I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of
investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once,
evidently. A country-parson and his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I
will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to
myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely
necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this
man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the
next five years. Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with
my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take
me into the conversation,--little thought I of the shadow he would one
day cast over both of our lives!
He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten
minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's
cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a
wonderful convenience.
"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good
bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often
walk fifty miles together."
We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the
world nobody walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if
not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least
one horse. Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.
Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom,
to be as unlike the British as possible,--as they did of making their
houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.
This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with
fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We
looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit
limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural
contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child
approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics
he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops,
of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath;
never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing
or whispering: no, all about him sounded like the free, dashing, rushing
water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned
cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly to the
outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort
of purposeless activity,--energy for its own sake. While his energies
harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of
knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good. But suppose
his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him
to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would have the
same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.
Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
anything else by any experience.
His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
bulb, even without being a Dutchman.
His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without
scruple every other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in
professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a
description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of jessamine and
Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers,
and hollyhocks.
"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I
had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for
day-lilies or tulips; "promise me that I may show you my tulips, and I
will promise you that you shall like botany hereafter."
We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which
I said I would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs
he gave me on the top of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in
the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house
afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old
glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which
happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine
clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were
extinguished forever.
I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not
matter at all. He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for
introduction. We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us
to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest. He had
travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that
he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.