stories, that
Kidd the pirate buried his treasure. The inlet allowed a facility to bring
the money in a boat secretly and at night to the very foot of the hill.
The elevation of the place permitted a good lookout to be kept that no one
was at hand, while the remarkable trees formed good landmarks by which the
place might easily be found again.
The old stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of
the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well
known, he always does with buried treasure, particularly when it has been
ill gotten. Be that as it may, Kidd never returned to recover his wealth,
being shortly after seized at Boston, sent out to England, and there
hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were prevalent in
New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees, there
lived near this place a meager, miserly fellow of the name of Tom Walker.
He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that they even
conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on she
hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the
new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying about to detect her
secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place
about what ought to have been common property.
They lived in a forlorn-looking house that stood alone and had an air of
starvation. A few straggling savin-trees, emblems of sterility, grew near
it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveler stopped at its
door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a
gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely
covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his
hunger, and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look
piteously at the passer-by, and seem to petition deliverance from this
land of famine.
The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a tall
termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice
was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband, and his face sometimes
showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. No one
ventured, however, to interfere between them; the lonely wayfarer shrunk
within himself at the horrid clamor and clapper-clawing; eyed the den of
discord askance, and hurried on his way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his
celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood, he
took what he considered a short cut homeward through the swamp. Like most
short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with
great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made
it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It
was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses,
where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black
smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the
tadpole, the bullfrog, and the water-snake, and where trunks of pines and
hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping
in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous
forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded
precarious footholds among the deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a
cat, among the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the
sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on
the wing from some solitary pool.
At length he arrived at a piece of firm ground which ran out like a
peninsula into the deep bosom of the swamp. It had been one of the
strongholds of the Indians during their wars with the first colonists.
Here they had thrown up a kind of fort which they had looked upon as
almost impregnable, and had used as a place of refuge for their squaws and
children. Nothing remained of the Indian fort but a few embankments
gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding earth, and already
overgrown in part by oaks and other forest trees, the foliage of which
formed a contrast to the dark pines and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the old fort,
and he paused there for a while to rest himself. Any one but he would have
felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for the common
people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed down from the time
of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the savages held
incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit. Tom Walker,
however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock,
listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving with his
walking-staff into a mound of black mold at his feet. As he turned up the
soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it
out of the vegetable mold, and lo! a cloven skull, with an Indian tomahawk
buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on the weapon showed the time
that had elapsed since this death-blow had been given. It was a dreary
memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in this last foothold
of the Indian warriors.
"Humph!" said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake the dirt
from it.
"Let that skull alone!" said a gruff voice.
Tom lifted up his eyes and beheld a great black man, seated directly
opposite him on the stump of a tree.
He was exceedingly surprised, having neither seen nor heard any one
approach, and he was still more perplexed on observing, as well as the
gathering gloom would permit, that the stranger was neither negro nor
Indian.
It is true, he was dressed in a rude, half Indian garb, and had a red belt
or sash swathed round his body, but his face was neither black nor copper
color, but swarthy and dingy and begrimed with soot, as if he had been
accustomed to toil among fires and forges. He had a shock of coarse black
hair that stood out from his head in all directions, and bore an ax on his
shoulder.
He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.
"What are you doing in my grounds?" said the black man, with a hoarse
growling voice.
"Your grounds?" said Tom, with a sneer; "no more your grounds than mine:
they belong to Deacon Peabody."
"Deacon Peabody be d----d," said the stranger, "as I flatter myself he
will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to his
neighbors'. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is faring."
Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one of
the great trees, fair and flourishing without, but rotten at the core, and
saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so that the first high wind was
likely to blow it down. On the bark of the tree was scored the name of
Deacon Peabody.
He now looked round and found most of the tall trees marked with the names
of some great men of the colony, and all more or less scored by the ax.
The one on which he had been seated, and which had evidently just been
hewn down, bore the name of Crowninshield; and he recollected a mighty
rich man of that name, who had made a vulgar display of wealth, which it
was whispered he had acquired by buccaneering.
"He's just ready for burning!" said the black man, with a growl of
triumph. "You see I am likely to have a good stock of firewood for
winter."
"But what right have you," said Tom, "to cut down Deacon Peabody's
timber?"
"The right of prior claim," said the other. "This woodland belonged to me
long before one of your white-faced race put foot upon the soil."
"And pray, who are you, if I may be so bold?" said Tom.
"Oh, I go by various names. I am the Wild Huntsman in some countries; the
Black Miner in others. In this neighborhood I am known by the name of the
Black Woodsman. I am he to whom the red men devoted this spot, and now and
then roasted a white man by way of sweet-smelling sacrifice. Since the red
men have been exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by
presiding at the persecutions of Quakers and Anabaptists; I am the great
patron and prompter of slave dealers, and the grand master of the Salem
witches."
"The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not," said Tom sturdily,
"you are he commonly called 'Old Scratch.'"
"The same at your service!" replied the black man, with a half civil nod.
Such was the opening of this interview, according to the old story, though
it has almost too familiar an air to be credited. One would think that to
meet with such a singular personage in this wild, lonely place would have
shaken any man's nerves; but Tom was a hard-minded fellow, not easily
daunted, and he had lived so long with a termagant wife that he did not
even fear the devil.
It is said that after this commencement they had a long and earnest
conversation together as Tom returned homeward. The black man told him of
great sums of money which had been buried by Kidd the pirate, under the
oak-trees on the high ridge not far from the morass. All these were under
his command and protected by his power, so that none could find them but
such as propitiated his favor. These he offered to place within Tom
Walker's reach, having conceived an especial kindness for him, but they
were to be had only on certain conditions.
What these conditions were may easily be surmised, though Tom never
disclosed them publicly. They must have been very hard, for he required
time to think of them, and he was not a man to stick at trifles where
money was in view. When they had reached the edge of the swamp the
stranger paused.
"What proof have I that all you have been telling me is true?" said Tom.
"There is my signature," said the black man, pressing his finger on Tom's
forehead. So saying, he turned off among the thickets of the swamp, and
seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down, into the earth, until he
totally disappeared.
When Tom reached home he found the black print of a finger burnt, as it
were, into his forehead, which nothing could obliterate.
The first news his wife had to tell him was the sudden death of Absalom
Crowninshield, the rich buccaneer. It was announced in the papers with the
usual flourish that "a great man had fallen in Israel."
Tom recollected the tree which his black friend had just hewn down, and
which was ready for burning. "Let the freebooter roast," said Tom; "who
cares!" He now felt convinced that all he had heard and seen was no
illusion.
He was not prone to let his wife into his confidence, but as this was an
uneasy secret he willingly shared it with her. All her avarice was
awakened at the mention of hidden gold, and she urged her husband to
comply with the black man's terms and secure what would make them wealthy
for life. However Tom might have felt disposed to sell himself to the
devil, he was determined not to do so to oblige his wife; so he flatly
refused out of the mere spirit of contradiction. Many and bitter were the
quarrels they had on the subject, but the more she talked the more
resolute was Tom not to be damned to please her. At length she determined
to drive the bargain on her own account, and, if she succeeded, to keep
all the gain to herself.
Being of the same fearless temper as her husband, she set off for the old
Indian fort toward the close of a summer's day. She was many hours absent.
When she came back she was reserved and sullen in her replies. She spoke
something of a black man whom she had met about twilight, hewing at the
root of a tall tree. He was sulky, however, and would not come to terms;
she was to go again with a propitiatory offering, but what it was she
forbore to say.
The next evening she set off again for the swamp, with her apron heavily
laden. Tom waited and waited for her, but in vain: midnight came, but she
did not make her appearance; morning, noon, night returned, but still she
did not come. Tom now grew uneasy for her safety, especially as he found
she had carried off in her apron the silver teapot and spoons, and every
portable article of value. Another night elapsed, another morning came;
but no wife. In a word, she was never heard of more.
What was her real fate nobody knows, in consequence of so many pretending
to know. It is one of those facts that have become confounded by a variety
of historians. Some asserted that she lost her way among the tangled mazes
of the swamp and sunk into some pit or slough; others, more uncharitable,
hinted that she had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some
other province; while others assert that the tempter had decoyed her into
a dismal quagmire, on top of which her hat was found lying. In
confirmation of this it was said a great black man with an ax on his
shoulder was seen late that very evening coming out of the swamp, carrying
a bundle tied in a check apron, with an air of surly triumph.
The most current and probable story, however, observes that Tom Walker
grew so anxious about the fate of his wife and his property that he set
out at length to seek them both at the Indian fort. During a long summer's
afternoon he searched about the gloomy place, but no wife was to be seen.
He called her name repeatedly, but she was nowhere to be heard. The
bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the
bullfrog croaked dolefully from a neighborly pool.
At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls
began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by
the clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress-tree. He
looked and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and hanging in the
branches of a tree; with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping
watch upon it. He leaped with joy, for he recognized his wife's apron, and
supposed it to contain the household valuables.
"Let us get hold of the property," said he consolingly to himself, "and we
will endeavor to do without the woman."
As he scrambled up the tree the vulture spread its wide wings, and sailed
off screaming into the deep shadows of the forest. Tom seized the check
apron, but, woful sight! found nothing but a heart and liver tied up in
it.
Such, according to the most authentic old story, was all that was to be
found of Tom's wife. She had probably attempted to deal with the black man
as she had been accustomed to deal with her husband; but though a female
scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance
she appears to have had the worst of it.
She must have died game, however: from the part that remained unconquered.
Indeed, it is said, Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped
about the tree, and several handfuls of hair that looked as if they had
been plucked from the coarse black shock of the woodsman. Tom knew his
wife's prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at
the signs of a fierce clapper-clawing. "Egad," said he to himself, "Old
Scratch must have had a tough time of it!"
Tom consoled himself for the loss of his property by the loss of his wife;
for he was a little of a philosopher. He even felt something like
gratitude toward the black woodsman, who he considered had done him a
kindness. He sought, therefore, to cultivate a further acquaintance with
him, but for some time without success; the old black legs played shy, for
whatever people may think, he is not always to be had for calling for; he
knows how to play his cards when pretty sure of his game.
At length, it is said, when delay had whetted Tom's eagerness to the
quick, and prepared him to agree to anything rather than not gain the
promised treasure, he met the black man one evening in his usual woodsman
dress, with his ax on his shoulder, sauntering along the edge of the
swamp, and humming a tune. He affected to receive Tom's advance with great
indifference, made brief replies, and went on humming his tune.
By degrees, however, Tom brought him to business, and they began to haggle
about the terms on which the former was to have the pirate's treasure.
There was one condition which need not be mentioned, being generally
understood in all cases where the devil grants favors; but there were
others about which, though of less importance, he was inflexibly
obstinate. He insisted that the money found through his means should be
employed in his service. He proposed, therefore, that Tom should employ it
in the black traffic--that is to say, that he should fit out a slave ship.
This, however, Tom resolutely refused; he was bad enough, in all
conscience, but the devil himself could not tempt him to turn
slave-dealer.
Finding Tom so squeamish on this point, he did not insist upon it, but
proposed instead that he should turn usurer; the devil being extremely
anxious for the increase of usurers, looking upon them as his peculiar
people.
To this no objections were made, for it was just to Tom's taste.
"You shall open a broker's shop in Boston next month," said the black man.
"I'll do it to-morrow if you wish," said Tom Walker.
"You shall lend money at two per cent a month."
"Egad, I'll charge four!" replied Tom Walker.
"You shall extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchant to
bankruptcy----"
"I'll drive him to the d----l!" cried Tom Walker eagerly.
"You are the usurer for my money!" said the black legs, with delight.
"When will you want the rhino?"
"This very night."
"Done!" said the devil.
"Done!" said Tom Walker.
So they shook hands and struck a bargain.
A few days' time saw Tom Walker seated behind his desk in a counting-house
in Boston. His reputation for a ready-moneyed man, who would lend money
out for a good consideration, soon spread abroad. Everybody remembers the
days of Governor Belcher, when money was particularly scarce. It was a
time of paper credit.
The country had been deluged with government bills; the famous Land Bank
had been established; there had been a rage for speculating; the people
had run mad with schemes for new settlements, for building cities in the
wilderness; land jobbers went about with maps of grants and townships and
Eldorados, lying nobody knew where, but which everybody was ready to
purchase. In a word, the great speculating fever which breaks out every
now and then in the country had raged to an alarming degree, and everybody
was dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual, the fever
had subsided; the dream had gone off, and the imaginary fortunes with it;
the patients were left in doleful plight, and the whole country resounded
with the consequent cry of "hard times."
At this propitious time of public distress did Tom Walker set up as a
usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and
the adventurous; the gambling speculator; the dreaming land-jobber; the
thriftless tradesman; the merchant with cracked credit; in short, every
one driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices
hurried to Tom Walker.
Thus Tom was the universal friend of the needy, and he acted like a
"friend in need"--that is to say, he always exacted good pay and good
security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the hardness
of his terms. He accumulated bonds and mortgages; gradually squeezed his
customers closer and closer, and sent them at length, dry as a sponge,
from his door.
In this way he made money hand over hand; became a rich and mighty man,
and exalted his cocked hat upon 'change. He built himself, as usual, a
vast house, out of ostentation; but left the greater part of it unfinished
and unfurnished out of parsimony. He even set up a carriage in the fulness
of his vainglory, though he nearly starved the horses which drew it; and
as the ungreased wheels groaned and screeched on the axletrees, you would
have thought you heard the souls of the poor debtors he was squeezing.
As Tom waxed old, however, he grew thoughtful. Having secured the good
things of this world, he began to feel anxious about those of the next. He
thought with regret on the bargain he had made with his black friend, and
set his wits to work to cheat him out of the conditions. He became,
therefore, all of a sudden, a violent churchgoer. He prayed loudly and
strenuously, as if heaven were to be taken by force of lungs. Indeed, one
might always tell when he had sinned most during the week, by the clamor
of his Sunday devotion.
The quiet Christians who had been modestly and steadfastly traveling
Zion-ward were struck with self-reproach at seeing themselves so suddenly
outstripped in their career by this new-made convert. Tom was as rigid in
religious as in money matters; he was a stern supervisor and censurer of
his neighbors, and seemed to think every sin entered up to their account
became a credit on his own side of the page. He even talked of the
expediency of reviving the persecution of Quakers and Anabaptists. In a
word, Tom's zeal became as notorious as his riches.
Still, in spite of all this strenuous attention to forms, Tom had a
lurking dread that the devil, after all, would have his due. That he might
not be taken unawares, therefore, it is said he always carried a small
Bible in his coat-pocket. He had also a great folio Bible on his
counting-house desk, and would frequently be found reading it when people
called on business; on such occasions he would lay his green spectacles on
the book, to mark the place, while he turned round to drive some usurious
bargain.
Some say that Tom grew a little crack-brained in his old days, and that,
fancying his end approaching, he had his horse new shod, saddled, and
bridled, and buried with his feet uppermost, because he supposed that at
the last day the world would be turned upside down; in which case he
should find his horse standing ready for mounting, and he was determined
at the worst to give his old friend a run for it. This, however, is
probably a mere old wives' fable. If he really did take such a precaution
it was totally superfluous; at least, so says the authentic old legend,
which closes his story in the following manner:
On one hot afternoon in the dog days, just as a terrible black
thunder-gust was coming up, Tom sat in his counting-house in his white
linen cap and India silk morning-gown. He was on the point of foreclosing
a mortgage by which he would complete the ruin of an unlucky land
speculator, for whom he had professed the greatest friendship. The poor
land-jobber begged him to grant a few months' indulgence. Tom had grown
testy and irritated, and refused another day.
"My family will be ruined and brought upon the parish," said the
land-jobber.
"Charity begins at home," replied Tom. "I must take care of myself in
these hard times."
"You have made so much money out of me," said the speculator.
Tom lost his patience and his piety. "The devil take me," said he, "if I
have made a farthing!"
Just then there were three loud knocks at the street-door. He stepped out
to see who was there.
A black man was holding a black horse which neighed and stamped with
impatience.
"Tom, you're come for!" said the black fellow gruffly.
Tom shrunk back, but too late. He had left his little Bible at the bottom
of his coat pocket, and his big Bible on the desk buried under the
mortgage he was about to foreclose. Never was sinner taken more unawares.
The black man whisked him like a child astride the horse and away he
galloped in the midst of a thunder-storm.
The clerks stuck their pens behind their ears and stared after him from
the windows. Away went Tom Walker, dashing down the street, his white cap
bobbing up and down, his morning-gown fluttering in the wind, and his
steed striking fire out of the pavement. When the clerks turned to look
for the black man he had disappeared.
Tom Walker never returned to foreclose the mortgage. A countryman who
lived on the borders of the swamp reported that in the height of the
thunder-gust he had heard a great clattering of hoofs and a howling along
the road, and that when he ran to the window he just caught sight of a
figure such as I have described on a horse that galloped like mad across
the fields, over the hills and down into the black hemlock swamp toward
the old Indian fort, and that shortly after a thunderbolt fell in that
direction which seemed to set the whole forest in a blaze.
The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders,
but had been so much accustomed to witches and goblins and tricks of the
devil in all kinds of shapes from the first settlement of the colony, that
they were not so much horror-struck as might have been expected.
Trustees were appointed to take charge of Tom's effects. There was
nothing, however, to administer upon. On searching his coffers, all his
bonds and mortgages were found reduced to cinders. In place of gold and
silver, his iron chest was filled with worthless chips and shavings; two
skeletons lay in his stable instead of his half-starved horses, and the
very next day his great house took fire and was burnt to the ground.
Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill-gotten wealth. Let all griping
money-brokers lay this story to heart. The truth of it is not to be
doubted. The very hole under the oak-trees, from whence he dug Kidd's
money, is to be seen to this day, and the neighboring swamp and old Indian
fort are often haunted on stormy nights by a figure on horseback, in a
morning-gown and white cap, which is doubtless the troubled spirit of the
usurer.
In fact, the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the origin
of that saying prevalent throughout New England of "The Devil and Tom
Walker."