The Brick Moon
and Other Stories
by EDWARD EVERETT HALE
Short Story Index Reprint Series
Preface
To read these stories again, thirty and more years after
they were written, is to recall many memories, sad or
glad, with which this reader need not be interrupted.
But I have to make sure that they are intelligible to
readers of a generation later than that for which they
were written.
The story of The Brick Moon was begun in my dear
brother Nathan's working-room in Union College,
Schenectady, in the year 1870, when he was professor of
the English language there. The account of the first
plan of the moon is a sketch, as accurate as was needed,
of the old chat and dreams, plans and jokes, of our
college days, before he left Cambridge in 1838. As I
learned almost everything I know through his care and
love and help, directly or indirectly, it is a pleasure
to say this here. The story was published in the
"Atlantic Monthly," in 1870 and 1871. It was the last
story I wrote for that magazine, before assuming the
charge of "Old and New," a magazine which I edited from
1870 to 1876, and for which I wrote "Ten Times One is
Ten," which has been printed in the third volume of this
series.
Among the kind references to "The Brick Moon" which
I have received from sympathetic friends, I now recall
with the greatest pleasure one sent me by Mr. Asaph Hall,
the distinguished astronomer of the National Observatory.
In sending me the ephemeris of the two moons of Mars,
which he revealed to this world of ours, he wrote, "The
smaller of these moons is the veritable Brick Moon."
That, in the moment of triumph for the greatest
astronomical discovery of a generation, Dr. Hall should
have time or thought to give to my little parable,--this
was praise indeed.
Writing in 1870, I said, as the reader will see on
page 66, that George Orcutt did not tell how he used a
magnifying power of 700. Nor did I choose to tell then,
hoping that in some fortunate winter I might be able
myself to repeat his process, greatly to the convenience
of astronomers who have not Alvan Clark's resources at
hand, or who have to satisfy themselves with glass lenses
of fifteen inches, or even thirty, in diameter. But no
such winter has come round to me, and I will now give
Orcutt's invention to the world. He had unlimited
freezing power. So have we now, as we had not then.
With this power he made an ice lens, ten feet in
diameter, which was easily rubbed, by the delicate hands
of the careful women around him, to precisely the
surface which he needed. Let me hope that before next
winter passes some countryman or countrywoman of mine
will have equalled his success, and with an ice lens will
surpass all the successes of the glasses of our time.
The plan of "Crusoe in New York" was made when I was
enjoying the princely hospitality of Henry Whitney
Bellows in New York. The parsonage in that city
commanded a view of a "lot" not built on, which would
have given for many years a happy home to any disciple of
Mayor Pingree, if a somewhat complicated social order had
permitted. The story was first published in Frank
Leslie's illustrated paper. In reading it in 1899, I am
afraid that the readers of a hard, money generation may
not know that "scrip" was in the sixties the name for
small change.
I regard a knowledge of every detail of the original
Robinson Crusoe as well-nigh a necessity in education.
Girls may occasionally be excused, but never boys. It
ought to be unnecessary, therefore, to say that some of
the narrative passages of Crusoe in New York are taken,
word for word, from the text of Defoe. If I do state
this for the benefit of a few unfortunate ladies who are
not familiar with that text, it is because I think no one
among many courteous critics has observed it.
"The Survivor's Story" is one of eight short stories
which were published in the first Christmas number of
"Old and New."
Of the other stories I think no explanation is
needed, but such as was given at the time of their
publication and is reprinted with each of them here.
EDWARD E. HALE.
ROXBURY, July 6, 1899.
CONTENTS
THE BRICK MOON
CRUSOE IN NEW YORK
BREAD ON THE WATERS
THE LOST PALACE
99 LINWOOD STREET
IDEALS
THANKSGIVING AT THE POLLS
THE SURVIVOR'S STORY
THE BRICK MOON
[From the papers of Captain FREDERIC INGHAM.]
I
PREPARATION
I have no sort of objection now to telling the whole
story. The subscribers, of course, have a right to
know what became of their money. The astronomers may
as well know all about it, before they announce any
more asteroids with an enormous movement in
declination. And experimenters on the longitude may as
well know, so that they may act advisedly in attempting
another brick moon or in refusing to do so.
It all began more than thirty years ago, when we were
in college; as most good things begin. We were studying
in the book which has gray sides and a green back, and is
called "Cambridge Astronomy" because it is translated
from the French. We came across this business of the
longitude, and, as we talked, in the gloom and glamour of
the old South Middle dining-hall, we had going the usual
number of students' stories about rewards offered by the
Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,--
stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like
all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion.
For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they
would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of
the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the
happy hit and to explain it to the rest of us.
[1] Wherever Q. is referred to in these pages my
brother Nathan is meant. One of his noms de plume
was Gnat Q. Hale, because G and Q may be silent letters.
I wonder if I can explain it to an unlearned world,
which has not studied the book with gray sides and a
green cambric back. Let us try.
You know then, dear world, that when you look at the
North Star, it always appears to you at just the same
height above the horizon or what is between you and the
horizon: say the Dwight School-house, or the houses in
Concord Street; or to me, just now, North College. You
know also that, if you were to travel to the North Pole,
the North Star would be just over your head. And, if you
were to travel to the equator, it would be just on your
horizon, if you could see it at all through the red,
dusty, hazy mist in the north, as you could not. If you
were just half-way between pole and equator, on the line
between us and Canada, the North Star would be half-way
up, or 45@ from the horizon. So you would know there
that you were 45@ from the equator. Then in Boston, you
would find it was 42@ 20' from the horizon. So you know
there that you are 42@ 20' from the equator. At Seattle
again you would find it was 47@ 40' high, so our friends
at Seattle know that they are at 47@ 40' from the
equator. The latitude of a place, in other words, is
found very easily by any observation which shows how high
the North Star is; if you do not want to measure the
North Star, you may take any star when it is just to
north of you, and measure its height; wait twelve hours,
and if you can find it, measure its height again. Split
the difference, and that is the altitude of the pole, or
the latitude of you, the observer.
"Of course we know this," says the graduating world.
"Do you suppose that is what we borrow your book for, to
have you spell out your miserable elementary astronomy?"
At which rebuff I should shrink distressed, but that a
chorus of voices an octave higher comes up with, "Dear
Mr. Ingham, we are ever so much obliged to you; we did
not know it at all before, and you make it perfectly
clear."
Thank you, my dear, and you, and you. We will not
care what the others say. If you do understand it, or do
know it, it is more than Mr. Charles Reade knew, or he
would not have made his two lovers on the island guess at
their latitude, as they did. If they had either of them
been educated at a respectable academy for the Middle
Classes, they would have fared better.
Now about the longitude.
The latitude, which you have found, measures your
distance north or south from the equator or the pole. To
find your longitude, you want to find your distance
east or west from the meridian of Greenwich. Now, if any
one would build a good tall tower at Greenwich, straight
into the sky,--say a hundred miles into the sky,--of
course if you and I were east or west of it, and could
see it, we could tell how far east or west we were by
measuring the apparent height of the tower above our
horizon. If we could see so far, when the lantern with
a Drummond's light, "ever so bright," on the very top of
the tower, appeared to be on our horizon, we should know
we were eight hundred and seventy-three miles away from
it. The top of the tower would answer for us as the North
Star does when we are measuring the latitude. If we were
nearer, our horizon would make a longer angle with the
line from the top to our place of vision. If we were
farther away, we should need a higher tower.
But nobody will build any such tower at Greenwich, or
elsewhere on that meridian, or on any meridian. You see
that to be of use to the half the world nearest to it, it
would have to be so high that the diameter of the world
would seem nothing in proportion. And then, for the
other half of the world you would have to erect another
tower as high on the other side. It was this difficulty
that made Q. suggest the expedient of the Brick Moon.
For you see that if, by good luck, there were a ring
like Saturn's which stretched round the world, above
Greenwich and the meridian of Greenwich, and if it would
stay above Greenwich, turning with the world, any one
who wanted to measure his longitude or distance from
Greenwich would look out of window and see how high this
ring was above his horizon. At Greenwich it would be
over his head exactly. At New Orleans, which is quarter
round the world from Greenwich, it would be just in his
horizon. A little west of New Orleans you would begin to
look for the other half of the ring on the west instead
of the east; and if you went a little west of the Feejee
Islands the ring would be over your head again. So if we
only had a ring like that, not round the equator of the
world,--as Saturn's ring is around Saturn,--but vertical
to the plane of the equator, as the brass ring of an
artificial globe goes, only far higher in proportion,--
"from that ring," said Q., pensively, "we could calculate
the longitude."
Failing that, after various propositions, he
suggested the Brick Moon. The plan was this: If from
the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you
could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward
as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that
when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to
fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the
North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get
it half round the earth without touching, that pea would
clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate
above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place,
above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the
impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere
and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it
revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure
the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the
orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.
"But a pea is so small!"
"Yes," said Q., "but we must make a large pea." Then
we fell to work on plans for making the pea very large
and very light. Large,--that it might be seen far away
by storm-tossed navigators: light,--that it might be the
easier blown four thousand and odd miles into the air;
lest it should fall on the heads of the Greenlanders or
the Patagonians; lest they should be injured and the
world lose its new moon. But, of course, all this lath-
and-plaster had to be given up. For the motion through
the air would set fire to this moon just as it does to
other aerolites, and all your lath-and-plaster would
gather into a few white drops, which no Rosse telescope
even could discern. "No," said Q. bravely, "at the least
it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well,
very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we
must have a Brick Moon."
Then we had to calculate its size. You can see, on
the old moon, an edifice two hundred feet long with any
of the fine refractors of our day. But no such
refractors as those can be carried by the poor little
fishermen whom we wanted to befriend, the bones of whose
ships lie white on so many cliffs, their names
unreported at any Lloyd's or by any Ross,
Themselves the owners and their sons the crew.
On the other hand, we did not want our moon two hundred
and fifty thousand miles away, as the old moon is, which
I will call the Thornbush moon, for distinction. We did
not care how near it was, indeed, if it were only far
enough away to be seen, in practice, from almost the
whole world. There must be a little strip where they
could not see it from the surface, unless we threw it
infinitely high. "But they need not look from the
surface," said Q.; "they might climb to the mast-head.
And if they did not see it at all, they would know that
they were ninety degrees from the meridian."
This difficulty about what we call "the strip,"
however, led to an improvement in the plan, which made it
better in every way. It was clear that even if "the
strip" were quite wide, the moon would have to be a good
way off, and, in proportion, hard to see. If, however,
we would satisfy ourselves with a moon four thousand
miles away, THAT could be seen on the earth's surface
for three or four thousand miles on each side; and twice
three thousand, or six thousand, is one fourth of the
largest circumference of the earth. We did not dare have
it nearer than four thousand miles, since even at that
distance it would be eclipsed three hours out of every
night; and we wanted it bright and distinct, and not of
that lurid, copper, eclipse color. But at four
thousand miles' distance the moon could be seen by a belt
of observers six or eight thousand miles in diameter.
"Start, then, two moons,"--this was my contribution to
the plan. "Suppose one over the meridian of Greenwich,
and the other over that of New Orleans. Take care that
there is a little difference in the radii of their
orbits, lest they `collide' some foul day. Then, in most
places, one or other, perhaps two will come in sight. So
much the less risk of clouds: and everywhere there may be
one, except when it is cloudy. Neither need be more than
four thousand miles off; so much the larger and more
beautiful will they be. If on the old Thornbush moon old
Herschel with his reflector could see a town-house two
hundred feet long, on the Brick Moon young Herschel will
be able to see a dab of mortar a foot and a half long, if
he wants to. And people without the reflector, with
their opera-glasses, will be able to see sufficiently
well." And to this they agreed: that eventually there
must be two Brick Moons. Indeed, it were better that
there should be four, as each must be below the horizon
half the time. That is only as many as Jupiter has. But
it was also agreed that we might begin with one.
Why we settled on two hundred feet of diameter I
hardly know. I think it was from the statement of dear
John Farrar's about the impossibility of there being a
state house two hundred feet long not yet discovered, on
the sunny side of old Thornbush. That, somehow, made
two hundred our fixed point. Besides, a moon of two
hundred feet diameter did not seem quite unmanageable.
Yet it was evident that a smaller moon would be of no
use, unless we meant to have them near the world, when
there would be so many that they would be confusing, and
eclipsed most of the time. And four thousand miles is a
good way off to see a moon even two hundred feet in
diameter.
Small though we made them on paper, these two-
hundred-foot moons were still too much for us. Of course
we meant to build them hollow. But even if hollow there
must be some thickness, and the quantity of brick would
at best be enormous. Then, to get them up! The pea-
shooter, of course, was only an illustration. It was
long after that time that Rodman and other guns sent iron
balls five or six miles in distance,--say two miles, more
or less, in height.
Iron is much heavier than hollow brick, but you can
build no gun with a bore of two hundred feet now,--far
less could you then. No.
Q. again suggested the method of shooting oft the
moon. It was not to be by any of your sudden explosions.
It was to be done as all great things are done,--by the
gradual and silent accumulation of power. You all know
that a flywheel--heavy, very heavy on the circumference,
light, very light within it--was made to save up power,
from the time when it was produced to the time when it
was wanted. Yes? Then, before we began even to
build the moon, before we even began to make the brick,
we would build two gigantic fly-wheels, the diameter of
each should be "ever so great," the circumference heavy
beyond all precedent, and thundering strong, so that no
temptation might burst it. They should revolve, their
edges nearly touching, in opposite directions, for years,
if it were necessary, to accumulate power, driven by some
waterfall now wasted to the world. One should be a
little heavier than the other. When the Brick Moon was
finished, and all was ready, IT should be gently rolled
down a gigantic groove provided for it, till it lighted
on the edge of both wheels at the same instant. Of
course it would not rest there, not the ten-thousandth
part of a second. It would be snapped upward, as a drop
of water from a grindstone. Upward and upward; but the
heavier wheel would have deflected it a little from the
vertical. Upward and northward it would rise, therefore,
till it had passed the axis of the world. It would, of
course, feel the world's attraction all the time, which
would bend its flight gently, but still it would leave
the world more and more behind. Upward still, but now
southward, till it had traversed more than one hundred
and eighty degrees of a circle. Little resistance,
indeed, after it had cleared the forty or fifty miles of
visible atmosphere. "Now let it fall," said Q., inspired
with the vision. "Let it fall, and the sooner the
better! The curve it is now on will forever clear
the world; and over the meridian of that lonely
waterfall,--if only we have rightly adjusted the gigantic
flies,--will forever revolve, in its obedient orbit,
the--
BRICK MOON,
the blessing of all seamen,--as constant in all change
as its older sister has been fickle, and the second
cynosure of all lovers upon the waves, and of all girls
left behind them." "Amen," we cried, and then we sat in
silence till the clock struck ten; then shook each other
gravely by the hand, and left the South Middle dining-
hall.
Of waterfalls there were plenty that we knew.
Fly-wheels could be built of oak and pine, and hooped
with iron. Fly-wheels did not discourage us.
But brick? One brick is, say, sixty-four cubic
inches only. This moon,--though we made it hollow,--
see,--it must take twelve million brick.
The brick alone will cost sixty thousand dollars!
The brick alone would cost sixty thousand dollars.
There the scheme of the Brick Moon hung, an airy vision,
for seventeen years,--the years that changed us from
young men into men. The brick alone, sixty thousand
dollars! For, to boys who have still left a few of their
college bills unpaid, who cannot think of buying that
lovely little Elzevir which Smith has for sale at
auction, of which Smith does not dream of the value,
sixty thousand dollars seems as intangible as sixty
million sestertia. Clarke, second, how much are sixty
million sestertia stated in cowries? How much in
currency, gold being at 1.37 1/4? Right; go up. Stop,
I forget myself!
So, to resume, the project of the Brick Moon hung in
the ideal, an airy vision, a vision as lovely and as
distant as the Brick Moon itself, at this calm moment of
midnight when I write, as it poises itself over the
shoulder of Orion, in my southern horizon. Stop! I
anticipate. Let me keep--as we say in Beadle's Dime
Series--to the even current of my story.
Seventeen years passed by, we were no longer boys,
though we felt so. For myself, to this hour, I never
enter board meeting, committee meeting, or synod, without
the queer question, what would happen should any one
discover that this bearded man was only a big boy
disguised? that the frockcoat and the round hat are none
of mine, and that, if I should be spurned from the
assembly, as an interloper, a judicious public, learning
all the facts, would give a verdict, "Served him right."
This consideration helps me through many bored meetings
which would be else so dismal. What did my old copy
say?--
"Boards are made of wood, they are long and narrow."
But we do not get on!
Seventeen years after, I say, or should have said,
dear Orcutt entered my room at Naguadavick again. I had
not seen him since the Commencement day when we
parted at Cambridge. He looked the same, and yet not the
same. His smile was the same, his voice, his tender look
of sympathy when I spoke to him of a great sorrow, his
childlike love of fun. His waistband was different, his
pantaloons were different, his smooth chin was buried in
a full beard, and he weighed two hundred pounds if he
weighed a gramme. O, the good time we had, so like the
times of old! Those were happy days for me in
Naguadavick. At that moment my double was at work for me
at a meeting of the publishing committee of the
Sandemanian Review, so I called Orcutt up to my own
snuggery, and we talked over old times; talked till tea
was ready. Polly came up through the orchard and made
tea for us herself there. We talked on and on, till
nine, ten at night, and then it was that dear Orcutt
asked me if I remembered the Brick Moon. Remember it? of
course I did. And without leaving my chair I opened the
drawer of my writing-desk, and handed him a portfolio
full of working-drawings on which I had engaged myself
for my "third"[1] all that winter. Orcutt was delighted.
He turned them over hastily but intelligently, and said:
"I am so glad. I could not think you had forgotten. And
I have seen Brannan, and Brannan has not forgotten."
"Now do you know," said he, "in all this railroading of
mine, I have not forgotten. When I built the great
tunnel for the Cattawissa and Opelousas, by which we
got rid of the old inclined planes, there was never a
stone bigger than a peach-stone within two hundred miles
of us. I baked the brick of that tunnel on the line with
my own kilns. Ingham, I have made more brick, I believe,
than any man living in the world!"
[1] "Every man," says Dr. Peabody, "should have a
vocation and an avocation." To which I add,"A third."
"You are the providential man," said I.
"Am I not, Fred? More than that," said he; "I have
succeeded in things the world counts worth more than
brick. I have made brick, and I have made money!"
"One of us make money?" asked I, amazed.
"Even so," said dear Orcutt; "one of us has, made
money." And he proceeded to tell me how. It was not in
building tunnels, nor in making brick. No! It was by
buying up the original stock of the Cattawissa and
Opelousas, at a moment when that stock had hardly a
nominal price in the market. There were the first
mortgage bonds, and the second mortgage bonds, and the
third, and I know not how much floating debt; and worse
than all, the reputation of the road lost, and deservedly
lost. Every locomotive it had was asthmatic. Every car
it had bore the marks of unprecedented accidents, for
which no one was to blame. Rival lines, I know not how
many, were cutting each other's throats for its
legitimate business. At this juncture dear George
invested all his earnings as a contractor, in the
despised original stock,--he actually bought it for 3 1/4
per cent,--good shares that had cost a round hundred
to every wretch who had subscribed. Six thousand eight
hundred dollars--every cent he had--did George thus
invest. Then he went himself to the trustees of the
first mortgage, to the trustees of the second, and to the
trustees of the third, and told them what he had done.
Now it is personal presence that moves the world.
Dear Orcutt has found that out since, if he did not know
it before. The trustees who would have sniffed had
George written to them, turned round from their desks,
and begged him to take a chair, when he came to talk with
them. Had he put every penny he was worth into that
stock? Then it was worth something which they did not
know of, for George Orcutt was no fool about railroads.
The man who bridged the Lower Rapidan when a freshet was
running was no fool.
"What were his plans?"
George did not tell--no, not to lordly trustees--what
his plans were. He had plans, but he kept them to
himself. All he told them was that he had plans. On
those plans he had staked his all. Now, would they or
would they not agree to put him in charge of the running
of that road, for twelve months, on a nominal salary?
The superintendent they had had was a rascal. He had
proved that by running away. They knew that George was
not a rascal. He knew that he could make this road pay
expenses, pay bond-holders, and pay a dividend,--a thing
no one else had dreamed of for twenty years. Could
they do better than try him?
Of course they could not, and they knew they could
not. Of course they sniffed and talked, and waited, and
pretended they did not know, and that they must consult,
and so forth and so on. But of course they all did try
him, on his own terms. He was put in charge of the
running of that road.
In one week he showed he should redeem it. In three
months he did redeem it!
He advertised boldly the first day: "Infant
children at treble price."
The novelty attracted instant remark. And it showed
many things. First, it showed he was a humane man, who
wished to save human life. He would leave these
innocents in their cradles, where they belonged.
Second, and chiefly, the world of travellers saw that
the Crichton, the Amadis, the perfect chevalier of the
future, had arisen,--a railroad manager caring for the
comfort of his passengers!
The first week the number of the C. and O.'s
passengers was doubled: in a week or two more freight
began to come in, in driblets, on the line which its
owners had gone over. As soon as the shops could turn
them out, some cars were put on, with arms on which
travellers could rest their elbows, with head-rests where
they could take naps if they were weary. These excited
so much curiosity that one was exhibited in the museum
at Cattawissa and another at Opelousas. It may not
be generally known that the received car of the American
roads was devised to secure a premium offered by the
Pawtucket and Podunk Company. Their receipts were
growing so large that they feared they should forfeit
their charter. They advertised, therefore, for a car in
which no man could sleep at night or rest by day,--in
which the backs should be straight, the heads of
passengers unsupported, the feet entangled in a vice, the
elbows always knocked by the passing conductor. The
pattern was produced which immediately came into use on
all the American roads. But on the Cattawissa and
Opelousas this time-honored pattern was set aside.
Of course you see the result. Men went hundreds of
miles out of their way to ride on the C. and O. The
third mortgage was paid off; a reserve fund was piled up
for the second; the trustees of the first lived in dread
of being paid; and George's stock, which he bought at 3
1/4, rose to 147 before two years had gone by! So was it
that, as we sat together in the snuggery, George was
worth well-nigh three hundred thousand dollars. Some of
his eggs were in the basket where they were laid; some he
had taken out and placed in other baskets; some in nests
where various hens were brooding over them. Sound eggs
they were, wherever placed; and such was the victory of
which George had come to tell.
One of us had made money!
On his way he had seen Brannan. Brannan, the pure-
minded, right-minded, shifty man of tact, man of brain,
man of heart, and man of word, who held New Altona in the
hollow of his hand. Brannan had made no money. Not he,
nor ever will. But Brannan could do much what he pleased
in this world, without money. For whenever Brannan
studied the rights and the wrongs of any enterprise, all
men knew that what Brannan decided about it was well-nigh
the eternal truth; and therefore all men of sense were
accustomed to place great confidence in his prophecies.
But, more than this, and better, Brannan was an
unconscious dog, who believed in the people. So, when he
knew what was the right and what was the wrong, he could
stand up before two or three thousand people and tell
them what was right and what was wrong, and tell them
with the same simplicity and freshness with which he
would talk to little Horace on his knee. Of the
thousands who heard him there would not be one in a
hundred who knew that this was eloquence. They were fain
to say, as they sat in their shops, talking, that Brannan
was not eloquent. Nay, they went so far as to regret
that Brannan was not eloquent! If he were only as
eloquent as Carker was or as Barker was, how excellent he
would be! But when, a month after, it was necessary for
them to do anything about the thing he had been speaking
of, they did what Brannan had told them to do;
forgetting, most likely, that he had ever told them,
and fancying that these were their own ideas, which, in
fact, had, from his liquid, ponderous, transparent, and
invisible common sense, distilled unconsciously into
their being. I wonder whether Brannan ever knew that he
was eloquent. What I knew, and what dear George knew,
was, that he was one of the leaders of men!
Courage, my friends, we are steadily advancing to the
Brick Moon!
For George had stopped, and seen Brannan; and Brannan
had not forgotten. Seventeen years Brannan had
remembered, and not a ship had been lost on a lee-shore
because her longitude was wrong,--not a baby had wailed
its last as it was ground between wrecked spar and cruel
rock,--not a swollen corpse unknown had been flung up
upon the sand and been buried with a nameless epitaph,--
but Brannan had recollected the Brick Moon, and had, in
the memory-chamber which rejected nothing, stored away
the story of the horror. And now George was ready to
consecrate a round hundred thousand to the building of
the Moon; and Brannan was ready, in the thousand ways in
which wise men move the people to and fro, to persuade
them to give to us a hundred thousand more; and George
had come to ask me if I were not ready to undertake with
them the final great effort, of which our old
calculations were the embryo. For this I was now to
contribute the mathematical certainty and the lore
borrowed from naval science, which should blossom and
bear fruit when the Brick Moon was snapped like a cherry
from the ways on which it was built, was launched into
the air by power gathered from a thousand freshets, and,
poised at last in its own pre-calculated region of the
ether, should begin its course of eternal blessings in
one unchanging meridian!
Vision of Beneficence and Wonder! Of course I
consented.
Oh that you were not so eager for the end! Oh that
I might tell you, what now you will never know,--of the
great campaign which we then and there inaugurated! How
the horrible loss of the Royal Martyr, whose longitude
was three degrees awry, startled the whole world, and
gave us a point to start from. How I explained to George
that he must not subscribe the one hundred thousand
dollars in a moment. It must come in bits, when "the
cause" needed a stimulus, or the public needed
encouragement. How we caught neophyte editors, and
explained to them enough to make them think the Moon was
well-nigh their own invention and their own thunder.
How, beginning in Boston, we sent round to all the men of
science, all those of philanthropy, and all those of
commerce, three thousand circulars, inviting them to a
private meeting at George's parlors at the Revere. How,
besides ourselves, and some nice, respectable-looking old
gentlemen Brannan had brought over from Podunk with him,
paying their fares both ways, there were present only
three men,--all adventurers whose projects had failed,--
besides the representatives of the press. How, of these
representatives, some understood the whole, and some
understood nothing. How, the next day, all gave us
"first-rate notices." How, a few days after, in the
lower Horticultural Hall, we had our first public
meeting. How Haliburton brought us fifty people who
loved him,--his Bible class, most of them,--to help fill
up; how, besides these, there were not three persons whom
we had not asked personally, or one who could invent an
excuse to stay away. How we had hung the walls with
intelligible and unintelligible diagrams. How I opened
the meeting. Of that meeting, indeed, I must tell
something.
First, I spoke. I did not pretend to unfold the
scheme. I did not attempt any rhetoric. But I did not
make any apologies. I told them simply of the dangers of
lee-shores. I told them when they were most dangerous,--
when seamen came upon them unawares. I explained to them
that, though the costly chronometer, frequently adjusted,
made a delusive guide to the voyager who often made a
harbor, still the adjustment was treacherous, the
instrument beyond the use of the poor, and that, once
astray, its error increased forever. I said that we
believed we had a method which, if the means were
supplied for the experiment, would give the humblest
fisherman the very certainty of sunrise and of sunset in
his calculations of his place upon the world. And I said
that whenever a man knew his place in this world, it
was always likely all would go well. Then I sat down.
Then dear George spoke,--simply, but very briefly.
He said he was a stranger to the Boston people, and that
those who knew him at all knew he was not a talking man.
He was a civil engineer, and his business was to
calculate and to build, and not to talk. But he had come
here to say that he had studied this new plan for the
longitude from the Top to the Bottom, and that he
believed in it through and through. There was his
opinion, if that was worth anything to anybody. If that
meeting resolved to go forward with the enterprise, or if
anybody proposed to, he should offer his services in any
capacity, and without any pay, for its success. If he
might only work as a bricklayer, he would work as a
bricklayer. For he believed, on his soul, that the
success of this enterprise promised more for mankind than
any enterprise which was ever likely to call for the
devotion of his life. "And to the good of mankind," he
said, very simply, "my life is devoted." Then he sat
down.
Then Brannan got up. Up to this time, excepting that
George had dropped this hint about bricklaying, nobody
had said a word about the Moon, far less hinted what it
was to be made of. So Ben had the whole to open. He did
it as if he had been talking to a bright boy of ten years
old. He made those people think that he respected
them as his equals. But, in fact, he chose every
word, as if not one of them knew anything. He explained,
as if it were rather more simple to explain than to take
for granted. But he explained as if, were they talking,
they might be explaining to him. He led them from point
to point,--oh! so much more clearly than I have been
leading you,--till, as their mouths dropped a little open
in their eager interest, and their lids forgot to wink in
their gaze upon his face, and so their eyebrows seemed a
little lifted in curiosity,--till, I say, each man felt
as if he were himself the inventor, who had bridged
difficulty after difficulty; as if, indeed, the whole
were too simple to be called difficult or complicated.
The only wonder was that the Board of Longitude, or the
Emperor Napoleon, or the Smithsonian, or somebody, had
not sent this little planet on its voyage of blessing
long before. Not a syllable that you would have called
rhetoric, not a word that you would have thought
prepared; and then Brannan sat down.
That was Ben Brannan's way. For my part, I like it
better than eloquence.
Then I got up again. We would answer any questions,
I said. We represented people who were eager to go
forward with this work. (Alas! except Q., all of those
represented were on the stage.) We could not go forward
without the general assistance of the community. It was
not an enterprise which the government could be asked to
favor. It was not an enterprise which would yield
one penny of profit to any human being. We had
therefore, purely on the ground of its benefit to
mankind, brought it before an assembly of Boston men and
women.
Then there was a pause, and we could hear our watches
tick, and our hearts beat. Dear George asked me in a
whisper if he should say anything more, but I thought
not. The pause became painful, and then Tom Coram,
prince of merchants, rose. Had any calculation been made
of the probable cost of the experiment of one moon?
I said the calculations were on the table. The brick
alone would cost $60,000. Mr. Orcutt had computed that
$214,729 would complete two flywheels and one moon. This
made no allowance for whitewashing the moon, which was
not strictly necessary. The fly-wheels and water-power
would be equally valuable for the succeeding moons, it
any were attempted, and therefore the second moon could
be turned off, it was hoped, for $159,732.
Thomas Coram had been standing all the time I spoke,
and in an instant he said: "I am no mathematician. But
I have had a ship ground to pieces under me on the
Laccadives because our chronometer was wrong. You need
$250,000 to build your first moon. I will be one of
twenty men to furnish the money; or I will pay $10,000
to-morrow for this purpose, to any person who may be
named as treasurer, to be repaid to me if the moon is not
finished this day twenty years."
That was as long a speech as Tom Coram ever made.
But it was pointed. The small audience tapped applause.
Orcutt looked at me, and I nodded. "I will be
another, of the twenty men," cried he. "And I another,"
said an old bluff Englishman, whom nobody had invited;
who proved to be a Mr. Robert Boll, a Sheffield man, who
came in from curiosity. He stopped after the meeting;
said he should leave the country the next week, and I
have never seen him since. But his bill of exchange came
all the same.
That was all the public subscribing. Enough more
than we had hoped for. We tried to make Coram treasurer,
but he refused. We had to make Haliburton treasurer,
though we should have liked a man better known than he
then was. Then we adjourned. Some nice ladies then came
up, and gave, one a dollar, and one five dollars, and one
fifty, and so on,--and some men who have stuck by ever
since. I always, in my own mind, call each of those
women Damaris, and each of those men Dionysius. But
those are not their real names.
How I am wasting time on an old story! Then some of
these ladies came the next day and proposed a fair; and
out of that, six months after, grew the great Longitude
Fair, that you will all remember, if you went to it, I am
sure. And the papers the next day gave us first-rate
reports; and then, two by two, with our subscription-
books, we went at it. But I must not tell the details of
that subscription. There were two or three men who
subscribed $5,000 each, because they were perfectly
certain the amount would never be raised. They wanted,
for once, to get the credit of liberality for nothing.
There were many men and many women who subscribed from
one dollar up to one thousand, not because they cared a
straw for the longitude, nor because they believed in the
least in the project; but because they believed in
Brannan, in Orcutt, in Q., or in me. Love goes far in
this world of ours. Some few men subscribed because
others had done it: it was the thing to do, and they must
not be out of fashion. And three or four, at least,
subscribed because each hour of their lives there came up
the memory of the day when the news came that the---- was
lost, George, or Harry, or John, in the----, and they
knew that George, or Harry, or John might have been at
home, had it been easier than it is to read the courses
of the stars!
Fair, subscriptions, and Orcutt's reserve,--we
counted up $162,000, or nearly so. There would be a
little more when all was paid in.
But we could not use a cent, except Orcutt's and our
own little subscriptions, till we had got the whole. And
at this point it seemed as if the whole world was sick of
us, and that we had gathered every penny that was in
store for us. The orange was squeezed dry!
II
HOW WE BUILT IT
The orange was squeezed dry! And how little any of us
knew,--skilful George Orcutt, thoughtful Ben Brannan,
loyal Haliburton, ingenious Q., or poor painstaking
I,--how little we knew, or any of us, where was another
orange, or how we could mix malic acid and tartaric
acid, and citric acid and auric acid and sugar and
water so as to imitate orange-juice, and fill up the
bank-account enough to draw in the conditioned
subscriptions, and so begin to build the MOON. How
often, as I lay awake at night, have I added up the
different subscriptions in some new order, as if that
would help the matter: and how steadily they have come
out one hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars, or even
less, when I must needs, in my sleepiness, forget
somebody's name! So Haliburton put into railroad
stocks all the money he collected, and the rest of us
ground on at our mills, or flew up on our own wings
towards Heaven. Thus Orcutt built more tunnels, Q.
prepared for more commencements, Haliburton calculated
more policies, Ben Brannan created more civilization,
and I, as I could, healed the hurt of my people of
Naguadavick for the months there were left to me of my
stay in that thriving town.
None of us had the wit to see how the problem was to
be wrought out further. No. The best things come to us
when we have faithfully and well made all the
preparation and done our best; but they come in some way
that is none of ours. So was it now, that to build the
BRICK MOON it was necessary that I should be turned out
of Naguadavick ignominiously, and that Jeff. Davis and
some seven or eight other bad men should create the Great
Rebellion. Hear how it happened.
Dennis Shea, my Double,--otherwise, indeed, called by
my name and legally so,--undid me, as my friends
supposed, one evening at a public meeting called by poor
Isaacs in Naguadavick. Of that transaction I have no
occasion here to tell the story. But of that transaction
one consequence is that the BRICK MOON now moves in
ether. I stop writing, to rest my eye upon it, through
a little telescope of Alvan Clark's here, which is always
trained near it. It is moving on as placidly as ever.
It came about thus. The morning after poor Dennis,
whom I have long since forgiven, made his extraordinary
speeches, without any authority from me, in the Town Hall
at Naguadavick, I thought, and my wife agreed with me,
that we had better both leave town with the children.
Auchmuty, our dear friend, thought so too. We left in
the seven o'clock Accommodation for Skowhegan, and so
came to Township No. 9 in the 3d Range, and there for
years we resided. That whole range of townships was set
off under a provision admirable in its character, that
the first settled minister in each town should receive
one hundred acres of land as the "minister's grant,"
and the first settled schoolmaster eighty. To No. 9,
therefore, I came. I constituted a little Sandemanian
church. Auchmuty and Delafield came up and installed me,
and with these hands I built the cabin in which, with
Polly and the little ones, I have since spent many happy
nights and days. This is not the place for me to publish
a map, which I have by me, of No. 9, nor an account of
its many advantages for settlers. Should I ever print my
papers called "Stay-at-home Robinsons," it will be easy
with them to explain its topography and geography.
Suffice it now to say, that, with Alice and Bertha and
Polly, I took tramps up and down through the lumbermen's
roads, and soon knew the general features of the lay of
the land. Nor was it long, of course, before we came out
one day upon the curious land-slides, which have more
than once averted the flow of the Little Carrotook River,
where it has washed the rocks away so far as to let down
one section more of the overlying yielding yellow clay.
Think how my eyes flashed, and my wife's, as,
struggling though a wilderness of moosewood, we came out
one afternoon on this front of yellow clay! Yellow clay
of course, when properly treated by fire, is brick! Here
we were surrounded by forests, only waiting to be burned;
yonder was clay, only waiting to be baked. Polly looked
at me, and I looked at her, and with one voice, we cried
out, "The MOON!"
For here was this shouting river at our feet, whose
power had been running to waste since the day when the
Laurentian hills first heaved themselves above the hot
Atlantic; and that day, I am informed by Mr. Agassiz, was
the first day in the history of this solid world. Here
was water-power enough for forty fly-wheels, were it
necessary to send heavenward twenty moons. Here was
solid timber enough for a hundred dams, yet only one was
necessary to give motion to the fly-wheels. Here was
retirement,--freedom from criticism, an escape from the
journalists, who would not embarrass us by telling of
every cracked brick which had to be rejected from the
structure. We had lived in No. 9 now for six weeks, and
not an "own correspondent" of them all had yet told what
Rev. Mr. Ingham had for dinner.
Of course I wrote to George Orcutt at once of our
great discovery, and he came up at once to examine the
situation. On the whole, it pleased him. He could not
take the site I proposed for the dam, because this very
clay there made the channel treacherous, and there was
danger that the stream would work out a new career. But
lower down we found a stony gorge with which George was
satisfied; he traced out a line for a railway by which,
of their own weight, the brick-cars could run to the
centrings; he showed us where, with some excavations, the
fly-wheels could be placed exactly above the great mill-
wheels, that no power might be wasted, and explained to
us how, when the gigantic structure was finished, the
BRICK MOON would gently roll down its ways upon the rapid
wheels, to be launched instant into the sky!
Shall I ever forget that happy October day of
anticipation?
We spent many of those October days in tentative
surveys. Alice and Bertha were our chain-men,
intelligent and obedient. I drove for George his stakes,
or I cut away his brush, or I raised and lowered the
shield at which he sighted and at noon Polly appeared
with her baskets, and we would dine al fresco, on a
pretty point which, not many months after, was wholly
covered by the eastern end of the dam. When the field-
work was finished we retired to the cabin for days, and
calculated and drew, and drew and calculated. Estimates
for feeding Irishmen, estimates of hay for mules,--George
was sure he could work mules better than oxen,--estimates
for cement, estimates for the preliminary saw-mills,
estimates for rail for the little brick-road, for wheels,
for spikes, and for cutting ties; what did we not
estimate for--on a basis almost wholly new, you will
observe. For here the brick would cost us less than our
old conceptions,--our water-power cost us almost
nothing,--but our stores and our wages would cost us much
more.
These estimates are now to me very curious,--a
monument, indeed, to dear George's memory, that in the
result they proved so accurate. I would gladly print
them here at length, with some illustrative cuts, but
that I know the impatience of the public, and its
indifference to detail. If we are ever able to print a
proper memorial of George, that, perhaps, will be the
fitter place for them. Suffice it to say that with the
subtractions thus made from the original estimates,--even
with the additions forced upon us by working in a
wilderness,--George was satisfied that a money charge of
$197,327 would build and start THE MOON. As soon as we
had determined the site, we marked off eighty acres,
which contained all the essential localities, up and down
the little Carrotook River,--I engaged George for the
first schoolmaster in No. 9, and he took these eighty
acres for the schoolmaster's reservation. Alice and
Bertha went to school to him the next day, taking lessons
in civil engineering; and I wrote to the Bingham trustees
to notify them that I had engaged a teacher, and that he
had selected his land.
Of course we remembered, still, that we were near
forty thousand dollars short of the new estimates, and
also that much of our money would not be paid us but on
condition that two hundred and fifty thousand were
raised. But George said that his own subscription was
wholly unhampered: with that we would go to work on the
preliminary work of the dam, and on the flies. Then, if
the flies would hold together,--and they should hold if
mortise and iron could hold them,--they might be at
work summers and winters, days and nights, storing up
Power for us. This would encourage the subscribers, it
would encourage us; and all this preliminary work would
be out of the way when we were really ready to begin upon
the MOON.
Brannan, Haliburton, and Q. readily agreed to this
when they were consulted. They were the other trustees
under an instrument which we had got St. Leger[1] to draw
up. George gave up, as soon as he might, his other
appointments; and taught me, meanwhile, where and how I
was to rig a little saw-mill, to cut some necessary
lumber. I engaged a gang of men to cut the timber for
the dam, and to have it ready; and, with the next spring,
we were well at work on the dam and on the flies! These
needed, of course, the most solid foundation. The least
irregularity of their movement might send the MOON awry.
[1] The St. Leger of these stories was Francis Brown
Hayes, H. C. 1839.
Ah me! would I not gladly tell the history of every
bar of iron which was bent into the tires of those flies,
and of every log which was mortised into its place in the
dam, nay, of every curling mass of foam which played in
the eddies beneath, when the dam was finished, and the
waste water ran so smoothly over? Alas! that one drop
should be wasted of water that might move a world,
although a small one! I almost dare say that I remember
each and all these,--with such hope and happiness did I
lend myself, as I could, each day to the great
enterprise; lending to dear George, who was here and
there and everywhere, and was this and that and
everybody,--lending to him, I say, such poor help as I
could lend, in whatever way. We waked, in the two cabins
in those happy days, just before the sun came up, when
the birds were in their loudest clamor of morning joy.
Wrapped each in a blanket, George and I stepped out from
our doors, each trying to call the other, and often
meeting on the grass between. We ran to the river and
plunged in,--oh, how cold it was!--laughed and screamed
like boys, rubbed ourselves aglow, and ran home to build
Polly's fire beneath the open chimney which stood beside
my cabin. The bread had risen in the night. The water
soon boiled above the logs. The children came laughing
out upon the grass, barefoot, and fearless of the dew.
Then Polly appeared with her gridiron and bear-steak, or
with her griddle and eggs, and, in fewer minutes than
this page has cost me, the breakfast was ready for Alice
to carry, dish by dish, to the white-clad table on the
piazza. Not Raphael and Adam more enjoyed their
watermelons, fox-grapes, and late blueberries! And, in
the long croon of the breakfast, we revenged ourselves
for the haste with which it had been prepared.
When we were well at table, a horn from the cabins
below sounded the reveille for the drowsier workmen.
Soon above the larches rose the blue of their smokes; and
when we were at last nodding to the children, to say
that they might leave the table, and Polly was folding
her napkin as to say she wished we were gone, we would
see tall Asaph Langdon, then foreman of the carpenters,
sauntering up the valley with a roll of paper, or an
adze, or a shingle with some calculations on it,--with
something on which he wanted Mr. Orcutt's directions for
the day.
An hour of nothings set the carnal machinery of the
day agoing. We fed the horses, the cows, the pigs, and
the hens. We collected the eggs and cleaned the hen-
houses and the barns. We brought in wood enough for the
day's fire, and water enough for the day's cooking and
cleanliness. These heads describe what I and the
children did. Polly's life during that hour was more
mysterious. That great first hour of the day is devoted
with women to the deepest arcana of the Eleusinian
mysteries of the divine science of housekeeping. She who
can meet the requisitions of that hour wisely and bravely
conquers in the Day's Battle. But what she does in it,
let no man try to say! It can be named, but not
described, in the comprehensive formula, "Just stepping
round."
That hour well given to chores and to digestion, the
children went to Mr. Orcutt's open-air school, and I to
my rustic study,--a separate cabin, with a rough square
table in it, and some book-boxes equally rude. No man
entered it, excepting George and me. Here for two hours
I worked undisturbed,--how happy the world, had it
neither postman nor door-bell!--worked upon my Traces of
Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, and
then was ready to render such service to The Cause and to
George as the day might demand. Thus I rode to Lincoln
or to Foxcroft to order supplies; I took my gun and lay
in wait on Chairback for a bear; I transferred to the
hewn lumber the angles or bevels from the careful
drawings: as best I could, I filled an apostle's part,
and became all things to all these men around me. Happy
those days!--and thus the dam was built; in such Arcadian
simplicity was reared the mighty wheel; thus grew on each
side the towers which were to support the flies; and
thus, to our delight not unmixed with wonder, at last we
saw those mighty flies begin to turn. Not in one day,
nor in ten; but in a year or two of happy life,--full of
the joy of joys,--the "joy of eventful living."
Yet, for all this, $162,000 was not $197,000, far
less was it $250,000; and but for Jeff. Davis and his
crew the BRICK MOON would not have been born.
But at last Jeff. Davis was ready. "My preparations
being completed," wrote General Beauregard, "I opened
fire on Fort Sumter." Little did he know it,--but in
that explosion the BRICK MOON also was lifted into the
sky!
Little did we know it, when, four weeks after, George
came up from the settlements, all excited with the
news! The wheels had been turning now for four days,
faster of course and faster. George had gone down for
money to pay off the men, and he brought us up the news
that the Rebellion had begun.
"The last of this happy life," he said; "the last,
alas, of our dear MOON." How little he knew and we!
But he paid off the men, and they packed their traps
and disappeared, and, before two months were over, were
in the lines before the enemy. George packed up, bade us
sadly good-by, and before a week had offered his service
to Governor Fenton in Albany. For us, it took rather
longer; but we were soon packed; Polly took the children
to her sister's, and I went on to the Department to offer
my service there. No sign of life left in No. 9, but the
two gigantic Fly-Wheels, moving faster and faster by day
and by night, and accumulating Power till it was needed.
If only they would hold together till the moment came!
So we all ground through the first slow year of the
war. George in his place, I in mine, Brannan in his,--we
lifted as we could. But how heavy the weight seemed! It
was in the second year, when the second large loan was
placed, that Haliburton wrote to me,--I got the letter,
I think, at Hilton Head,--that he had sold out every
penny of our railroad stocks, at the high prices which
railroad stocks then bore, and had invested the whole
fifty-nine thousand in the new Governments. "I could
not call a board meeting," said Haliburton, "for I am
here only on leave of absence, and the rest are all away.
But the case is clear enough. If the government goes up,
the MOON will never go up; and, for one, I do not look
beyond the veil." So he wrote to us all, and of course
we all approved.
So it was that Jeff. Davis also served. Deep must
that man go into the Pit who does not serve, though
unconscious. For thus it was that, in the fourth year of
the war, when gold was at 290, Haliburton was receiving
on his fifty-nine thousand dollars seventeen per cent
interest in currency; thus was it that, before the war
was over, he had piled up, compounding his interest, more
than fifty per cent addition to his capital; thus was it
that, as soon as peace came, all his stocks were at a
handsome percentage; thus was it that, before I returned
from South America, he reported to all the subscribers
that the full quarter-million was secured: thus was it
that, when I returned after that long cruise of mine in
the Florida, I found Polly and the children again at No.
9, George there also, directing a working party of nearly
eighty bricklayers and hodmen, the lower centrings well-
nigh filled to their diameter, and the BRICK MOON, to the
eye, seeming almost half completed.
Here it is that I regret most of all that I cannot
print the working-drawings with this paper. If you will
cut open the seed-vessel of Spergularia Rubra, or any
other carpel that has a free central placenta, and
observe how the circular seeds cling around the circular
centre, you will have some idea of the arrangement of a
transverse horizontal section of the completed MOON. Lay
three croquet-balls on the piazza, and call one or two of
the children to help you poise seven in one plane above
the three; then let another child place three more above
the seven, and you have the CORE of the MOON
completely. If you want a more poetical illustration, it
was what Mr. Wordsworth calls a mass
"Of conglobated bubbles undissolved."
Any section through any diameter looked like an
immense rose-window, of six circles grouped round a
seventh. In truth, each of these sections would reveal
the existence of seven chambers in the moon,--each a
sphere itself,--whose arches gave solidity to the whole;
while yet, of the whole moon, the greater part was air.
In all there were thirteen of these moonlets, if I am so
to call them; though no one section, of course, would
reveal so many. Sustained on each side by their groined
arches, the surface of the whole moon was built over
them and under them,--simply two domes connected at the
bases. The chambers themselves were made lighter by
leaving large, round windows or open circles in the parts
of their vaults farthest from their points of contact, so
that each of them looked not unlike the outer sphere of
a Japanese ivory nest of concentric balls. You see
the object was to make a moon, which, when left to its
own gravity, should be fitly supported or braced within.
Dear George was sure that, by this constant repetition of
arches, we should with the least weight unite the
greatest strength. I believe it still, and experience
has proved that there is strength enough.
When I went up to No. 9, on my return from South
America, I found the lower centring up, and half full of
the working-bees,--who were really Keltic laborers,--all
busy in bringing up the lower half-dome of the shell.
This lower centring was of wood, in form exactly like a
Roman amphitheatre if the seats of it be circular; on
this the lower or inverted brick dome was laid. The
whole fabric was on one of the terraces which were heaved
up in some old geological cataclysm, when some lake gave
way, and the Carrotook River was born. The level was
higher than that of the top of the fly-wheels, which,
with an awful velocity now, were circling in their wild
career in the ravine below. Three of the lowest
moonlets, as I have called them,--separate croquet-balls,
if you take my other illustration,--had been completed;
their centrings had been taken to pieces and drawn out
through the holes, and were now set up again with other
new centrings for the second story of cells.
I was received with wonder and delight. I had
telegraphed my arrival, but the despatches had never
been forwarded from Skowhegan. Of course, we all had a
deal to tell; and, for me, there was no end to inquiries
which I had to make in turn. I was never tired of
exploring the various spheres, and the nameless spaces
between them. I was never tired of talking with the
laborers. All of us, indeed, became skilful bricklayers;
and on a pleasant afternoon you might see Alice and
Bertha, and George and me, all laying brick together,--
Polly sitting in the shade of some wall which had been
built high enough, and reading to us from Jean Ingelow or
Monte-Cristo or Jane Austen, while little Clara brought
to us our mortar. Happily and lightly went by that
summer. Haliburton and his wife made us a visit; Ben
Brannan brought up his wife and children; Mrs. Haliburton
herself put in the keystone to the central chamber, which
had always been named G on the plans; and at her
suggestion, it was named Grace now, because her mother's
name was Hannah. Before winter we had passed the
diameter of I, J, and K, the three uppermost cells of
all; and the surrounding shell was closing in upon them.
On the whole, the funds had held out amazingly well.
The wages had been rather higher than we meant; but the
men had no chances at liquor or dissipation, and had
worked faster than we expected; and, with our new brick-
machines, we made brick inconceivably fast, while their
quality was so good that dear George said there was never
so little waste. We celebrated Thanksgiving of that year
together,--my family and his family. We had paid
off all the laborers; and there were left, of that busy
village, only Asaph Langdon and his family, Levi Jordan
and Levi Ross, Horace Leonard and Seth Whitman with
theirs. "Theirs," I say, but Ross had no family. He was
a nice young fellow who was there as Haliburton's
representative, to take care of the accounts and the pay-
roll; Jordan was the head of the brick-kilns; Leonard, of
the carpenters; and Whitman, of the commissariat,--and a
good commissary Whitman was.
We celebrated Thanksgiving together! Ah me! what a
cheerful, pleasant time we had; how happy the children
were together! Polly and I and our bairns were to go to
Boston the next day. I was to spend the winter in one
final effort to get twenty-five thousand dollars more if
I could, with which we might paint the MOON, or put on
some ground felspathic granite dust, in a sort of paste,
which in its hot flight through the air might fuse into
a white enamel. All of us who saw the MOON were so
delighted with its success that we felt sure "the
friends" would not pause about this trifle. The rest of
them were to stay there to watch the winter, and to be
ready to begin work the moment the snow had gone.
Thanksgiving afternoon, how well I remember it,--that
good fellow, Whitman, came and asked Polly and me to
visit his family in their new quarters. They had moved
for the winter into cells B and E, so lofty, spacious,
and warm, and so much drier than their log cabins.
Mrs. Whitman, I remember, was very cheerful and
jolly; made my children eat another piece of pie, and
stuffed their pockets with raisins; and then with great
ceremony and fun we christened room B by the name of
Bertha, and E, Ellen, which was Mrs. Whitman's name. And
the next day we bade them all good-by, little thinking
what we said, and with endless promises of what we would
send and bring them in the spring.
Here are the scraps of letters from Orcutt, dear
fellow, which tell what more there is left to tell:--
"December 10th.
". . . After you left we were a little blue, and hung
round loose for a day or two. Sunday we missed you
especially, but Asaph made a good substitute, and Mrs.
Leonard led the singing. The next day we moved the
Leonards into L and M, which we christened Leonard and
Mary (Mary is for your wife). They are pretty dark, but
very dry. Leonard has swung hammocks, as Whitman did.
"Asaph came to me Tuesday and said he thought they
had better turn to and put a shed over the unfinished
circle, and so take occasion of warm days for dry work
there. This we have done, and the occupation is good for
us. . . ."
"December 25th.
I have had no chance to write for a fortnight. The
truth is, that the weather has been so open that I let
Asaph go down to No. 7 and to Wilder's, and engage five-
and-twenty of the best of the men, who, we knew, were
hanging round there. We have all been at work most of
the time since, with very good success. H is now wholly
covered in, and the centring is out. The men have named
it Haliburton. I is well advanced. J is as you left it.
The work has been good for us all, morally."
"February 11th.
". . . We got your mail unexpectedly by some
lumbermen on their way to the 9th Range. One of them has
cut himself, and takes this down.
"You will be amazed to hear that I and K are both
done. We have had splendid weather, and have worked half
the time. We had a great jollification when K was closed
in,--called it Kilpatrick, for Seth's old general. I
wish you could just run up and see us. You must be
quick, if you want to put in any of the last licks.
"March 12th.
"DEAR FRED,--I have but an instant. By all means
make your preparations to be here by the end of the month
or early in next month. The weather has been faultless,
you know. Asaph got in a dozen more men, and we have
brought up the surface farther than you could dream. The
ways are well forward, and I cannot see why, if the
freshet hold off a little, we should not launch her by
the 10th or 12th. I do not think it worth while to wait
for paint or enamel. Telegraph Brannan that he must be
here. You will be amused by our quarters. We, who were
the last outsiders, move into A and D to-morrow, for a
few weeks. It is much warmer there.
"Ever yours,
G. O."
I telegraphed Brannan, and in reply he came with his
wife and his children to Boston. I told him that he
could not possibly get up there, as the roads then were;
but Ben said he would go to Skowhegan, and take his
chance there. He would, of course, communicate with me
as soon as he got there. Accordingly I got a note from
him at Skowhegan, saying he had hired a sleigh to go over
to No. 9; and in four days more I got this letter:--
March 27th.
DEAR FRED,--I am most glad I came, and I beg you to
bring your wife as soon as possible. The river is very
full, the wheels, to which Leonard has added two
auxiliaries, are moving as if they could not hold out
long, the ways are all but ready, and we think we must
not wait. Start with all hands as soon as you can. I
had no difficulty in coming over from Skowhegan. We did
it in two days.
This note I sent at once to Haliburton; and we got
all the children ready for a winter journey, as the
spectacle of the launch of the MOON was one to be
remembered their life long. But it was clearly
impossible to attempt, at that season, to get the
subscribers together. Just as we started, this despatch
from Skowhegan was brought me,--the last word I got from
them:--
Stop for nothing. There is a jam below us in the
stream, and we fear back-water.
ORCUTT.
Of course we could not go faster than we could. We
missed no connection. At Skowhegan, Haliburton and I
took a cutter, leaving the ladies and children to follow
at once in larger sleighs. We drove all night, changed
horses at Prospect, and kept on all the next day. At No.
7 we had to wait over night. We started early in the
morning, and came down the Spoonwood Hill at four in the
afternoon, in full sight of our little village.
It was quiet as the grave! Not a smoke, not a man,
not an adze-blow, nor the tick of a trowel. Only the
gigantic fly-wheels were whirling as I saw them last.
There was the lower Coliseum-like centring, somewhat
as I first saw it.
But where was the Brick Dome of the MOON?
"Good Heavens! has it fallen on them all?" cried I.
Haliburton lashed the beast till he fairly ran down
that steep hill. We turned a little point, and came out
in front of the centring. There was no MOON there! An
empty amphitheatre, with not a brick nor a splinter
within!
We were speechless. We left the cutter. We ran up
the stairways to the terrace. We ran by the familiar
paths into the centring. We came out upon the ways,
which we had never seen before. These told the story too
well! The ground and crushed surface of the timbers,
scorched by the rapidity with which the MOON had slid
down, told that they had done the duty for which they
were built.
It was too clear that in some wild rush of the waters
the ground had yielded a trifle. We could not find that
the foundations had sunk more than six inches, but that
was enough. In that fatal six inches' decline of the
centring, the MOON had been launched upon the ways just
as George had intended that it should be when he was
ready. But it had slid, not rolled, down upon these
angry fly-wheels, and in an instant, with all our
friends, it had been hurled into the sky!
"They have gone up!" said Haliburton; "She has gone
up!" said I;--both in one breath. And with a common
instinct, we looked up into the blue.
But of course she was not there.
--------
Not a shred of letter or any other tidings could we
find in any of the shanties. It was indeed six weeks
since George and Fanny and their children had moved into
Annie and Diamond,--two unoccupied cells of the MOON,--so
much more comfortable had the cells proved than the
cabins, for winter life. Returning to No. 7, we found
there many of the laborers, who were astonished at what
we told them. They had been paid off on the 30th, and
told to come up again on the 15th of April, to see the
launch. One of them, a man named Rob Shea, told me that
George kept his cousin Peter to help him move back into
his house the beginning of the next week.
And that was the last I knew of any of them for
more than a year. At first I expected, each hour, to
hear that they had fallen somewhere. But time passed by,
and of such a fall, where man knows the world's surface,
there was no tale. I answered, as best I could, the
letters of their friends; by saying I did not know where
they were, and had not heard from them. My real thought
was, that if this fatal MOON did indeed pass our
atmosphere, all in it must have been burned to death in
the transit. But this I whispered to no one save to
Polly and Annie and Haliburton. In this terrible doubt
I remained, till I noticed one day in the "Astronomical
Record" the memorandum, which you perhaps remember, of
the observation, by Dr. Zitta, of a new asteroid, with an
enormous movement in declination.
III
FULFILMENT
Looking back upon it now, it seems inconceivable that
we said as little to each other as we did, of this
horrible catastrophe. That night we did not pretend to
sleep. We sat in one of the deserted cabins, now
talking fast, now sitting and brooding, without
speaking, perhaps, for hours. Riding back the next day
to meet the women and children, we still brooded, or we
discussed this "if," that "if," and yet others. But
after we had once opened it all to them,--and when we
had once answered the children's horribly naive
questions as best we could,--we very seldom spoke to
each other of it again. It was too hateful, all of it,
to talk about. I went round to Tom Coram's office one
day, and told him all I knew. He saw it was dreadful
to me, and, with his eyes full, just squeezed my hand,
and never said one word more. We lay awake nights,
pondering and wondering, but hardly ever did I to
Haliburton or he to me explain our respective notions
as they came and went. I believe my general impression
was that of which I have spoken, that they were all
burned to death on the instant, as the little aerolite
fused in its passage through our atmosphere. I believe
Haliburton's thought more often was that they were
conscious of what had happened, and gasped out their
lives in one or two breathless minutes,--so horribly
long!--as they shot outside of our atmosphere. But it
was all too terrible for words. And that which we could
not but think upon, in those dreadful waking nights, we
scarcely whispered even to our wives.
Of course I looked and he looked for the miserable
thing. But we looked in vain. I returned to the few
subscribers the money which I had scraped together
towards whitewashing the moon,--"shrouding its guilty
face with innocent white" indeed! But we agreed to spend
the wretched trifle of the other money, left in the
treasury after paying the last bills, for the largest
Alvan Clark telescope that we could buy; and we were
fortunate in obtaining cheap a second-hand one which
came to the hammer when the property of the Shubael
Academy was sold by the mortgagees. But we had, of
course, scarce a hint whatever as to where the miserable
object was to be found. All we could do was to carry the
glass to No. 9, to train it there on the meridian of No.
9, and take turns every night in watching the field, in
the hope that this child of sorrow might drift across it
in its path of ruin. But, though everything else seemed
to drift by, from east to west, nothing came from south
to north, as we expected. For a whole month of spring,
another of autumn, another of summer, and another of
winter, did Haliburton and his wife and Polly and I glue
our eyes to that eye-glass, from the twilight of evening
to the twilight of morning, and the dead hulk never hove
in sight. Wherever else it was, it seemed not to be on
that meridian, which was where it ought to be and was
made to be! Had ever any dead mass of matter wrought
such ruin to its makers, and, of its own stupid inertia,
so falsified all the prophecies of its birth! Oh, the
total depravity of things!
It was more than a year after the fatal night,--if it
all happened in the night, as I suppose,--that, as I
dreamily read through the "Astronomical Record" in the
new reading-room of the College Library at Cambridge, I
lighted on this scrap:--
"Professor Karl Zitta of Breslau writes to the
Astronomische Nachrichten to claim the discovery
of a new asteroid observed by him on the night of
March 31st.
App. A. R. App. Decl.
Bresl. M. T. h. m. s. h. m. s. @ ' " Size.
March 31 12 53 51.9 15 39 52.32 -23 50 26.1 12.9
April 1 1 3 2.1 15 39 52.32 -23 9 1.9 12.9
He proposes for the asteroid the name of Phoebe. Dr.
Zitta states that in the short period which he had for
observing Phoebe, for an hour after midnight, her motion
in R. A. seemed slight and her motion in declination very
rapid."
After this, however, for months, nay even to this
moment, nothing more was heard of Dr. Zitta of Breslau.
But, one morning, before I was up, Haliburton came
banging at my door on D Street. The mood had taken him,
as he returned from some private theatricals at
Cambridge, to take the comfort of the new reading-room at
night, and thus express in practice his gratitude to the
overseers of the college for keeping it open through all
the twenty-four hours. Poor Haliburton, he did not sleep
well in those times! Well, as he read away on the
Astronomische Nachrichten itself, what should he find
but this in German, which he copied for me, and then, all
on foot in the rain and darkness, tramped over with, to
South Boston:--
"The most enlightened head professor Dr. Gmelin
writes to the director of the Porpol Astronomik at
St. Petersburg, to claim the discovery of an asteroid in
a very high southern latitude, of a wider inclination of
the orbit, as will be noticed, than any asteroid yet
observed.
"Planet's apparent {alpha} 21^h. 20^m. 51^s.40.
Planet's apparent {delta}-39@ 31' 11".9. Comparison star
{alpha}.
"Dr. Gmelin publishes no separate second observation,
but is confident that the declination is diminishing.
Dr. Gmelin suggests for the name of this extra-zodiacal
planet `Io,' as appropriate to its wanderings from the
accustomed ways of planetary life, and trusts that the
very distinguished Herr Peters, the godfather of so many
planets, will relinquish this name, already claimed for
the asteroid (85) observed by him, September 15, 1865."
I had run down stairs almost as I was, slippers and
dressing-gown being the only claims I had on society.
But to me, as to Haliburton, this stuff about "extra-
zodiacal wandering" blazed out upon the page, and though
there was no evidence that the "most enlightened" Gmelin
found anything the next night, yet, if his "diminishing"
meant anything, there was, with Zitta's observation,--
whoever Zitta might be,--something to start upon. We
rushed upon some old bound volumes of the Record and
spotted the "enlightened Gmelin." He was chief of a
college at Taganrog, where perhaps they had a spyglass.
This gave us the parallax of his observation. Breslau,
of course, we knew, and so we could place Zitta's,
and with these poor data I went to work to construct,
if I could, an orbit for this Io-Phoebe mass of brick and
mortar. Haliburton, not strong in spherical
trigonometry, looked out logarithms for me till
breakfast, and, as soon as it would do, went over to Mrs.
Bowdoin, to borrow her telescope, ours being left at No.
9.
Mrs. Bowdoin was kind, as she always was, and at noon
Haliburton appeared in triumph with the boxes on P.
Nolan's job-wagon. We always employ P., in memory of
dear old Phil. We got the telescope rigged, and waited
for night, only, alas! to be disappointed again. Io had
wandered somewhere else, and, with all our sweeping back
and forth on the tentative curve I had laid out, Io would
not appear. We spent that night in vain.
But we were not going to give it up so. Phoebe might
have gone round the world twice before she became Io;
might have gone three times, four, five, six,--nay, six
hundred,--who knew? Nay, who knew how far off Phoebe-
Io was or Io-Phoebe? We sent over for Annie, and
she and Polly and George and I went to work again. We
calculated in the next week sixty-seven orbits on the
supposition of so many different distances from our
surface. I laid out on a paper, which we stuck up on the
wall opposite, the formula, and then one woman and one
man attacked each set of elements, each having the
Logarithmic Tables, and so in a week's working-time the
sixty-seven orbits were completed. Seventy-seven
possible places for Io-Phoebe to be in on the
forthcoming Friday evening. Of these sixty-seven, forty-
one were observable above our horizon that night.
She was not in one of the forty-one, nor near it.
But Despair, if Giotto be correct, is the chief of
sins. So has he depicted her in the fresco of the Arena
in Padua. No sin, that, of ours! After searching all
that Friday night, we slept all Saturday (sleeping after
sweeping). We all came to the Chapel, Sunday, kept awake
there, and taught our Sunday classes special lessons on
Perseverance. On Monday we began again, and that week we
calculated sixty-seven more orbits. I am sure I do not
know why we stopped at sixty-seven. All of these were on
the supposition that the revolution of the Brick Moon, or
Io-Phoebe, was so fast that it would require either
fifteen days to complete its orbit, or sixteen days, or
seventeen days, and so on up to eighty-one days. And,
with these orbits, on the next Friday we waited for the
darkness. As we sat at tea, I asked if I should begin
observing at the smallest or at the largest orbit. And
there was a great clamor of diverse opinions. But little
Bertha said, "Begin in the middle."
"And what is the middle?" said George, chaffing the
little girl.
But she was not to be dismayed. She had been in and
out all the week, and knew that the first orbit was of
fifteen days and the last of eighty-one; and, with true
Lincoln School precision, she said, "The mean of the
smallest orbit and the largest orbit is forty-eight
days."
"Amen!" said I, as we all laughed. "On forty-eight
days we will begin."
Alice ran to the sheets, turned up that number, and
read, "R. A. 27@ 11'. South declination 34@ 49'."
"Convenient place," said George; "good omen, Bertha,
my darling! If we find her there, Alice and Bertha and
Clara shall all have new dolls."
It was the first word of pleasantry that had been
spoken about the horrid thing since Spoonwood Hill!
Night came at last. We trained the glass on the
fated spot. I bade Polly take the eye-glass. She did
so, shook her head uneasily, screwed the tube northward
herself a moment, and then screamed, "It is there! it is
there,--a clear disk,--gibbous shape,--and very sharp on
the upper edge. Look! look! as big again as Jupiter!"
Polly was right! The Brick Moon was found!
Now we had found it, we never lost it. Zitta and
Gmelin, I suppose, had had foggy nights and stormy
weather often. But we had some one at the eye-glass all
that night, and before morning had very respectable
elements, good measurements of angular distance when we
got one, from another star in the field of our lowest
power. For we could see her even with a good French
opera-glass I had, and with a night-glass which I used to
carry on the South Atlantic Station. It certainly
was an extraordinary illustration of Orcutt's engineering
ability, that, flying off as she did, without leave or
license, she should have gained so nearly the orbit of
our original plan,--nine thousand miles from the earth's
centre, five thousand from the surface. He had always
stuck to the hope of this, and on his very last tests of
the Flies he had said they, were almost up to it. But
for this accuracy of his, I can hardly suppose we should
have found her to this hour, since she had failed, by
what cause I then did not know, to take her intended
place on the meridian of No. 9. At five thousand miles
the MOON appeared as large as the largest satellite of
Jupiter appears. And Polly was right in that first
observation, when she said she got a good disk with that
admirable glass of Mrs. Bowdoin.
The orbit was not on the meridian of No. 9, nor did
it remain on any meridian. But it was very nearly South
and North,--an enormous motion in declination with a very
slight RETROGRADE motion in Right Ascension. At five
thousand miles the MOON showed as large as a circle two
miles and a third in diameter would have shown on old
Thornbush, as we always called her older sister. We
longed for an eclipse of Thornbush by B. M., but no such
lucky chance is on the cards in any place accessible to
us for many years. Of course, with a MOON so near us the
terrestrial parallax is enormous.
Now, you know, dear reader, that the gigantic
reflector of Lord Rosse, and the exquisite fifteen-
inch refractors of the modern observatories, eliminate
from the chaotic rubbish-heap of the surface of old
Thornbush much smaller objects than such a circle as I
have named. If you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon
Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh in
your memory. As John Farrar taught us when all this
began,--and as I have said already,--if there were a
State House in Thornbush two hundred feet long, the first
Herschel would have seen it. His magnifying power was
6450; that would have brought this deaf and dumb State
House within some forty miles. Go up on Mt. Washington
and see white sails eighty miles away, beyond Portland,
with your naked eye, and you will find how well he would
have seen that State House with his reflector. Lord
Rosse's statement is, that with his reflector he can see
objects on old Thornbush two hundred and fifty-two feet
long. If he can do that he can see on our B. M. objects
which are five feet long; and, of course, we were beside
ourselves to get control of some instrument which had
some approach to such power. Haliburton was for at once
building a reflector at No. 9; and perhaps he will do it
yet, for Haliburton has been successful in his paper-
making and lumbering. But I went to work more promptly.
I remembered, not an apothecary, but an observatory,
which had been dormant, as we say of volcanoes, now for
ten or a dozen years,--no matter why! The trustees
had quarrelled with the director, or the funds had given
out, or the director had been shot at the head of his
division,--one of those accidents had happened which will
happen even in observatories which have fifteen-inch
equatorials; and so the equatorial here had been left as
useless as a cannon whose metal has been strained or its
reputation stained in an experiment. The observatory at
Tamworth, dedicated with such enthusiasm,--"another
light-house in the skies," had been, so long as I have
said, worthless to the world. To Tamworth, therefore, I
travelled. In the neighborhood of the observatory I took
lodgings. To the church where worshipped the family
which lived in the observatory buildings I repaired;
after two Sundays I established acquaintance with John
Donald, the head of this family. On the evening of the
third, I made acquaintance with his wife in a visit to
them. Before three Sundays more he had recommended me to
the surviving trustees as his successor as janitor to the
buildings. He himself had accepted promotion, and gone,
with his household, to keep a store for Haliburton in
North Ovid. I sent for Polly and the children, to
establish them in the janitor's rooms; and, after writing
to her, with trembling eye I waited for the Brick Moon to
pass over the field of the fifteen-inch equatorial.
Night came. I was "sole alone"! B. M. came, more
than filled the field of vision, of course! but for that
I was ready. Heavens! how changed. Red no longer,
but green as a meadow in the spring. Still I could see--
black on the green--the large twenty-foot circles which
I remembered so well, which broke the concave of the
dome; and, on the upper edge--were these palm-trees?
They were. No, they were hemlocks, by their shape, and
among them were moving to and fro---------- flies? Of
course, I cannot see flies! But something is moving,--
coming, going. One, two, three, ten; there are more than
thirty in all! They are men and women and their
children!
Could it be possible? It was possible! Orcutt and
Brannan and the rest of them had survived that giddy
flight through the ether, and were going and coming on
the surface of their own little world, bound to it by its
own attraction and living by its own laws!
As I watched, I saw one of them leap from that
surface. He passed wholly out of my field of vision, but
in a minute, more or less, returned. Why not! Of course
the attraction of his world must be very small, while he
retained the same power of muscle he had when he was
here. They must be horribly crowded, I thought. No.
They had three acres of surface, and there were but
thirty-seven of them. Not so much crowded as people are
in Roxbury, not nearly so much as in Boston; and,
besides, these people are living underground, and have
the whole of their surface for their exercise.
I watched their every movement as they approached the
edge and as they left it. Often they passed beyond it,
so that I could see them no more. Often they sheltered
themselves from that tropical sun beneath the trees.
Think of living on a world where from the vertical heat
of the hottest noon of the equator to the twilight of the
poles is a walk of only fifty paces! What atmosphere
they had, to temper and diffuse those rays, I could not
then conjecture.
I knew that at half-past ten they would pass into the
inevitable eclipse which struck them every night at this
period of their orbit, and must, I thought, be a luxury
to them, as recalling old memories of night when they
were on this world. As they approached the line of
shadow, some fifteen minutes before it was due, I counted
on the edge thirty-seven specks arranged evidently in
order; and, at one moment, as by one signal, all thirty-
seven jumped into the air,--high jumps. Again they did
it, and again. Then a low jump; then a high one. I
caught the idea in a moment. They were telegraphing to
our world, in the hope of an observer. Long leaps and
short leaps,--the long and short of Morse's Telegraph
Alphabet,--were communicating ideas. My paper and pencil
had been of course before me. I jotted down the
despatch, whose language I knew perfectly:--
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
By "I understand" they meant the responsive signal
given, in all telegraphy, by an operator who has received
and understood a message.
As soon as this exercise had been three times
repeated, they proceeded in a solid body--much the most
apparent object I had had until now--to Circle No. 3, and
then evidently descended into the MOON.
The eclipse soon began, but I knew the MOON'S path
now, and followed the dusky, coppery spot without
difficulty. At 1.33 it emerged, and in a very few
moments I saw the solid column pass from Circle No. 3
again, deploy on the edge again, and repeat three times
the signal:--
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
It was clear that Orcutt had known that the edge of
his little world would be most easy of observation, and
that he had guessed that the moments of obscuration and
of emersion were the moments when observers would be most
careful. After this signal they broke up again, and I
could not follow them. With daylight I sent off a
despatch to Haliburton, and, grateful and happy in
comparison, sank into the first sleep not haunted by
horrid dreams, which I had known for years.
Haliburton knew that George Orcutt had taken with him
a good Dolland's refractor, which he had bought in
London, of a two-inch glass. He knew that this would
give Orcutt a very considerable power, if he could only
adjust it accurately enough to find No. 9 in the 3d
Range. Orcutt had chosen well in selecting the "Saw-Mill
Flat," a large meadow, easily distinguished by the
peculiar shape of the mill-pond which we had made. Eager
though Haliburton was to join me, he loyally took moneys,
caught the first train to Skowhegan, and, travelling
thence, in thirty-six hours more was again descending
Spoonwood Hill, for the first time since our futile
observations. The snow lay white upon the Flat. With
Rob. Shea's help, he rapidly unrolled a piece of black
cambric twenty yards long, and pinned it to the crust
upon the snow; another by its side, and another. Much
cambric had he left. They had carried down with them
enough for the funerals of two Presidents. Haliburton
showed the symbols for "I understand," but he could not
resist also displaying ..-- .--, which are the dots and
lines to represent O. K., which, he says, is the
shortest message of comfort. And not having exhausted
the space on the Flat, he and Robert, before night closed
in, made a gigantic O. K., fifteen yards from top to
bottom, and in marks that were fifteen feet through.
I had telegraphed my great news to Haliburton on
Monday night. Tuesday night he was at Skowhegan.
Thursday night he was at No. 9. Friday he and Rob.
stretched their cambric. Meanwhile, every day I slept.
Every night I was glued to the eye-piece. Fifteen
minutes before the eclipse every night this weird dance
of leaps two hundred feet high, followed by hops of
twenty feet high, mingled always in the steady order I
have described, spelt out the ghastly message: "Show `I
understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
And every morning, as the eclipse ended, I saw the
column creep along to the horizon, and again, as the duty
of opening day, spell out the same:--
"Show `I understand' on the Saw-Mill Flat."
They had done this twice in every twenty-four hours
for nearly two years. For three nights steadily I read
these signals twice each night; only these, and nothing
more.
But Friday night all was changed. After "Attention,"
that dreadful "Show" did not come, but this cheerful
signal:--
"Hurrah. All well. Air, food, and friends! what
more can man require? Hurrah."
How like George! How like Ben Brannan! How like
George's wife! How like them all! And they were all
well! Yet poor _I_ could not answer. Nay, I could
only guess what Haliburton had done. But I have never,
I believe, been so grateful since I was born.
After a pause, the united line of leapers resumed
their jumps and hops. Long and short spelled out:--
"Your O. K. is twice as large as it need be."
Of the meaning of this, lonely _I_ had, of course,
no idea.
"I have a power of seven hundred," continued George.
How did he get that? He has never told us. But this I
can see, that all our analogies deceive us,--of views of
the sea from Mt. Washington, or of the Boston State House
from Wachusett. For in these views we look through forty
or eighty miles of dense terrestrial atmosphere. But
Orcutt was looking nearly vertically through an
atmosphere which was, most of it, rare indeed, and pure
indeed, compared with its lowest stratum.
In the record-book of my observations these
despatches are entered as 12 and 13. Of course it was
impossible for me to reply. All I could do was to
telegraph these in the morning to Skowhegan, sending them
to the care of the Moores, that they might forward them.
But the next night showed that this had not been
necessary.
Friday night George and the others went on for a
quarter of an hour. Then they would rest, saying, "two,"
"three," or whatever their next signal time would be.
Before morning I had these despatches:--
14. "Write to all hands that we are doing well.
Langdon's baby is named Io, and Leonard's is named
Phoebe."
How queer that was! What a coincidence! And they
had some humor there.
15 was: "Our atmosphere stuck to us. It weighs
three tenths of an inch--our weight."
16. "Our rain-fall is regular as the clock. We have
made a cistern of Kilpatrick."
This meant the spherical chamber of that name.
17. "Write to Darwin that he is all right. We began
with lichens and have come as far as palms and hemlocks."
These were the first night's messages. I had
scarcely covered the eye-glasses and adjusted the
equatorial for the day, when the bell announced the
carriage in which Polly and the children came from the
station to relieve me in my solitary service as janitor.
I had the joy of showing her the good news. This night's
work seemed to fill our cup. For all the day before,
when I was awake, I had been haunted by the fear of
famine for them. True, I knew that they had stored away
in chambers H, I, and J the pork and flour which we had
sent up for the workmen through the summer, and the corn
and oats for the horses. But this could not last
forever.
Now, however, that it proved that in a tropical
climate they were forming their own soil, developing
their own palms, and eventually even their bread-fruit
and bananas, planting their own oats and maize, and
developing rice, wheat, and all other cereals, harvesting
these six, eight, or ten times--for aught I could see--in
one of our years,--why, then, there was no danger of
famine for them. If, as I thought, they carried up with
them heavy drifts of ice and snow in the two chambers
which were not covered in when they started, why, they
had waters in their firmament quite sufficient for all
purposes of thirst and of ablution. And what I had seen
of their exercise showed that they were in strength
sufficient for the proper development of their little
world.
Polly had the messages by heart before an hour was
over, and the little girls, of course, knew them sooner
than she.
Haliburton, meanwhile, had brought out the Shubael
refractor (Alvan Clark), and by night of Friday was in
readiness to see what he could see. Shubael of course
gave him no such luxury of detail as did my fifteen-inch
equatorial. But still he had no difficulty in making out
groves of hemlock, and the circular openings. And
although he could not make out my thirty-seven flies,
still when 10.15 came he saw distinctly the black square
crossing from hole Mary to the edge, and beginning its
Dervish dances. They were on his edge more precisely
than on mine. For Orcutt knew nothing of Tamworth, and
had thought his best chance was to display for No. 9. So
was it that, at the same moment with me, Haliburton also
was spelling out Orcutt & Co.'s joyous "Hurrah!"
"Thtephen," lisps Celia, "promith that you will look
at yon moon [old Thombush] at the inthtant I do." So was
it with me and Haliburton.
He was of course informed long before the Moores'
messenger came, that, in Orcutt's judgment, twenty feet
of length were sufficient for his signals. Orcutt's
atmosphere, of course, must be exquisitely clear.
So, on Saturday, Rob. and Haliburton pulled up all
their cambric and arranged it on the Flat again, in
letters of twenty feet, in this legend:--
RAH. AL WEL.
Haliburton said he could not waste flat or cambric on
spelling.
He had had all night since half-past ten to consider
what next was most important for them to know; and a very
difficult question it was, you will observe. They had
been gone nearly two years, and much had happened. Which
thing was, on the whole, the most interesting and
important? He had said we were all well. What then?
Did you never find yourself in the same difficulty?
When your husband had come home from sea, and kissed you
and the children, and wondered at their size, did you
never sit silent and have to think what you should say?
Were you never fairly relieved when little Phil said,
blustering, "I got three eggs to-day." The truth is,
that silence is very satisfactory intercourse, if we only
know all is well. When De Sauty got his original cable
going, he had not much to tell after all; only that
consols were a quarter per cent higher than they were
the day before. "Send me news," lisped he--poor lonely
myth!--from Bull's Bay to Valentia,--"send me news; they
are mad for news." But how if there be no news worth
sending? What do I read in my cable despatch to-day?
Only that the Harvard crew pulled at Putney yesterday,
which I knew before I opened the paper, and that there
had been a riot in Spain, which I also knew. Here is a
letter just brought me by the mail from Moreau, Tazewell
County, Iowa. It is written by Follansbee, in a good
cheerful hand. How glad I am to hear from Follansbee!
Yes; but do I care one straw whether Follansbee planted
spring wheat or winter wheat? Not I. All I care for is
Follansbee's way of telling it. All these are the
remarks by which Haliburton explains the character of the
messages he sent in reply to George Orcutt's autographs,
which were so thoroughly satisfactory.
Should he say Mr. Borie had left the Navy Department
and Mr. Robeson come in? Should he say the Lords had
backed down on the Disendowment Bill? Should he say the
telegraph had been landed at Duxbury? Should he say
Ingham had removed to Tamworth? What did they care for
this? What does anybody ever care for facts? Should he
say that the State Constable was enforcing the liquor law
on whiskey, but was winking at lager? All this would
take him a week, in the most severe condensation,--
and for what good? as Haliburton asked. Yet these were
the things that the newspapers told, and they told
nothing else. There was a nice little poem of Jean
Ingelow's in a Transcript Haliburton had with him. He
said he was really tempted to spell that out. It was
better worth it than all the rest of the newspaper stuff,
and would be remembered a thousand years after that was
forgotten. "What they wanted," says Haliburton, "was
sentiment. That is all that survives and is eternal."
So he and Rob. laid out their cambric thus:--
RAW. AL WEL. SO GLAD.
Haliburton hesitated whether he would not add, "Power
5000," to indicate the full power I was using at
Tamworth. But he determined not to, and, I think,
wisely. The convenience was so great, of receiving the
signal at the spot where it could be answered, that for
the present he thought it best that they should go on
as they did. That night, however, to his dismay,
clouds gathered and a grim snow-storm began. He got no
observations; and the next day it stormed so heavily
that he could not lay his signals out. For me at
Tamworth, I had a heavy storm all day, but at midnight
it was clear; and as soon as the regular eclipse was
past, George began with what we saw was an account of
the great anaclysm which sent them there. You observe
that Orcutt had far greater power of communicating with
us than we had with him. He knew this. And it was
fortunate he had. For he had, on his little world,
much more of interest to tell than we had on our large
one.
18. "It stormed hard. We were all asleep, and knew
nothing till morning; the hammocks turned so slowly."
Here was another revelation and relief. I had always
supposed that if they knew anything before they were
roasted to death, they had had one wild moment of horror.
Instead of this, the gentle slide of the MOON had not
wakened them, the flight upward had been as easy as it
was rapid, the change from one centre of gravity to
another had of course been slow,--and they had actually
slept through the whole. After the dancers had rested
once, Orcutt continued:--
19. "We cleared E. A. in two seconds, I think. Our
outer surface fused and cracked somewhat. So much the
better for us."
They moved so fast that the heat of their friction
through the air could not propagate itself through the
whole brick surface. Indeed, there could have been but
little friction after the first five or ten miles. By E.
A. he means earth's atmosphere.
His 20th despatch is: "I have no observations of
ascent. But by theory our positive ascent ceased in two
minutes five seconds, when we fell into our proper orbit,
which, as I calculate, is 5,109 miles from your mean
surface."
In all this, observe, George dropped no word of
regret through these five thousand miles.
His 21st despatch is: "Our rotation on our axis is
made once in seven hours, our axis being exactly vertical
to the plane of our own orbit. But in each of your daily
rotations we get sunned all round."
Of course, they never had lost their identity with
us, so far as our rotation and revolution went: our
inertia was theirs; all the fatal, Fly-Wheels had given
them was an additional motion in space of their own.
This was the last despatch before daylight of Sunday
morning; and the terrible snow-storm of March, sweeping
our hemisphere, cut off our communication with them, both
at Tamworth and No. 9, for several days.
But here was ample food for reflection. Our friends
were in a world of their own, all thirty-seven of them
well, and it seemed they had two more little girls added
to their number since they started. They had plenty of
vegetables to eat, with prospect of new tropical
varieties according to Dr. Darwin. Rob. Shea was sure
that they carried up hens; he said he knew Mrs. Whitman
had several Middlesexes and Mrs. Leonard two or three
Black Spanish fowls, which had been given her by some
friends in Foxcroft. Even if they had not yet had time
enough for these to develop into Alderneys and venison,
they would not be without animal food.
When at last it cleared off, Haliburton had to
telegraph: "Repeat from 21"; and this took all his
cambric, though he had doubled his stock. Orcutt replied
the next night:
22. "I can see your storms. We have none. When we
want to change climate we can walk in less than a minute
from midsummer to the depth of winter. But in the inside
we have eleven different temperatures, which do not
change."
On the whole there is a certain convenience in such
an arrangement. With No. 23 he went back to his story:--
It took us many days, one or two of our months, to
adjust ourselves to our new condition. Our greatest
grief is that we are not on the meridian. Do you know
why?"
Loyal George! He was willing to exile himself and
his race from the most of mankind, if only the great
purpose of his life could be fulfilled. But his great
regret was that it was not fulfilled. He was not on the
meridian. I did not know why. But Haliburton, with
infinite labor, spelt out on the Flat,
CYC. PROJECT. AD FIN.,
by which he meant, "See article Projectiles in the
Cyclopaedia at the end"; and there indeed is the only
explanation to be given. When you fire a shot, why
does it ever go to the right or left of the plane in
which it is projected? Dr. Hutton ascribes it to a
whirling motion acquired by the bullet by friction
with the gun. Euler thinks it due chiefly to the
irregularity of the shape of the ball. In our case the
B. M. was regular enough. But on one side, being
wholly unprepared for flight, she was heavily stored
with pork and corn, while her other chambers had in
some of them heavy drifts of snow, and some only a few
men and women and hens.
Before Orcutt saw Haliburton's advice, he had sent us
24 and 25.
24. "We have established a Sandemanian church, and
Brannan preaches. My son Edward and Alice Whitman are to
be married this evening."
This despatch unfortunately did not reach Haliburton,
though I got it. So, all the happy pair received for our
wedding-present was the advice to look in the Cyclopaedia
at article Projectiles near the end.
25 was:--
"We shall act `As You Like It' after the wedding.
Dead-head tickets for all of the old set who will come."
Actually, in one week's reunion we had come to
joking.
The next night we got 26:
"Alice says she will not read the Cyclopaedia in the
honeymoon, but is much obliged to Mr. Haliburton for his
advice."
"How did she ever know it was I?" wrote the matter-
of-fact Haliburton to me.
27. "Alice wants to know if Mr. Haliburton will not
send here for some rags; says we have plenty, with little
need for clothes."
And then despatches began to be more serious again.
Brannan and Orcutt had failed in the great scheme for the
longitude, to which they had sacrificed their lives,--if,
indeed, it were a sacrifice to retire with those they
love best to a world of their own. But none the less did
they devote themselves, with the rare power of
observation they had, to the benefit of our world. Thus,
in 28:
"Your North Pole is an open ocean. It was black,
which we think means water, from August 1st to September
29th. Your South Pole is on an island bigger than New
Holland. Your Antarctic Continent is a great cluster of
islands."
29. "Your Nyanzas are only two of a large group of
African lakes. The green of Africa, where there is no
water, is wonderful at our distance."
30. "We have not the last numbers of `Foul Play.'
Tell us, in a word or two, how they got home. We can see
what we suppose their island was."
31. "We should like to know who proved Right in `He
Knew He was Right.'"
This was a good night's work, as they were then
telegraphing. As soon as it cleared, Haliburton
displayed,--
BEST HOPES. CARRIER DUCKS.
This was Haliburton's masterpiece. He had no room
for more, however, and was obliged to reserve for the
next day his answer to No. 31, which was simply,
SHE.
A real equinoctial now parted us for nearly a week,
and at the end of that time they were so low in our
northern horizon that we could not make out their
signals; we and they were obliged to wait till they had
passed through two-thirds of their month before we could
communicate again. I used the time in speeding to No. 9.
We got a few carpenters together, and arranged on the
Flat two long movable black platforms, which ran in and
out on railroad-wheels on tracks, from under green
platforms; so that we could display one or both as we
chose, and then withdraw them. With this apparatus we
could give forty-five signals in a minute, corresponding
to the line and dot of the telegraph; and thus could
compass some twenty letters in that time, and make out
perhaps two hundred and fifty words in an hour.
Haliburton thought that, with some improvements, he could
send one of Mr. Buchanan's messages up in thirty-seven
working-nights.
IV
INDEPENDENCE
I own to a certain mortification in confessing that
after this interregnum, forced upon us by so long a
period of non-intercourse, we never resumed precisely
the same constancy of communication as that which I
have tried to describe at the beginning. The apology
for this benumbment, if I may so call it, will suggest
itself to the thoughtful reader.
It is indeed astonishing to think that we so readily
accept a position when we once understand it. You buy a
new house. You are fool enough to take out a staircase
that you may put in a bathing-room. This will be done in
a fortnight, everybody tells you, and then everybody
begins. Plumbers, masons, carpenters, plasterers,
skimmers, bell-hangers, speaking-tube men, men who make
furnace-pipe, paper-hangers, men who scrape off the old
paper, and other men who take off the old paint with
alkali, gas men, city-water men, and painters begin. To
them are joined a considerable number of furnace-men's
assistants, stovepipe-men's assistants, mason's
assistants, and hodmen who assist the assistants of the
masons, the furnace-men, and the pipe-men. For a day or
two these all take possession of the house and reduce it
to chaos. In the language of Scripture, they enter
in and dwell there. Compare, for the details, Matt. xii.
45. Then you revisit it at the end of the fortnight, and
find it in chaos, with the woman whom you employed to
wash the attics the only person on the scene. You ask
her where the paper-hanger is; and she says he can do
nothing because the plaster is not dry. You ask why the
plaster is not dry, and are told it is because the
furnace-man has not come. You send for him, and he says
he did come, but the stove-pipe man was away. You send
for him, and he says he lost a day in coming, but that
the mason had not cut the right hole in the chimney. You
go and find the mason, and he says they are all fools,
and that there is nothing in the house that need take two
days to finish.
Then you curse, not the day in which you were born,
but the day in which bath-rooms were invented. You say,
truly, that your father and mother, from whom you inherit
every moral and physical faculty you prize, never had a
bath-room till they were past sixty, yet they thrived,
and their children. You sneak through back streets,
fearful lest your friends shall ask you when your house
will be finished. You are sunk in wretchedness, unable
even to read your proofs accurately, far less able to
attend the primary meetings of the party with which you
vote, or to discharge any of the duties of a good
citizen. Life is wholly embittered to you.
Yet, six weeks after, you sit before a soft-coal fire
in your new house, with the feeling that you have always
lived there. You are not even grateful that you are
there. You have forgotten the plumber's name; and if you
met in the street that nice carpenter that drove things
through, you would just nod to him, and would not think
of kissing him or embracing him.
Thus completely have you accepted the situation.
Let me confess that the same experience is that with
which, at this writing, I regard the BRICK MOON. It is
there in ether. I cannot keep it. I cannot get it down.
I cannot well go to it,--though possibly that might be
done, as you will see. They are all very happy there,--
much happier, as far as I can see, than if they lived in
sixth floors in Paris, in lodgings in London, or even in
tenement-houses in Phoenix Place, Boston. There are
disadvantages attached to their position; but there are
also advantages. And what most of all tends to our
accepting the situation is, that there is "nothing that
we can do about it," as Q. says, but to keep up our
correspondence with them, and to express our sympathies.
For them, their responsibilities are reduced in
somewhat the same proportion as the gravitation which
binds them down,--I had almost said to earth,--which
binds them down to brick, I mean. This decrease of
responsibility must make them as light-hearted as the
loss of gravitation makes them light-bodied.
On which point I ask for a moment's attention. And
as these sheets leave my hand, an illustration turns up
which well serves me. It is the 23d of October.
Yesterday morning all wakeful women in New England were
sure there was some one under the bed. This is a certain
sign of an earthquake. And when we read the evening
newspapers, we were made sure there had been an
earthquake. What blessings the newspapers are,--and how
much information they give us! Well, they said it was
not very severe, here, but perhaps it was more severe
elsewhere; hopes really arising in the editorial mind
that in some Caraccas or Lisbon all churches and the
cathedral might have fallen. I did not hope for that.
But I did have just the faintest feeling that IF--if
if--it should prove that the world had blown up into six
or eight pieces, and they had gone off into separate
orbits, life would be vastly easier for all of us, on
whichever bit we happened to be.
That thing has happened, they say, once. Whenever
the big planet between Mars and Jupiter blew up, and
divided himself into one hundred and two or more
asteroids, the people on each one only knew there had
been an earthquake when and after they read their morning
journals. And then, all that they knew at first was that
telegraphic communication had ceased beyond--say two
hundred miles. Gradually people and despatches came in,
who said that they had parted company with some of the
other islands and continents. But, as I say, on each
piece the people not only weighed much less, but were
much lighter-hearted, had less responsibility.
Now will you imagine the enthusiasm here, at Miss
Hale's school, when it should be announced that
geography, in future, would be confined to the study of
the region east of the Mississippi and west of the
Atlantic,--the earth having parted at the seams so named.
No more study of Italian, German, French, or Sclavonic,--
the people speaking those languages being now in
different orbits or other worlds. Imagine also the
superior ease of the office-work of the A. B. C. F. M.
and kindred societies, the duties of instruction and
civilizing, of evangelizing in general, being reduced
within so much narrower bounds. For you and me also, who
cannot decide what Mr. Gladstone ought to do with the
land tenure in Ireland, and who distress ourselves so
much about it in conversation, what a satisfaction to
know that Great Britain is flung off with one rate of
movement, Ireland with another, and the Isle of Man with
another, into space, with no more chance of meeting again
than there is that you shall have the same hand at whist
to-night that you had last night! Even Victoria would
sleep easier, and I am sure Mr. Gladstone would.
Thus, I say, were Orcutt's and Brannan's
responsibilities so diminished, that after the first I
began to see that their contracted position had its
decided compensating ameliorations.
In these views, I need not say, the women of our
little circle never shared. After we got the new
telegraph arrangement in good running-order, I observed
that Polly and Annie Haliburton had many private
conversations, and the secret came out one morning, when,
rising early in the cabins, we men found they had
deserted us; and then, going in search of them, found
them running the signal boards in and out as rapidly as
they could, to tell Mrs. Brannan and the bride, Alice
Orcutt, that flounces were worn an inch and a half
deeper, and that people trimmed now with harmonizing
colors and not with contrasts. I did not say that I
believed they wore fig-leaves in B. M., but that was my
private impression.
After all, it was hard to laugh at the girls, as
these ladies will be called, should they live to be as
old as Helen was when she charmed the Trojan senate (that
was ninety-three, if Heyne be right in his calculations).
It was hard to laugh at them because this was simple
benevolence, and the same benevolence led to a much more
practical suggestion when Polly came to me and told me
she had been putting up some baby things for little Io
and Phoebe, and some playthings for the older children,
and she thought we might "send up a bundle."
Of course we could. There were the Flies still
moving! or we might go ourselves!
[And here the reader must indulge me in a long
parenthesis. I beg him to bear me witness that I never
made one before. This parenthesis is on the tense that
I am obliged to use in sending to the press these
minutes. The reader observes that the last transactions
mentioned happen in April and May, 1871. Those to be
narrated are the sequence of those already told.
Speaking of them in 1870 with the coarse tenses of the
English language is very difficult. One needs, for
accuracy, a sure future, a second future, a paulo-post
future, and a paulum-ante future, none of which does this
language have. Failing this, one would be glad of an a-
orist,--tense without time,--if the grammarians will not
swoon at hearing such language. But the English tongue
hath not that, either. Doth the learned reader remember
that the Hebrew--language of history and prophecy--hath
only a past and a future tense, but hath no present? Yet
that language succeeded tolerably in expressing the
present griefs or joys of David and of Solomon. Bear
with me, then, O critic! if even in 1870 I use the so-
called past tenses in narrating what remaineth of this
history up to the summer of 1872. End of the
parenthesis.]
On careful consideration, however, no one volunteers
to go. To go, if you observe, would require that a man
envelop himself thickly in asbestos or some similar non-
conducting substance, leap boldly on the rapid Flies, and
so be shot through the earth's atmosphere in two seconds
and a fraction, carrying with him all the time in a non-
conducting receiver the condensed air he needed, and
landing quietly on B. M. by a precalculated orbit. At
the bottom of our hearts I think we were all afraid.
Some of us confessed to fear; others said, and said
truly, that the population of the Moon was already dense,
and that it did not seem reasonable or worth while, on
any account, to make it denser. Nor has any movement
been renewed for going. But the plan of the bundle of
"things" seemed more feasible, as the things would not
require oxygen. The only precaution seemed to be that
which was necessary for protecting the parcel against
combustion as it shot through the earth's atmosphere. We
had not asbestos enough. It was at first proposed to
pack them all in one of Professor Horsford's safes. But
when I telegraphed this plan to Orcutt, he demurred.
Their atmosphere was but shallow, and with a little too
much force the corner of the safe might knock a very bad
hole in the surface of his world. He said if we would
send up first a collection of things of no great weight,
but of considerable bulk, he would risk that, but he
would rather have no compact metals.
I satisfied myself, therefore, with a plan which I
still think good. Making the parcel up in heavy old
woollen carpets, and cording it with worsted cords, we
would case it in a carpet-bag larger than itself and fill
in the interstice with dry sand, as our best non-
conductor; cording this tightly again, we would renew the
same casing with more sand; and so continually offer
surfaces of sand and woollen, till we had five separate
layers between the parcel and the air. Our calculation
was that a perceptible time would be necessary for
the burning and disintegrating of each sand-bag. If each
one, on the average, would stand two-fifths of a second,
the inner parcel would get through the earth's atmosphere
unconsumed. If, on the other hand, they lasted a little
longer, the bag, as it fell on B. M., would not be unduly
heavy. Of course we could take their night for the
experiment, so that we might be sure they should all be
in bed and out of the way.
We had very funny and very merry times in selecting
things important enough and at the same time bulky and
light enough to be safe. Alice and Bertha at once
insisted that there must be room for the children's
playthings. They wanted to send the most approved of the
old ones, and to add some new presents. There was a
woolly sheep in particular, and a watering-pot that Rose
had given Fanny, about which there was some sentiment;
boxes of dominos, packs of cards, magnetic fishes, bows
and arrows, checker-boards and croquet sets. Polly and
Annie were more considerate. Down to Coleman and Company
they sent an order for pins, needles, hooks and eyes,
buttons, tapes, and I know not what essentials. India-
rubber shoes for the children Mrs. Haliburton insisted on
sending. Haliburton himself bought open-eye-shut-eye
dolls, though I felt that wax had been, since Icarus's
days, the worst article in such an adventure. For the
babies he had india-rubber rings: he had tin cows and
carved wooden lions for the bigger children, drawing-
tools for those older yet, and a box of crochet tools for
the ladies. For my part I piled in literature,--a set of
my own works, the Legislative Reports of the State of
Maine, Jean Ingelow, as I said or intimated, and both
volumes of the "Earthly Paradise." All these were packed
in sand, bagged and corded,--bagged, sanded and corded
again,--yet again and again,--five times. Then the whole
awaited Orcutt's orders and our calculations.
At last the moment came. We had, at Orcutt's order,
reduced the revolutions of the Flies to 7230, which was,
as nearly as he knew, the speed on the fatal night. We
had soaked the bag for near twelve hours, and, at the
moment agreed upon, rolled it on the Flies and saw it
shot into the air. It was so small that it went out of
sight too soon for us to see it take fire.
Of course we watched eagerly for signal time. They
were all in bed on B. M. when we let fly. But the
despatch was a sad disappointment.
107. "Nothing has come through but two croquet balls
and a china horse. But we shall send the boys hunting in
the bushes, and we may find more."
108. "Two Harpers and an Atlantic, badly singed. But
we can read all but the parts which were most dry."
109. "We see many small articles revolving round us
which may perhaps fall in."
They never did fall in, however. The truth was that
all the bags had burned through. The sand, I suppose,
went to its place, wherever that was. And all the other
things in our bundle became little asteroids or aerolites
in orbits of their own, except a well-disposed score or
two, which persevered far enough to get within the
attraction of Brick Moon and to take to revolving there,
not having hit quite square, as the croquet balls did.
They had five volumes of the "Congressional Globe"
whirling round like bats within a hundred feet of their
heads. Another body, which I am afraid was "The Ingham
Papers," flew a little higher, not quite so heavy. Then
there was an absurd procession of the woolly sheep, a
china cow, a pair of india-rubbers, a lobster Haliburton
had chosen to send, a wooden lion, the wax doll, a
Salter's balance, the "New York Observer," the bow and
arrows, a Nuremberg nanny-goat, Rose's watering-pot, and
the magnetic fishes, which gravely circled round and
round them slowly and made the petty zodiac of their
petty world.
We have never sent another parcel since, but we
probably shall at Christmas, gauging the Flies perhaps to
one revolution more. The truth is, that although we have
never stated to each other in words our difference of
opinion or feeling, there is a difference of habit of
thought in our little circle as to the position which the
B. M. holds. Somewhat similar is the difference of
habit of thought in which different statesmen of
England regard their colonies.
Is B. M. a part of our world, or is it not? Should
its inhabitants be encouraged to maintain their
connections with us, or is it better for them to "accept
the situation" and gradually wean themselves from us and
from our affairs? It would be idle to determine this
question in the abstract: it is perhaps idle to decide
any question of casuistry in the abstract. But, in
practice, there are constantly arising questions which
really require some decision of this abstract problem for
their solution.
For instance, when that terrible breach occurred in
the Sandemanian church, which parted it into the Old
School and New School parties, Haliburton thought it very
important that Brannan and Orcutt and the church in B. M.
under Brannan's ministry should give in their adhesion to
our side. Their church would count one more in our
registry, and the weight of its influence would not be
lost. He therefore spent eight or nine days in
telegraphing, from the early proofs, a copy of the
address of the Chautauqua Synod to Brannan, and asked
Brannan if he were not willing to have his name signed to
it when it was printed. And the only thing which
Haliburton takes sorely in the whole experience of the
Brick Moon, from the beginning, is that neither Orcutt
nor Brannan has ever sent one word of acknowledgment of
the despatch. Once, when Haliburton was very low-
spirited, I heard him even say that he believed they had
never read a word of it, and that he thought he and Rob.
Shea had had their labor for their pains in running the
signals out and in.
Then he felt quite sure that they would have to
establish civil government there. So he made up an
excellent collection of books,--De Lolme on the British
Constitution; Montesquieu on Laws; Story, Kent, John
Adams, and all the authorities here; with ten copies of
his own address delivered before the Young Men's Mutual
Improvement Society of Podunk, on the "Abnormal Truths of
Social Order." He telegraphed to know what night he
should send them, and Orcutt replied:--
129. "Go to thunder with your old law-books. We have
not had a primary meeting nor a justice court since we
have been here, and, D. V., we never will have."
Haliburton says this is as bad as the state of things
in Kansas, when, because Frank Pierce would not give them
any judges or laws to their mind, they lived a year or so
without any. Orcutt added in his next despatch:--
130. "Have not you any new novels? Send up Scribe
and the `Arabian Nights' and `Robinson Crusoe' and the
`Three Guardsmen,' and Mrs. Whitney's books. We have
Thackeray and Miss Austen."
When he read this, Haliburton felt as if they
were not only light-footed but light-headed. And he
consulted me quite seriously as to telegraphing to them
"Pycroft's Course of Reading." I coaxed him out of that,
and he satisfied himself with a serious expostulation
with George as to the way in which their young folks
would grow up. George replied by telegraphing Brannan's
last sermon, I Thessalonians iv. II. The sermon had
four heads, must have occupied an hour and a half in
delivery, and took five nights to telegraph. I had
another engagement, so that Haliburton had to sit it all
out with his eye to Shubael, and he has never entered on
that line of discussion again. It was as well, perhaps,
that he got enough of it.
The women have never had any misunderstandings. When
we had received two or three hundred despatches from B.
M., Annie Haliburton came to me and said, in that pretty
way of hers, that she thought they had a right to their
turn again. She said this lore about the Albert Nyanza
and the North Pole was all very well, but, for her part,
she wanted to know how they lived, what they did, and
what they talked about, whether they took summer
journeys, and how and what was the form of society where
thirty-seven people lived in such close quarters. This
about "the form of society" was merely wool pulled over
my eyes. So she said she thought her husband and I had
better go off to the Biennial Convention at Assampink, as
she knew we wanted to do, and she and Bridget and
Polly and Cordelia would watch for the signals, and would
make the replies. She thought they would get on better
if we were out of the way.
So we went to the convention, as she called it, which
was really not properly a convention, but the Forty-fifth
Biennial General Synod, and we left the girls to their
own sweet way.
Shall I confess that they kept no record of their own
signals, and did not remember very accurately what they
were? "I was not going to keep a string of `says I's'
and `says she's,'" said Polly, boldly. "it shall not be
written on my tomb that I have left more annals for
people to file or study or bind or dust or catalogue."
But they told us that they had begun by asking the
"bricks" if they remembered what Maria Theresa said to
her ladies-in-waiting.[1] Quicker than any signal had
ever been answered, George Orcutt's party replied from
the Moon, "We hear, and we obey." Then the women-kind
had it all to themselves. The brick-women explained at
once to our girls that they had sent their men round to
the other side to cut ice, and that they were manning the
telescope, and running the signals for themselves, and
that they could have a nice talk without any bother about
the law-books or the magnetic pole. As I say, I do
not know what questions Polly and Annie put; but--to give
them their due--they had put on paper a coherent record
of the results arrived at in the answers; though, what
were the numbers of the despatches, or in what order they
came, I do not know; for the session of the synod kept us
at Assampink for two or three weeks
[1] Maria Theresa's husband, Francis, Duke of
Tuscany, was hanging about loose one day, and the
Empress, who had got a little tired, said to the maids of
honor, "Girls, whenever you marry, take care and choose
a husband who has something to do outside of the house."
Mrs. Brannan was the spokesman. "We tried a good
many experiments about day and night. It was very funny
at first not to know when it would be light and when
dark, for really the names day and night do not express
a great deal for us. Of course the pendulum clocks all
went wrong till the men got them overhauled, and I think
watches and clocks both will soon go out of fashion. But
we have settled down on much the old hours, getting up,
without reference to daylight, by our great gong, at your
eight o'clock. But when the eclipse season comes, we
vary from that for signalling.
"We still make separate families, and Alice's is the
seventh. We tried hotel life and we liked it, for there
has never been the first quarrel here. You can't quarrel
here, where you are never sick, never tired, and need not
be ever hungry. But we were satisfied that it was nicer
for the children and for all round to live separately and
come together at parties, to church, at signal time, and
so on. We had something to say then, something to teach,
and something to learn.
"Since the carices developed so nicely into flax, we
have had one great comfort, which we had lost before, in
being able to make and use paper. We have had great fun,
and we think the children have made great improvement in
writing novels for the Union. The Union is the old Union
for Christian work that we had in dear old No. 9. We
have two serial novels going on, one called `Diana of
Carrotook,' and the other called `Ups and Downs'; the
first by Levi Ross, and the other by my Blanche. They
are really very good, and I wish we could send them to
you. But they would not be worth despatching.
"We get up at eight; dress, and fix up at home; a
sniff of air, as people choose; breakfast; and then we
meet for prayers outside. Where we meet depends on the
temperature; for we can choose any temperature we want,
from boiling water down, which is convenient. After
prayers an hour's talk, lounging, walking, and so on; no
flirting, but a favorite time with the young folks.
"Then comes work. Three hours' head-work is the
maximum in that line. Of women's work, as in all worlds,
there are twenty-four in one of your days, but for my
part I like it. Farmers and carpenters have their own
laws, as the light serves and the seasons. Dinner is
seven hours after breakfast began; always an hour long,
as breakfast was. Then every human being sleeps for an
hour. Big gong again, and we ride, walk, swim,
telegraph, or what not, as the case may be. We have
no horses yet, but the Shanghaes are coming up into very
good dodos and ostriches, quite big enough for a trot for
the children.
"Only two persons of a family take tea at home. The
rest always go out to tea without invitation. At 8 P. M.
big gong again, and we meet in `Grace,' which is the
prettiest hall, church, concert-room, that you ever saw.
We have singing, lectures, theatre, dancing, talk, or
what the mistress of the night determines, till the
curfew sounds at ten, and then we all go home. Evening
prayers are in the separate households, and every one is
in bed by midnight. The only law on the statute-book is
that every one shall sleep nine hours out of every
twenty-four.
"Only one thing interrupts this general order. Three
taps on the gong means `telegraph,' and then, I tell you,
we are all on hand.
"You cannot think how quickly the days and years go
by!"
Of course, however, as I said, this could not last.
We could not subdue our world and be spending all our
time in telegraphing our dear B. M. Could it be
possible--perhaps it was possible--that they there had
something else to think of and to do besides attending to
our affairs? Certainly their indifference to Grant's
fourth Proclamation, and to Mr. Fish's celebrated
protocol in the Tahiti business, looked that way. Could
it be that that little witch of a Belle Brannan really
cared more for their performance of "Midsummer
Night's Dream," or her father's birthday, than she cared
for that pleasant little account I telegraphed up to all
the children, of the way we went to muster when we were
boys together? Ah well! I ought not to have supposed
that all worlds were like this old world. Indeed, I
often say this is the queerest world I ever knew.
Perhaps theirs is not so queer, and it is I who am the
oddity.
Of course it could not last. We just arranged
correspondence days, when we would send to them, and they
to us. I was meanwhile turned out from my place at
Tamworth Observatory. Not but I did my work well, and
Polly hers. The observer's room was a miracle of
neatness. The children were kept in the basement.
Visitors were received with great courtesy; and all the
fees were sent to the treasurer; he got three dollars and
eleven cents one summer,--that was the year General Grant
came there; and that was the largest amount that they
ever received from any source but begging. I was not
unfaithful to my trust. Nor was it for such infidelity
that I was removed. No! But it was discovered that I
was a Sandemanian; a Glassite, as in derision I was
called. The annual meeting of the trustees came round.
There was a large Mechanics' Fair in Tamworth at the
time, and an Agricultural Convention. There was no
horse-race at the convention, but there were two
competitive examinations in which running horses
competed with each other, and trotting horses
competed with each other, and five thousand dollars was
given to the best runner and the best trotter. These
causes drew all the trustees together. The Rev. Cephas
Philpotts presided. His doctrines with regard to free
agency were considered much more sound than mine. He
took the chair,--in that pretty observatory parlor, which
Polly had made so bright with smilax and ivy. Of course
I took no chair; I waited, as a janitor should, at the
door. Then a brief address. Dr. Philpotts trusted that
the observatory might always be administered in the
interests of science, of true science; of that science
which rightly distinguishes between unlicensed liberty
and true freedom; between the unrestrained volition and
the freedom of the will. He became eloquent, he became
noisy. He sat down. Then three other men spoke, on
similar subjects. Then the executive committee which had
appointed me was dismissed with thanks. Then a new
executive committee was chosen, with Dr. Philpotts at the
head. The next day I was discharged. And the next week
the Philpotts family moved into the observatory, and
their second girl now takes care of the instruments.
I returned to the cure of souls and to healing the
hurt of my people. On observation days somebody runs
down to No. 9, and by means of Shubael communicates with
B. M. We love them, and they love us all the same.
Nor do we grieve for them as we did. Coming home
from Pigeon Cove in October with those nice Wadsworth
people, we fell to talking as to the why and wherefore of
the summer life we had led. How was it that it was so
charming? And why were we a little loath to come back to
more comfortable surroundings? "I hate the school," said
George Wadsworth. "I hate the making calls," said his
mother. "I hate the office hour," said her poor husband;
"if there were only a dozen I would not mind, but
seventeen hundred thousand in sixty minutes is too many."
So that led to asking how many of us there had been at
Pigeon Cove. The children counted up all the six
families,--the Haliburtons, the Wadsworths, the
Pontefracts, the Midges, the Hayeses, and the Inghams,
and the two good-natured girls, thirty-seven in all,--and
the two babies born this summer. "Really," said Mrs.
Wadsworth, "I have not spoken to a human being besides
these since June; and what is more, Mrs. Ingham, I have
not wanted to. We have really lived in a little world of
our own."
"World of our own!" Polly fairly jumped from her
seat, to Mrs. Wadsworth's wonder. So we had--lived in a
world of our own. Polly reads no newspaper since the
"Sandemanian" was merged. She has a letter or two tumble
in sometimes, but not many; and the truth was that she
had been more secluded from General Grant and Mr.
Gladstone and the Khedive, and the rest of the
important people, than had Brannan or Ross or any of
them!
And it had been the happiest summer she had ever
known.
Can it be possible that all human sympathies can
thrive, and all human powers be exercised, and all human
joys increase, if we live with all our might with the
thirty or forty people next to us, telegraphing kindly to
all other people, to be sure? Can it be possible that
our passion for large cities, and large parties, and
large theatres, and large churches, develops no faith nor
hope nor love which would not find aliment and exercise
in a little "world of our own"?
CRUSOE IN NEW YORK
PART I
I was born in the year 1842, in the city of New York,
of a good family, though not of that country, my father
being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first in
England. He got a good estate by merchandise, and
afterward lived at New York. But first he had married
my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very
good family in her country--and from them I was named.
My father died before I can remember--at least, I
believe so. For, although I sometimes figure to myself
a grave, elderly man, thickset and wearing a broad-
brimmed hat, holding me between his knees and advising me
seriously, I cannot say really whether this were my
father or no; or, rather, whether this is really some one
I remember or no. For my mother, with whom I have lived
alone much of my life, as the reader will see, has talked
to me of my father so much, and has described him to me
so faithfully, that I cannot tell but it is her
description of him that I recollect so easily. And
so, as I say, I cannot tell whether I remember him or no.
He never lost his German notions, and perhaps they
gained in England some new force as to the way in which
boys should be bred. At least, for myself, I know that
he left to my mother strict charge that I should be bound
'prentice to a carpenter as soon as I was turned of
fourteen. I have often heard her say that this was the
last thing he spoke to her of when he was dying; and with
the tears in her eyes, she promised him it should be so.
And though it cost her a world of trouble--so changed
were times and customs--to find an old-fashioned master
who would take me for an apprentice, she was as good as
her word.
I should like to tell the story of my apprenticeship,
if I supposed the reader cared as much about it as I do;
but I must rather come to that part of my life which is
remarkable, than hold to that which is more like the life
of many other boys. My father's property was lost or was
wasted, I know not how, so that my poor mother had but a
hard time of it; and when I was just turned of twenty-one
and was free of my apprenticeship, she had but little to
live upon but what I could bring home, and what she could
earn by her needle. This was no grief to me, for I was
fond of my trade, and I had learned it well. My old
master was fond of me, and would trust me with work of a
good deal of responsibility. I neither drank nor
smoked, nor was I over-fond of the amusements which took
up a good deal of the time of my fellow-workmen. I was
most pleased when, on pay-day, I could carry home to my
mother ten, fifteen, or even twenty dollars--could throw
it into her lap, and kiss her and make her kiss me.
"Here is the oil for the lamp, my darling," I would
say; or, "Here is the grease for the wheels"; or, "Now
you must give me white sugar twice a day." She was a
good manager, and she made both ends meet very well.
I had no thought of leaving my master when my
apprenticeship was over, nor had he any thought of
letting me go. We understood each other well, he liked
me and I liked him. He knew that he had in me one man
who was not afraid of work, as he would say, and who
would not shirk it. And so, indeed, he would often put
me in charge of parties of workmen who were much older
than I was.
So it was that it happened, perhaps some months after
I had become a journeyman, that he told me to take a gang
of men, whom he named, and to go quite up-town in the
city, to put a close wooden fence around a vacant lot of
land there. One of his regular employers had come to
him, to say that this lot of land was to be enclosed, and
the work was to be done by him. He had sent round the
lumber, and he told me that I would find it on the
ground. He gave me, in writing, the general
directions by which the fence was ordered, and told me to
use my best judgment in carrying them out. "Only take
care," said he, "that you do it as well as if I was there
myself. Do not be in a hurry, and be sure your work
stands."
I was well pleased to be left thus to my own
judgment. I had no fear of failing to do the job well,
or of displeasing my old master or his employer. If I
had any doubts, they were about the men who were to work
under my lead, whom I did not rate at all equally; and,
if I could have had my pick, I should have thrown out
some of the more sulky and lazy of them, and should have
chosen from the other hands. But youngsters must not be
choosers when they are on their first commissions.
I had my party well at work, with some laborers whom
we had hired to dig our post-holes, when a white-haired
old man, with gold spectacles and a broad-brimmed hat,
alighted from a cab upon the sidewalk, watched the men
for a minute at their work, and then accosted me. I knew
him perfectly, though of course he did not remember me.
He was, in fact, my employer in this very job, for he was
old Mark Henry, a Quaker gentleman of Philadelphia, who
was guardian of the infant heirs who owned this block of
land which we were enclosing. My master did all the
carpenter's work in the New York houses which Mark Henry
or any of his wards owned, and I had often seen him
at the shop in consultation. I turned to him and
explained to him the plans for the work. We had already
some of the joists cut, which were to make the posts to
our fence. The old man measured them with his cane, and
said he thought they would not be long enough.
I explained to him that the fence was to be eight
feet high, and that these were quite long enough for
that.
"I know," he said, "I know, my young friend, that my
order was for a fence eight feet high, but I do not think
that will do."
With some surprise I showed him, by a "ten-foot
pole," how high the fence would come.
"Yes, my young friend, I see, I see. But I tell
thee, every beggar's brat in the ward will be over thy
fence before it has been built a week, and there will be
I know not what devices of Satan carried on in the
inside. All the junk from the North River will be hidden
there, and I shall be in luck if some stolen trunk, nay,
some dead man's body, is not stowed away there. Ah, my
young friend, if thee is ever unhappy enough to own a
vacant lot in the city, thee will know much that thee
does not know now of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
Thee will know of trials of the spirit and of the temper
that thee has never yet experienced."
I said I thought this was probable, but I thought
inwardly that I would gladly be tried that way. The old
man went on:--
"I said eight feet to friend Silas, but thee may say
to him that I have thought better of it, and that I have
ordered thee to make the fence ten feet high. Thee may
say that I am now going to Philadelphia, but that I will
write to him my order when I arrive. Meanwhile thee will
go on with the fence as I bid thee."
And so the old man entered his cab again and rode
away.
I amused myself at his notion, for I knew very well
that the street-boys and other loafers would storm his
ten-foot wall as readily as they would have stormed the
Malakoff or the Redan, had they supposed there was
anything to gain by doing it. I had, of course, to
condemn some of my posts, which were already cut, or to
work them in to other parts of the fence. My order for
spruce boards was to be enlarged by twenty per cent by
the old man's direction, and this, as it happened, led to
a new arrangement of my piles of lumber on my vacant
land.
And all this it was which set me to thinking that
night, as I looked on the work, that I might attempt
another enterprise, which, as it proved, lasted me for
years, and which I am now going to describe.
I had worked diligently with the men to set up some
fifty feet of the fence where it parted us from an alley-
way, for I wanted a chance to dry some of the boards,
which had just been hauled from a raft in the North
River. The truckmen had delivered them helter-
skelter, and they lay, still soaking, above each other on
our vacant lot.
We turned all our force on this first piece of fence,
and had so much of it done that, by calling off the men
just before sundown, I was able to set up all the wet
boards, each with one end resting on the fence and the
other on the ground, so that they took the air on both
sides, and would dry more quickly. Of course this left
a long, dark tunnel underneath.
As the other hands gathered up their tools and made
ready to go, a fellow named McLoughlin, who had gone out
with one of the three months' regiments not long before,
said:--
"I would not be sorry to sleep there. I have slept
in many a worse place than that in Dixie"; and on that he
went away, leaving me to make some measurements which I
needed the next day. But what he said rested in my mind,
and, as it happened, directed the next twelve years of my
life.
Why should not I live here? How often my mother had
said that if she had only a house of her own she should
be perfectly happy! Why should not we have a house of
our own here, just as comfortable as if we had gone a
thousand miles out on the prairie to build it, and a
great deal nearer to the book-stores, to the good music,
to her old friends, and to my good wages? We had talked
a thousand times of moving together to Kansas, where I
was to build a little hut for her, and we were to be
very happy together. But why not do as the minister had
bidden us only the last Sunday--seize on to-day, and take
what Providence offered now?
I must acknowledge that the thought of paying any
ground rent to old Mr. Henry did not occur to me then--
no, nor for years afterward. On the other hand, all that
I thought of was this,--that here was as good a chance as
there was in Kansas to live without rent, and that rent
had been, was still, and was likely to be my bugbear,
unless I hit on some such scheme as this for abating it.
The plan, to be short, filled my mind. There was
nothing in the way of house-building which I shrank from
now, for, in learning my trade, I had won my Aladdin's
lamp, and I could build my mother a palace, if she had
needed one. Pleased with my fancy, before it was dark I
had explored my principality from every corner, and
learned all its capabilities.
The lot was an oblong, nearly three times as long as
it was wide. On the west side, which was one of the
short sides, it faced what I will call the Ninety-ninth
Avenue, and on the south side, what I will call Fernando
Street, though really it was one of the cross-streets
with numbers. Running to the east it came to a narrow
passage-way which had been reserved for the accommodation
of the rear of a church which fronted on the street just
north of us. Our back line was also the back line of the
yards of the houses on the same street, but on our
northeast corner the church ran back as far as the back
line of both houses and yards, and its high brick wall--
nearly fifty feet high--took the place there of the ten-
foot brick wall, surmounted by bottle-glass, which made
their rear defence.
The moment my mind was turned to the matter, I saw
that in the rear of the church there was a corner which
lay warmly and pleasantly to the southern and western
sun, which was still out of eye-shot from the street,
pleasantly removed from the avenue passing, and only
liable to inspection, indeed, from the dwelling-houses on
the opposite side of our street,--houses which, at this
moment, were not quite finished, though they would be
occupied soon.
If, therefore, I could hit on some way of screening
my mother's castle from them--for a castle I called it
from the first moment, though it was to be much more like
a cottage--I need fear no observation from other
quarters; for the avenue was broad, and on the other side
from us there was a range of low, rambling buildings--an
engine-house and a long liquor-saloon were two--which had
but one story. Most of them bad been built, I suppose,
only to earn something for the land while it was growing
valuable. The church had no windows in the rear, and
that protected my castle--which was, indeed, still in the
air--from all observation on that side.
I told my mother nothing of all this when I went
home. But I did tell her that I had some calculations to
make for my work, and that was enough. She went on,
sweet soul! without speaking a word, with her knitting
and her sewing at her end of the table, only getting up
to throw a cloth over her parrot's cage when he was
noisy; and I sat at my end of the table, at work over my
figures, as silent as if I had been on a desert island.
Before bedtime I had quite satisfied myself with the
plan of a very pretty little house which would come quite
within our space, our means, and our shelter. There was
a little passage which ran quite across from east to
west. On the church side of this there was my mother's
kitchen, which was to be what I fondly marked the
"common-room." This was quite long from east to west,
and not more than half as long the other way. But on the
east side, where I could have no windows, I cut off, on
its whole width, a deep closet; and this proved a very
fortunate thing afterward, as you shall see. On the west
side I made one large square window, and there was, of
course, a door into the passage.
On the south side of the passage I made three rooms,
each narrow and long. The two outside rooms I meant to
light from the top. Whether I would put any skylight
into the room between them, I was not quite so certain;
I did not expect visitors in my new house, so I did not
mark it a "guest-room " in the plan. But I thought
of it as a store-room, and as such, indeed, for many
years we used it; though at last I found it more
convenient to cut a sky-light in the roof there also.
But I am getting before my story.
Before I had gone to bed that night I had made a
careful estimate as to how much lumber I should need, of
different kinds, for my little house; for I had, of
course, no right to use my master's lumber nor Mr.
Henry's; nor had I any thought of doing so. I made out
an estimate that would be quite full, for shingles, for
clapboards, white pine for my floors and finish,--for I
meant to make a good job of it if I made any,--and for
laths for the inside work. I made another list of the
locks, hinges, window furniture and other hardware I
should need; but for this I cared less, as I need not
order them so soon. I could scarcely refrain from
showing my plan to my mother, so snug and comfortable did
it look already; but I had already determined that the
"city house" should be a present to her on her next
birthday, and that till then I would keep it a secret
from her, as from all the world; so I refrained.
The next morning I told my master what the old Quaker
had directed about the fence, and I took his order for
the new lumber we should need to raise the height as was
proposed. At the same time I told him that we were all
annoyed at the need of carrying our tools back and forth,
and because we could only take the nails for one
day's use; and that, if he were willing, I had a mind to
risk an old chest I had with the nails in it and a few
tools, which I thought I could so hide that the wharf-
rats and other loafers should not discover it. He told
me to do as I pleased, that he would risk the nails if I
would risk my tools; and so, by borrowing what we call a
hand-cart for a few days, I was able to take up my own
little things to the lot without his asking any other
questions, or without exciting the curiosity of
McLoughlin or any other of the men. Of course, he would
have sent up in the shop-wagon anything we needed; but it
was far out of the way, and nobody wanted to drive the
team back at night if we could do without. And so, as
night came on, I left the men at their work, and having
loaded my hand-cart with a small chest I had, I took that
into the alley-way of which I told you before, carried my
box of tools into the corner between the church and our
fence, under the boards which we had set up that day, and
covered it heavily, with McLoughlin's help, with joists
and boards, so that no light work would remove them, if,
indeed, any wanderer of the night suspected that the box
was there. I took the hand-cart out into the alley-way
and chained it, first by the wheel and then by the
handle, in two staples which I drove there. I had
another purpose in this, as you shall see; but most of
all, I wanted to test both the police and the
knavishness of the neighborhood by seeing if the
hand-cart were there in the morning.
To my great joy it was, and to my greater joy it
remained there unmolested all the rest of the week in
which we worked there. For my master, who never came
near us himself, increased our force for us on the third
day, so that at the end of the week, or Saturday night,
the job was nearly done, and well done, too.
On the third day I had taken the precaution to throw
out in the inside of our enclosure a sort of open fence,
on which I could put the wet boards to dry, which at
first I had placed on our side fence. I told McLoughlin,
what was true enough, that the south sun was better for
them than the sun from the west. So I ran out what I may
call a screen thirty-five feet from the church, and
parallel with it, on which I set up these boards to dry,
and to my great joy I saw that they would wholly protect
the roof of my little house from any observation from the
houses the other side of the way while the workmen were
at work, or even after they were inhabited.
There was not one of the workmen with me who had
forethought enough or care for our master's interest to
ask whose boards those were which we left there, or why
we left them there. Indeed, they knew the next Monday
that I went up with the Swede, to bring back such lumber
was we did not use, and none of them knew or cared how
much we left there.
For me, I was only eager to get to work, and that day
seemed very long to me. But that Monday afternoon I
asked my master if I might have the team again for my own
use for an hour or so, to move some stuff of mine and my
mother's, and he gave it to me readily.
I had then only to drive up-town to a friendly
lumberman's, where my own stuff was already lying waiting
for me to load up, with the assistance of the workmen
there, and to drive as quickly as I could into the church
alley. Here I looked around, and seeing a German who
looked as if he were only a day from Bremen, I made signs
to him that if he would help me I would give him a piece
of scrip which I showed him. The man had been long
enough in the country to know that the scrip was good for
lager. He took hold manfully with me, and carried my
timbers and boards into the enclosure through a gap I
made in the fence for the purpose. I gave him his money
and he went away. As he went to Minnesota the next day,
he never mentioned to anybody the business he had been
engaged in.
Meanwhile, I had bought my hand-cart of the man who
owned it. I left a little pile of heavy cedar logs on
the outside, spiking them to each other indeed, that they
should not be easily moved. And to them and to my posts
I padlocked the hand-cart; nor was it ever disturbed
during my reign in those regions. So I had easy method
enough when I wanted a bundle or two of laths, or a
bunch of shingles, or anything else for my castle, to
bring them up in the cool of the evening, and to
discharge my load without special observation. My pile
of logs, indeed, grew eventually into a blind or screen,
which quite protected that corner of the church alley
from the view of any passer-by in Fernando Street.
Of that whole summer, happy and bright as it all was,
I look back most often on the first morning when I got
fairly to work on my new home. I told my mother that for
some weeks I should have to start early, and that she
must not think of getting up for my breakfast. I told
her that there was extra work on a job up-town, and that
I had promised to be there at five every day while the
summer lasted. She left for me a pot of coffee, which I
promised her I would warm when the time for breakfast and
dinner came; and for the rest, she always had my dinner
ready in my tin dinner-pail. Little did she know then,
sweet saint! that I was often at Fernando Street by half-
past three in the first sweet gray of those summer days.
On that particular day, it was really scarcely light
enough for me to find the nail I drew from the plank
which I left for my entrance. When I was fairly within
and the plank was replaced, I felt that I was indeed
"monarch of all I surveyed." What did I survey? The
church wall on the north; on the south, my own screen of
spruce boards, now well dry; on the east and west, the
ten-foot fences which I had built myself; and over
that on the west, God's deep, transparent sky, in which
I could still see a planet whose name I did not know. It
was a heaven, indeed, which He had said was as much mine
as his!
The first thing, of course, was to get out my frame.
This was a work of weeks. The next thing was to raise
it. And here the first step was the only hard one, nor
was this so hard as it would seem. The highest wall of
my house was no higher than the ten-foot fence we had
already built on the church alley. The western wall, if,
indeed, a frame house has any walls, was only eight feet
high. For foundations and sills, I dug deep post-holes,
in which I set substantial cedar posts which I knew would
outlast my day, and I framed my sills into these. I made
the frame of the western wall lie out upon the ground in
one piece; and I only needed a purchase high enough, and
a block with repeating pulleys strong enough, to be able
to haul up the whole frame by my own strength,
unassisted. The high purchase I got readily enough by
making what we called a "three-leg," near twenty feet
high, just where my castle was to stand. I had no
difficulty in hauling this into its place by a solid
staple and ring, which for this purpose I drove high in
the church wall. My multiplying pulley did the rest; and
after it was done, I took out the staple and mended the
hole it had made, so the wall was as good as ever.
You see it was nobody's business what shanty or what
tower old Mark Henry or the Fordyce heirs might or might
not put on the vacant corner lot. The Fordyce heirs were
all in nurseries and kindergartens in Geneva, and indeed
would have known nothing of corner lots had they been
living in their palace in Fourteenth Street. As for Mark
Henry, that one great achievement by which he rode up to
Fernando Street was one of the rare victories of his
life, of which ninety-nine hundredths were spent in
counting-houses. Indeed, if he had gone there, all he
would have seen was his ten-foot fence, and he would have
taken pride to himself that he had it built so high.
When the day of the first raising came, and the frame
slipped into the mortises so nicely, as I had
foreordained that it should do, I was so happy that I
could scarcely keep my secret from my mother. Indeed,
that day I did run back to dinner. And when she asked me
what pleased me so, I longed to let her know; but I only
smoothed her cheeks with my hands and kissed her on both
of them, and told her it was because she was so handsome
that I was so pleased. She said she knew I had a secret
from her, and I owned that I had, but she said she would
not try to guess, but would wait for the time for me to
tell her.
And so the summer sped by. Of course I saw my
sweetheart, as I then called my mother, less and
less. For I worked till it was pitch-dark at the castle;
and after it was closed in, so I could work inside, I
often worked till ten o'clock by candlelight. I do not
know how I lived with so little sleep; I am afraid I
slept pretty late on Sundays. But the castle grew and
grew, and the common-room, which I was most eager to
finish wholly before cold weather, was in complete order
three full weeks before my mother's birthday came.
Then came the joy of furnishing it. To this I had
looked forward all the summer, and I had measured with my
eye many a bit of furniture, and priced, in an unaffected
way, many an impossible second-hand finery, so that I
knew just what I could do and what I could not do.
My mother had always wanted a Banner stove. I knew
this, and it was a great grief to me that she had none,
though she would never say anything about it.
To my great joy, I found a second-hand Banner stove,
No. 2, at a sort of old junk-shop, which was, in fact, an
old curiosity shop not three blocks away from Ninety-
ninth Avenue. Some one had sold this to them while it
was really as good as new, and yet the keeper offered it
to me at half-price.
I hung round the place a good deal, and when the man
found I really had money and meant something, he took me
into all sorts of alleys and hiding-places, where he
stored his old things away. I made fabulous
bargains there, for either the old Jew liked me
particularly, or I liked things that nobody else wanted.
In the days when his principal customers were wharf-rats,
and his principal business the traffic in old cordage and
copper, he had hung out as a sign an old tavern-sign of
a ship that had come to him. His place still went by the
name of "The Ship," though it was really, as I say, a
mere wreck, a rambling, third-rate old furniture shop of
the old-curiosity kind.
But after I had safely carried the Banner to my new
house, and was sure the funnel drew well, and that the
escape of smoke and sparks was carefully guarded, many a
visit did I make to The Ship at early morning or late in
the evening, to bring away one or another treasure which
I had discovered there.
Under the pretence of new-varnishing some of my
mother's most precious tables and her bureau, I got them
away from her also. I knocked up, with my own hatchet
and saw, a sitting-table which I meant to have permanent
in the middle of the room, which was much more convenient
than anything I could buy or carry.
And so, on the 12th of October, the eve of my
mother's birthday, the common-room was all ready for her.
In her own room I had a new carpet and a new set of
painted chamber furniture, which I had bought at the
maker's, and brought up piece by piece. It cost me
nineteen dollars and a half, for which I paid him in
cash, which indeed he wanted sadly.
So, on the morning of the 13th of October, I kissed
my mother forty times, because that day she was forty
years old. I told her that before midnight she should
know what the great surprise was, and I asked her if she
could hold out till then.
She let me poke as much fun at her as I chose,
because she said she was so glad to have me at breakfast;
and I stayed long after breakfast, for I had told my
mother that it was her birthday, and that I should be
late. And such a thing as my asking for an hour or two
was so rare that I took it quite of course when I did
ask. I came home early at night, too. Then I said,--
"Now, sweetheart, the surprise requires that you
spend the night away from home with me. Perhaps, if you
like the place, we will spend tomorrow there. So I will
take Poll in her cage, and you must put up your night-
things and take them in your hand."
She was surprised now, for such a thing as an outing
over night had never been spoken of before by either of
us.
"Why, Rob," she said, "you are taking too much pains
for your old sweetheart, and spending too much money for
her birthday. Now, don't you think that you should
really have as good a time, say, if we went visiting
together, and then came back here?"
For, you see, she never thought of herself at all; it
was only what I should like most.
"No, sweetheart dear," said I. "It is not for me,
this 13th of October, it is all for you. And to-night's
outing is not for me, it is for you; and I think you will
like it and I think Poll will like it, and I have leave
for to-morrow, and we will stay away all to-morrow."
As for Tom-puss, I said, we would leave some milk
where he could find it, and I would leave a bone or two
for him. But I whistled Rip, my dog, after me. I took
Poll's cage, my mother took her bag, and locked and left
her door, unconscious that she was never to enter it
again.
A Ninety-ninth Avenue car took us up to Fernando
Street. It was just the close of twilight when we came
there. I took my mother to Church Alley, muttered
something about some friends, which she did not
understand more than I did, and led her up the alley in
her confused surprise. Then I pushed aside my movable
board, and, while she was still surprised, led her in
after me and slid it back again.
"What is it, dear Rob? Tell me--tell me!"
"This way, sweetheart, this way!" This was all I
would say.
I drew her after me through the long passage, led her
into the common-room, which was just lighted up by the
late evening twilight coming in between the curtains of
the great square window. Then I fairly pushed her to the
great, roomy easy-chair which I had brought from The
Ship, and placed it where she could look out on the
evening glow, and I said,--
"Mother, dear, this is the surprise; this is your new
home; and, mother dear, your own boy has made it with his
own hands, all for you."
"But, Rob, I do not understand--I do not understand
at all. I am so stupid. I know I am awake. But it is
as sudden as a dream!"
So I had to begin and to explain it all,--how here
was a vacant lot that Mark Henry had the care of, and how
I had built this house for her upon it. And long before
I had explained it all, it was quite dark. And I lighted
up the pretty student's-lamp, and I made the fire in the
new Banner with my own hands.
And that night I would not let her lift a kettle, nor
so much as cut a loaf of bread. It was my feast, I said,
and I had everything ready, round to a loaf of birthday-
cake, which I had ordered at Taylor's, which I had myself
frosted and dressed, and decorated with the initials of
my mother's name.
And when the feast was over, I had the best surprise
of all. Unknown to my mother, I had begged from my Aunt
Betsy my own father's portrait, and I had hung that
opposite the window, and now I drew the curtain that hid
it, and told my sweetheart that this and the house were
her birthday presents for this year!
. . . . . . . .
And this was the beginning of a happy life, which
lasted nearly twelve years. I could make a long story of
it, for there was an adventure in everything,--in the way
we bought our milk, and the way we took in our coals.
But there is no room for me to tell all that, and it
might not interest other people as it does me. I am sure
my mother was never sorry for the bold step she took when
we moved there from our tenement. True, she saw little
or no society, but she had not seen much before. The
conditions of our life were such that she did not like to
be seen coming out of Church Alley, lest people should
ask how she got in, and excepting in the evening, I did
not care to have her go. In the evening I could go with
her. She did not make many calls, because she could not
ask people to return them. But she would go with me to
concerts, and to the church parlor meetings, and
sometimes to exhibitions; and at such places, and on
Sundays, she would meet, perhaps, one or another of the
few friends she had in New York. But we cared for them
less and less, I will own, and we cared more and more for
each other.
As soon as the first spring came, I made an immense
effort, and spaded over nearly half of the lot. It was
ninety feet wide and over two hundred and sixty long--more
than half an acre. So I knew we could have our own fresh
vegetables, even if we never went to market. My mother
was a good gardener, and she was not afraid even to
hoe the corn when I was out of the way. I dare say that
the people whom the summer left in the street above us
often saw her from their back windows, but they did not
know--as how should they?--who had the charge of this
lot, and there was no reason why they should be surprised
to see a cornfield there. We only raised green corn. I
am fond of Indian cake, but I did not care to grind my
own corn, and I could buy sweet meal without trouble. I
settled the milk question, after the first winter, by
keeping our own goats. I fenced in, with a wire fence,
the northwest corner of our little empire, and put there
a milch goat and her two kids. The kids were pretty
little things, and would come and feed from my mother's
hand. We soon weaned them, so that we could milk their
mother; and after that our flock grew and multiplied, and
we were never again troubled for such little milk as we
used.
Some old proprietor, in the old Dutch days, must have
had an orchard in these parts. There were still left two
venerable wrecks of ancient pear-trees; and although they
bore little fruit, and what they bore was good for
nothing, they still gave a compact and grateful shade.
I sodded the ground around them and made a seat beneath,
where my mother would sit with her knitting all the
afternoon. Indeed, after the sods grew firm, I planted
hoops there, and many a good game of croquet have she and
I had together there, playing so late that we longed
for the chance they have in Sybaris, where, in the
evening, they use balls of colored glass, with fireflies
shut up inside.
On the 11th of February, in the year 1867, my old
master died, to my great regret, and I truly believe to
that of his widow and her children. His death broke up
the establishment, and I, who was always more of a
cabinet-maker or joiner than carpenter or builder, opened
a little shop of my own, where I took orders for
cupboards, drawers, stairs, and other finishing work, and
where I employed two or three German journeymen, and was
thus much more master of my own time. In particular, I
had two faithful fellows, natives of my own father's town
of Bremen. While they were with me I could leave them a
whole afternoon at a time, while I took any little job
there might be, and worked at it at my own house at home.
Where my house was, except that it was far uptown, they
never asked, nor ever, so far as I know, cared. This
gave me the chance for many a pleasant afternoon with my
mother, such as we had dreamed of in the old days when we
talked of Kansas. I would work at the lathe or the bench
and she would read to me. Or we would put off the bench
till the evening, and we would both go out into the
cornfield together.
And so we lived year after year. I am afraid that we
worshipped each other too much. We were in the
heart of a crowded city, but there was that in our lives
which tended a little to habits of loneliness, and I
suppose a moralist would say that our dangers lay in that
direction.
On the other hand, I am almost ashamed to say that,
as I sat in a seat I had made for myself in old Van der
Tromp's pear-tree, I would look upon my corn and peas and
squashes and tomatoes with a satisfaction which I believe
many a nobleman in England does not enjoy.
Till the youngest of the Fordyce heirs was of age,
and that would not be till 1880, this was all my own. I
was, by right of possession and my own labors, lord of
all this region. How else did the writers on political
economy teach me that any property existed!
I surveyed it with a secret kind of pleasure. I had
not abundance of pears; what I had were poor and few.
But I had abundance of sweet corn, of tomatoes, of peas,
and of beans. The tomatoes were as wholesome as they
were plentiful, and as I sat I could see the long shelves
of them which my mother had spread in the sun to ripen,
that we might have enough of them canned when winter
should close in upon us. I knew I should have potatoes
enough of my own raising also to begin the winter with.
I should have been glad of more. But as by any good
day's work I could buy two barrels of potatoes, I did not
fret myself that my stock was but small.
Meanwhile my stock in bank grew fast. Neither my
mother nor I had much occasion to buy new clothes. We
were at no charge for house-rent, insurance, or taxes.
I remember that a Spanish gentleman, who was fond of me,
for whom I had made a cabinet with secret drawers, paid
me in moidores and pieces-of-eight, which in those times
of paper were a sight to behold.
I carried home the little bag and told my mother that
this was a birthday present for her; indeed, that she was
to put it all in her bed that night, that she might say
she had rolled in gold and silver. She played with the
pieces, and we used them to count with as we played our
game of cribbage.
"But really, Robin, boy," said she, "it is as the
dirt under our feet. I would give it all for three or
four pairs of shoes and stockings, such as we used to buy
in York, but such as these Lynn-built shoes and steam-
knit stockings have driven out of the market."
Indeed, we wanted very little in our desert home.
And so for many years we led a happy life, and we
found more in life than would have been possible had we
been all tangled up with the cords of artificial society.
I say "we," for I am sure I did, and I think my dear
mother did.
But it was in the seventh year of our residence in
the hut that of a sudden I had a terrible shock or
fright, and this I must now describe to you. It
comes in about the middle of this history, and it may end
this chapter.
It was one Sunday afternoon, when I had taken the
fancy, as I often did of Sundays, to inspect my empire.
Of course, in a certain way, I did this every time I
climbed old Van der Tromp's pear-tree, and sat in my
hawk's-nest there. But a tour of inspection was a
different thing. I walked close round the path which I
had made next the fence of the enclosure. I went in
among my goats,--even entered the goat-house and played
with my kids. I tried the boards of the fence and the
timber-stays, to be sure they all were sound. I had
paths enough between the rows of corn and potatoes to
make a journey of three miles and half a furlong, with
two rods more, if I went through the whole of them. So
at half-past four on this fatal afternoon I bade my
mother good-by, and kissed her. I told her I should not
be back for two hours, because I was going to inspect my
empire, and I set out happily.
But in less than an hour--I can see the face of the
clock now: it was twenty-two minutes after five--I flung
myself in my chair, panting for breath, and, as my mother
said, as pale as if I had seen a ghost. But I told her
it was worse than that.
I had come out from between two high rows of corn,
which wholly covered me, upon a little patch which lay
warm to the south and west, where I had some melons
a-ripening, and was just lifting one of the melons, to be
sure that the under surface did not rot, when close
behind it I saw the print of a man's foot, which was very
plain to be seen in the soft soil.
I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen
an apparition. I listened; I looked round me. I could
hear nothing but the roar of the omnibuses, nor could I
see anything. I went up and down the path, but it was
all one. I could see no other impression but that one.
I went to it again, to see if there were any more, and to
observe if it might not be my fancy. But there was no
room for that, for there was exactly the print of an
Englishman's hobnailed shoe,--the heavy heel, the prints
of the heads of the nails. There was even a piece of
patch which had been put on it, though it had never been
half-soled.
How it came there I knew not; neither could I in the
least imagine. But, as I say, like a man perfectly
confused and out of myself, I rushed home into my hut,
not feeling the ground I went upon. I fled into it like
one pursued, and, as my mother said, when I fell into my
chair, panting, I looked as if I had seen a ghost.
It was worse than that, as I said to her.
PART II
I cannot well tell you how much dismay this sight of a
footprint in the ground gave me, nor how many sleepless
nights it cost me. All the time I was trying to make
my mother think that there was no ground for anxiety,
and yet all the time I was showing her that I was very
anxious. The more I pretended that I was not troubled,
the more absent-minded, and so the more troubled, I
appeared to her. And yet, if I made no pretence, and
told her what I really feared, I should have driven her
almost wild by the story of my terrors. To have our
pretty home broken up, perhaps to be put in the
newspapers--which was a lot that, so far, we had always
escaped in our quiet and modest life--all this was more
than she or I could bear to think of.
In the midst of these cogitations, apprehensions, and
reflections, it came into my thoughts one day, as I was
working at my shop down-town with my men, that all this
might be a chimera of my own, and that the foot might be
the print of my own boot as I had left it in the soil
some days before when I was looking at my melons. This
cheered me up a little, too. I considered that I could
by no means tell for certain where I had trod and where
I had not, and that if at last this was the print of my
own boot, I had played the part of those fools who strive
to make stories of spectres, and then are themselves
frightened at them more than anybody else.
So I returned home that day in very good spirits. I
carried to my mother a copy of Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper, which had in it some pictures that I knew
would please her, and I talked with her in as light-
hearted a way as I could, to try to make her think that
I had forgotten my alarm. And afterward we played two or
three games of Egyptian solitaire at the table, and I
went to bed unusually early. But, at the first break of
day, when I fancied or hoped that she was still asleep,
I rose quickly, and half-dressing myself, crept out to
the melon-patch to examine again the imprint of the foot
and to make sure that it was mine.
Alas! it was no more mine than it was Queen
Victoria's. If it had only been cloven, I could easily
have persuaded myself whose it was, so much grief and
trouble had it cost me. When I came to measure the mark
with my own boot, I found, just as I had seen before,
that mine was not nearly so large as this mark was.
Also, this was, as I have said, the mark of a heavy
brogan--such as I never wore--and there was the mark of
a strange patch near the toe, such as I had never seen,
nor, indeed, have seen since, from that hour to this
hour. All these things renewed my terrors. I went home
like a whipped dog, wholly certain now that some one had
found the secret of our home: we might be surprised in it
before I was aware; and what course to take for my
security I knew not.
As we breakfasted, I opened my whole heart to my
mother. If she said so, I would carry all our little
property, piece by piece, back to old Thunberg, the junk-
dealer, and with her parrot and my umbrella we would go
out to Kansas, as we used to propose. We would give up
the game. Or, if she thought best, we would stand on the
defensive. I would put bottle-glass on the upper edges
of the fences all the way round.
There were four or five odd revolvers at The Ship,
and I would buy them all, with powder and buck-shot
enough for a long siege. I would teach her how to load,
and while she loaded I would fire, till they had quite
enough of attacking us in our home. Now it has all gone
by, I should be ashamed to set down in writing the
frightful contrivances I hatched for destroying these
"creatures," as I called them, or, at least, frightening
them, so as to prevent their coming thither any more.
"Robin, my boy," said my mother to me, when I gave
her a chance at last, "if they came in here to-night--
whoever `they' may be--very little is the harm that they
could do us. But if Mr. Kennedy and twenty of his police
should come in here over the bodies of--five times five
are twenty-five, twenty-five times eleven are--two
hundred and seventy-five people whom you will have killed
by that time, if I load as fast as thee tells me I
can, why, Robin, my boy, it will go hard for thee and me
when the day of the assizes comes. They will put
handcuffs on thy poor old mother and on thee, and if they
do not send thee to Jack Ketch, they will send thee to
Bloomingdale."
I could not but see that there was sense in what she
said. Anyway, it cooled me down for the time, and I
kissed her and went to my work less eager, and, indeed,
less anxious, than I had been the night before. As I
went down-town in the car, I had a chance to ask myself
what right I had to take away the lives of these poor
savages of the neighborhood merely because they entered
on my possessions. Was it their fault that they had not
been apprenticed to carpenters? Could they help
themselves in the arrangements which had left them
savages? Had any one ever given them a chance to fence
in an up-town lot? Was it, in a word, I said to myself--
was it my merit or my good luck which made me as good as
a landed proprietor, while the Fordyce heirs had their
education? Such thoughts, before I came to my shop, had
quite tamed me down, and when I arrived there I was quite
off my design, and I concluded that I had taken a wrong
measure in my resolution to attack the savages, as I had
begun to call men who might be merely harmless loafers.
It was clearly not my business to meddle with them
unless they first attacked me. This it was my
business to prevent; if I were discovered and attacked,
then I knew my duty.
With these thoughts I went into my shop that day, and
with such thoughts as these, and with my mother's good
sense in keeping me employed in pleasanter things than
hunting for traces of savages, I got into a healthier way
of thinking.
The crop of melons came in well, and many a good
feast we had from them. Once and again I was able to
carry a nice fresh melon to an old lady my mother was
fond of, who now lay sick with a tertian ague.
Then we had the best sweet corn for dinner every day
that any man had in New York. For at Delmonico's itself,
the corn the grandees had had been picked the night
before, and had started at two o'clock in the morning on
its long journey to town. But my mother picked my corn
just at the minute when she knew I was leaving my shop.
She husked it and put it in the pot, and by the time I
had come home, had slipped up the board in the fence that
served me for a door, and had washed my face and hands in
my own room, she would have dished her dinner, would have
put her fresh corn upon the table, covered with a pretty
napkin; and so, as I say, I had a feast which no nabob in
New York had. No indeed, nor any king that I know of,
unless it were the King of the Sandwich Islands, and I
doubt if he were as well served as I.
So I became more calm and less careworn, though
I will not say but sometimes I did look carefully to see
if I could find the traces of a man's foot; but I never
saw another.
Unless we went out somewhere during the evening, we
went to bed early. We rose early as well, for I never
lost the habits of my apprenticeship. And so we were
both sound asleep in bed one night when a strange thing
happened, and a sudden fright came to us, of which I must
tell quite at length, for it made, indeed, a very sudden
change in the current of our lives.
I was sound asleep, as I said, and so, I found, was
my mother also. But I must have been partly waked by
some sudden noise in the street, for I knew I was sitting
up in my bed in the darkness when I heard a woman
scream,--a terrible cry,--and while I was yet startled,
I heard her scream again, as if she were in deadly fear.
My window was shaded by a heavy green curtain, but in an
instant I had pulled it up, and by the light of the moon
I seized my trousers and put them on.
I was well awake by this time, and when I flung open
the door of my house, so as to run into my garden, I
could hear many wild voices, some in English, some in
German, some in Irish, and some with terrible cries,
which I will not pretend I could understand.
There was no cry of a woman now, but only the howling
of angry or drunken men, when they are in a rage with
some one or with each other. What startled me was
that, whereas the woman's cry came from the street south
of me, which I have called Fernando Street, the whole
crowd of men, as they howled and swore, were passing
along that street rapidly, and then stopped for an
instant, as if they were coming up what I called Church
Alley. There must have been seven or eight of them.
Now, it was by Church Alley that my mother and I
always came into our house, and so into our garden. In
the eight years, or nearly so, that I had lived there, I
had by degrees accumulated more and more rubbish near the
furthest end of the alley as a screen, so to speak, that
when my mother or I came in or out, no one in the street
might notice us. I had even made a little wing-fence out
from my own, to which my hand-cart was chained. Next
this I had piled broken brickbats and paving-stones, and
other heavy things, that would not be stolen. There was
the stump and the root of an old pear-tree there, too
heavy to steal, and too crooked and hard to clean or saw.
There was a bit of curbstone from the street, and other
such trash, which quite masked the fence and the hand-
cart.
On the other side--that is, the church side, or the
side furthest from the street--was the sliding-board in
the fence, where my mother and I came in. So soon as it
was slid back, no man could see that the fence was not
solid.
At this moment in the night, however, when I
found that this riotous, drunken crew were pausing
at the entrance of Church Alley, as doubting if they
would not come down, I ran back through the passage,
knocking loudly for my mother as I passed, and coming to
my coal-bin, put my eye at the little hole through which
I always reconnoitred before I slid the door. I could
see nothing, nor at night ought I to have expected to do
so.
But I could hear, and I heard what I did not expect.
I could hear the heavy panting of one who had been
running, and as I listened I heard a gentle, low voice
sob out, "Ach, ach, mein Gott! Ach, mein Gott!" or words
that I thought were these, and I was conscious, when I
tried to move the door, that some one was resting close
upon it.
All the same, I put my shoulder stoutly to the cross-
bar, to which the boards of the door were nailed; I slid
it quickly in its grooves, and as it slid, a woman fell
into the passage.
She was wholly surprised by the motion, so that she
could not but fall. I seized her and dragged her in,
saying, "Hush, hush, hush!" as I did so. But not so
quick was I but that she screamed once more as I drew to
the sliding-door and thrust in the heavy bolt which held
it.
In an instant my mother was in the passage with a
light in her hand. In another instant I had seized the
light and put it out. But that instant was enough for
her and me to see that here was a lovely girl, with
no hat or bonnet on, with her hair floating wildly, both
her arms bleeding, and her clothes all stained with
blood. She could see my mother's face of amazement, and
she could see my finger on my mouth, as with the other I
dashed out the candle. We all thought quickly, and we
all knew that we must keep still.
But that unfortunate scream of hers was enough.
Though no one of us all uttered another sound, this was
like a "view-halloo," to bring all those dogs down upon
us. The passage was dark, and, to my delight, I heard
some of them breaking their shins over the curbstone and
old pear-tree of my defences. But they were not such
hounds as were easily thrown off the scent, and there
were enough to persevere while the leaders picked
themselves up again.
Then how they swore and cursed and asked questions!
And we three stood as still as so many frightened
rabbits. In an instant more one of them, who spoke in
English, said he would be hanged if he thought she had
gone into the church, that he believed she had got
through the fence; and then, with his fist, or something
harder, he began trying the boards on our side, and
others of them we could hear striking those on the other
side of the alley-way.
When it came to this, I whispered to my mother that
she must never fear, only keep perfectly still. She
dragged the frightened girl into our kitchen, which
was our sitting-room, and they both fell, I know not how,
into the great easy-chair.
For my part, I seized the light ladder, which always
hung ready at the door, and ran with it at my full speed
to the corner of Fernando Street and the alley. I
planted the ladder, and was on the top of the fence in an
instant
Then I sprang my watchman's rattle, which had hung by
the ladder, and I whirled it round well. It wholly
silenced the sound of the swearing fellows up the
passage, and their pounding. When I found they were
still, I cried out:--
"This way, 24! this way, 47! I have them all penned
up here! Signal the office, 42, and bid them send us a
sergeant. This way, fellows--up Church Alley!"
With this I was down my ladder again. But my gang of
savages needed no more. I could hear them rushing out of
the alley as fast as they might, not one of them waiting
for 24 or 47. This was lucky for me, for as it happened
I was ten minutes older before I heard two patrolmen on
the outside, wondering what frightened old cove had been
at the pains to spring a rattle.
The moonlight shone in at the western window of the
kitchen, so that as I came in I could just make out the
figure of my mother and of the girl, lying, rather than
sitting, in her lap and her arms. I was not afraid to
speak now, and I told my mother we were quite safe again,
and she told the poor girl so. I struck a match and
lighted the lamp as soon as I could. The poor,
frightened creature started as I did so, and then fell on
her knees at my mother's feet, took both her hands in her
own, and seemed like one who begs for mercy, or, indeed,
for life.
My poor, dear mother was all amazed, and her eyes
were running with tears at the sight of the poor thing's
terror. She kissed her again and again; she stroked her
beautiful golden hair with her soft hands; she said in
every word that she could think of that she was quite
safe now, and must not think of being frightened any
more.
But it was clear in a moment that the girl could not
understand any language that we could speak. My mother
tried her with a few words of German, and she smiled
then; but she shook her head prettily, as if to say that
she thanked her, but could not speak to her in that way
either. Then she spoke eagerly in some language that we
could not understand. But had it been the language of
Hottentots, we should have known that she was begging my
mother not to forsake her, so full of entreaty was every
word and every gesture.
My dear, sweet mother lifted her at last into the
easy-chair and made her lie there while she dipped some
hot water from her boiler and filled a large basin in her
sink. Then she led the pretty creature to it, and washed
from her arms, hands, and face the blood that had
hardened upon them, and looked carefully to find what her
wounds were. None of them were deep, though there
were ugly scratches on her beautiful arms; they were cut
by glass, as I guessed then, and as we learned from her
afterward. My mother was wholly prepared for all such
surgery as was needed here; she put on two bandages where
she thought they were needed, she plastered up the other
scratches with court-plaster, and then, as if the girl
understood her, she said to her, "And now, my dear child,
you must come to bed; there is no danger for you more."
The poor girl had grown somewhat reassured in the
comfortable little kitchen, but her terror seemed to come
back at any sign of removal; she started to her feet,
almost as if she were a wild creature. But I would defy
any one to be afraid of my dear mother, or indeed to
refuse to do what she bade, when she smiled so in her
inviting way and put out her hand; and so the girl went
with her, bowing to me, or dropping a sort of courtesy in
her foreign fashion, as she went out of the door, and I
was left to see what damage had been done to my castle by
the savages, as I called them.
I had sprung the rattle none too soon; for one of
these rascals, as it proved--I suppose it was the same
who swore that she had not gone into the church--with
some tool or other he had in his hand, had split out a
bit of the fence and had pried out a part of a plank. I
had done my work too well for any large piece to give
way. But the moment I looked into my coal-bin I saw that
something was amiss. I did not like very well to go
to the outside, but I must risk something; so I took out
a dark lantern which I always kept ready. Sure enough,
as I say, the fellow had struck so hard and so well that
he had split out a piece of board, and a little coal even
had fallen upon the passage-way. I was not much
displeased at this, for if he thought no nearer the truth
than that he had broken into a coal-bin of the church,
why, he was far enough from his mark for me. After
finding this, however, I was anxious enough, lest any of
them should return, not to go to bed again that night;
but all was still as death, and, to tell the truth, I
fell asleep in my chair. I doubt whether my mother
slept, or her frightened charge.
I was at work in the passage early the next morning
with some weather-stained boards I had, and before nine
o'clock I had doubled all that piece of fence, from my
wing where my hand-cart was to the church, and I had
spiked the new boards on, which looked like old boards,
as I said, with tenpenny nails; so that he would be a
stout burglar who would cut through them unless he had
tools for his purpose and daylight to work by. As I was
gathering up my tools to go in, a coarse, brutal-looking
Irishman came walking up the alley and looked round. My
work was so well done, and I had been so careful to leave
no chips, that even then he could not have guessed that
I had been building the fence anew, though I fancied
he looked at it. He seemed to want to excuse himself for
being there at all, and asked me, with an oath and in a
broad Irish brogue, if there were no other passage
through. I had the presence of mind to say in German,
"Wollen sie sprechen Deutsch?" and so made as if I
could not understand him; and then, kneeling on the
cellar-door of the church, pretended to put a key into
the lock, as if I were making sure that I had made it
firm.
And with that, he turned round with another oath, as
if he had come out of his way, and went out of the alley,
closely followed by me. I watched him as long as I
dared, but as he showed no sign of going back to the
alley, I at last walked round a square with my tools, and
so came back to my mother and the pretty stranger.
My mother had been trying to get at her story. She
made her understand a few words of German, but they
talked by signs and smiles and tears and kisses much more
than by words; and by this time they understood each
other so well that my mother had persuaded her not to go
away that day.
Nor did she go out for many days after; I will go
before my story far enough to say that. She had, indeed,
been horribly frightened that night, and she was as loath
to go out again into the streets of New York as I should
be to plunge from a safe shore into some terrible,
howling ocean; or, indeed, as one who found himself safe
at home would be to trust himself to the tender
mercies of a tribe of cannibals.
Two such loving women as they were were not long in
building up a language, especially as my mother had
learned from my father and his friends, in her early
life, some of the common words of German--what she called
a bread-and-butter German. For our new inmate was a
Swedish girl. Her story, in short, was this:--
She had been in New York but two days. On the voyage
over, they had had some terrible sickness on the vessel,
and the poor child's mother had died very suddenly and
had been buried in the sea. Her father had died long
before.
This was, as you may think, a terrible shock to her.
But she had hoped and hoped for the voyage to come to an
end, because there was a certain brother of hers in
America whom they were to meet at their landing, and
though she was very lonely on the packet-ship, in which
she and her mother and a certain family of the name of
Hantsen--of whom she had much to say--were the only
Swedes, still she expected to find the brother almost as
soon, as I may say, as they saw the land.
She felt badly enough that he did not come on board
with the quarantine officer. When the passengers were
brought to Castle Garden, and no brother came, she felt
worse. However, with the help of the clerks there, she
got off a letter to him, somewhere in Jersey, and
proposed to wait as long as they would let her, till he
should come.
The second day there came a man to the Garden, who
said he was a Dane, but he spoke Swedish well enough. He
said her brother was sick, and had sent him to find her.
She was to come with her trunks, and her mother's, and
all their affairs, to his house, and the same afternoon
they should go to where the brother was.
Without doubt or fear she went with this man, and
spent the day at a forlorn sort of hotel which she
described, but which I never could find again. Toward
night the man came again and bade her take a bag, with
her one change of dress, and come with him to her
brother.
After a long ride through the city, they got out at
a house which, thank God! was only one block from
Fernando Street. And there this simple, innocent
creature, as she went in, asked where her brother was, to
meet only a burst of laughter from one or two coarse-
looking men, and from half-a-dozen brazen-faced girls
whom she hated, she said, the minute she saw them.
Except that an old woman took off her shawl and cloak
and bonnet, and took away from her the travelling things
she had in her hand, nobody took any care of her but to
laugh at her, and mock her if she dared say anything.
She tried to go out to the door to find even the
Dane who had brought her there, but she was given to
understand that he was coming again for her, and that she
must wait till he came. As for her brother, there was no
brother there, nor had been any. The poor girl had been
trapped, and saw that she had been trapped; she had been
spirited away from everybody who ever heard of her
mother, and was in the clutches, as she said to my mother
afterward, of a crew of devils who knew nothing of love
or of mercy.
They did try to make her eat and drink,--tried to
make her drink champagne, or any other wine; but they had
no fool to deal with. The girl did not, I think, let her
captors know how desperate were her resolutions. But her
eyes were wide open, and she was not going to lose any
chance. She was all on the alert for her escape when, at
eleven o'clock, the Dane came at last whom she had been
expecting so anxiously.
The girl asked him for her brother, only to be put
off by one excuse or another, and then to hear from him
the most loathsome talk of his admiration, not to say his
passion, for her.
They were nearly alone by this time, and he led her
unresisting, as he thought, into another smaller room,
brilliantly lighted, and, as she saw in a glance, gaudily
furnished, with wine and fruit and cake on a side-
table,--a room where they would be quite alone.
She walked simply across and looked at herself in the
great mirror. Then she made some foolish little
speech about her hair, and how pale she looked. Then she
crossed to the sofa, and sat upon it with as tired an air
as he might have expected of one who had lived through
such a day. Then she looked up at him and even smiled
upon him, she said, and asked him if he would not ask
them for some cold water.
The fellow turned into the passage-way, well pleased
with her submission, and in the same instant the girl was
at the window as if she had flown across the room.
Fool! The window was made fast, not by any moving
bolt, either. It was nailed down, and it did not give a
hairs-breadth to her hand.
Little cared she for that. She sat on the window-
seat, which was broad enough to hold her; she braced her
feet against the foot of the bedstead, which stood just
near enough to her; she turned enough to bring her
shoulder against the window-sash, and then with her whole
force she heaved herself against the sash, and the entire
window, of course, gave way.
The girl caught herself upon the blind, which swung
open before her. She pulled herself free from the sill
and window-seat, and dropped fearless into the street.
The fall was not long. She lighted on her feet and
ran as only fear could teach her to run. Where to, she
knew not; but she thought she turned a corner before she
heard any voices from behind.
Still she ran. And it was when she came to the
corner of the next street that she heard for the first
time the screams of pursuers.
She turned again, like a poor hunted hare as she was.
But what was her running to theirs? She was passing our
long fence in Fernando Street, and then for the first
time she screamed for help.
It was that scream which waked me.
She saw the steeple of the church. She had a dim
feeling that a church would be an asylum. So was it that
she ran up our alley, to find that she was in a trap
there.
And then it was that she fell against my door, that
she cried twice, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" and that the
good God, who had heard her, sent me to draw her in.
We had to learn her language, in a fashion, and she
to learn ours, before we understood her story in this
way. But at the very first my mother made out that the
girl had fled from savages who meant worse than death for
her. So she understood why she was so frightened at
every sound, and why at first she was afraid to stay with
us, yet more afraid to go.
But this passed off in a day or two. She took to my
mother with a sort of eager way which showed how she must
have loved her own mother, and how much she lost when she
lost her. And that was one of the parts of her sad story
that we understood.
No one, I think, could help loving my mother; but
here was a poor, storm-tossed creature who, I might say,
had nothing else to love, seeing she had lost all trace
of this brother, and here was my mother, soothing her,
comforting her, dressing her wounds for her, trying to
make her feel that God's world was not all wickedness;
and the girl in return poured out her whole heart.
When my mother explained to her that she should not
let her go away till her brother was found, then for the
first time she seemed perfectly happy. She was indeed
the loveliest creature I ever put my eyes on.
She was then about nineteen years old, of a delicate
complexion naturally, which was now a little browned by
the sea-air. She was rather tall than otherwise, but her
figure was so graceful that I think you never thought her
tall. Her eyes were perhaps deep-set, and of that
strange gray which I have heard it said the goddesses in
the Greek poetry had. Still, when she was sad, one saw
the less of all this. It was not till she forgot her
grief for the instant in the certainty that she might
rest with my mother, so that her whole face blazed with
joy, that I first knew what the perfect beauty of a
perfect woman was.
Her name, it seemed, was Frida,--a name made from the
name of one of the old goddesses among the Northmen, the
same from whom our day Friday is named. She is the half-
sister of Thor, from whom Thursday is named, and the
daughter of Wodin, from whom Wednesday is named.
I knew little of all this then, but I did not wonder
when I read afterward that this northern goddess was the
Goddess of Love, the friend of song, the most beautiful
of all their divinities,--queen of spring and light and
everything lovely.
But surely never any one took fewer of the airs of a
goddess than our Frida did while she was with us. She
would watch my mother, as if afraid that she should put
her hand to a gridiron or a tin dipper. She gave her to
understand, in a thousand pretty ways, that she should be
her faithful, loving, and sincere. servant. If she would
only show her what to do, she would work for her as a
child that loved her. And so indeed she did. My dear
mother would laugh and say she was quite a fine lady now,
for Frida would not let her touch broom nor mop, skimmer
nor dusting-cloth.
The girl would do anything but go out upon an errand.
She could not bear to see the other side of the fence.
What she thought of it all I do not know. Whether she
thought it was the custom in America for young men to
live shut up with their mothers in enclosures of half an
acre square, or whether she thought we two made some
peculiar religious order, whose rules provided that one
woman and one man should live together in a convent or
monastery of their own, or whether she supposed half New
York was made up, as Marco Polo found Pekin, of
cottages or of gardens, I did not know, nor did I much
care. I could see that here was provided a companion for
my mother, who was else so lonely, and I very soon found
that she was as much a companion for me.
So soon as we could understand her at all, I took the
name of her brother and his address. When he wrote last
he was tending a saw-mill at a place about seven miles
away from Tuckahoe, in Jersey. But he said he was going
to leave there at once, so that they need not write
there. He sent the money for their passage, and
promised, as I said, to meet them at New York.
This was a poor clew at the best. But I put a good
face on it, and promised her I would find him if he could
be found. And I spared no pains. I wrote to the
postmaster at Tuckahoe, and to a minister I heard of
there. I inquired of the Swedish consuls in New York and
Philadelphia. Indeed, in the end, I went to Tuckahoe
myself, with her, to inquire. But this was long after.
However, I may say here, once for all, to use an old
phrase of my mother's, we never found "hide nor hair" of
him. And although this grieved Frida, of course, yet it
came on her gradually, and as she had never seen him to
remember him, it was not the same loss as if they had
grown up together.
Meanwhile that first winter was, I thought, the
pleasantest I had ever known in my life. I did not have
to work very hard now, for my business was rather
the laying out work for my men, and sometimes a nice job
which needed my hand on my lathe at home, or in some
other delicate affair that I could bring home with me.
We were teaching Frida English, my mother and I, and
she and I made a great frolic of her teaching me Swedish.
I would bring home Swedish newspapers and stories for
her, and we would puzzle them out together,--she as much
troubled to find the English word as I to find out the
Swedish. Then she sang like a bird when she was about
her household work, or when she sat sewing for my mother,
and she had not lived with us a fortnight before she
began to join us on Sunday evenings in the choruses of
the Methodist hymns which my mother and I sang together.
So then we made her sing Swedish hymns to us. And before
she knew it, the great tears would brim over her deep
eyes and would run down in pearls upon her cheek.
Nothing set her to thinking of her old home as those
Sunday evenings did. Of a Sunday evening we could make
her go out with us to church sometimes. Not but then she
would half cover her face with a veil, so afraid was she
that we might meet the Dane. But I told her that the
last place we should find him at would be at church on
Sunday evening.
I have come far in advance of my story, that I might
make any one who reads this life of mine to understand
how naturally and simply this poor lost bird nestled down
into our quiet life, and how the house that was
built for two proved big enough for three. For I made
some new purchases now, and fitted up the little middle
chamber for Frida's own use. We had called it the "spare
chamber" before, in joke. But now my mother fitted
pretty curtains to it, and other hangings, without
Frida's knowledge. I had a square of carpet made up at
the warehouse for the middle of the floor, and by making
her do one errand and another in the corner of the garden
one pleasant afternoon in November, we had it all
prettily fitted up for her room before she knew it. And
a great gala we made of it when she came in from
gathering the seeds of the calystegia, which she had been
sent for.
She looked like a northern Flora as she came in, with
her arms all festooned by the vines she had been pulling
down. And when my mother made her come out to the door
she had never seen opened before, and led her in, and
told her that this pretty chamber was all her own, the
pretty creature flushed crimson red at first, and then
her quick tears ran over, and she fell on my mother's
neck and kissed her as if she would never be done. And
then she timidly held her hand out to me, too, as I stood
in the doorway, and said, in her slow, careful English,--
"And you, too--and you, too. I must tank you both,
also, especially. You are so good--so good to de poor
lost girl!" That was a very happy evening.
But, as I say, I have gone ahead of my story. For
before we had these quiet evenings we were fated to have
many anxious ones and one stormy one.
The very first day that Frida was with us, I felt
sure that the savages would make another descent upon us.
They had heard her scream, that was certain. They knew
she had not passed them, that was certain. They knew
there was a coal-bin on the other side of our fence, that
was certain. They would have reason enough for being
afraid to have her at large, if, indeed, there were no
worse passion than fear driving some of them in pursuit
of her. I could not keep out of my mind the beastly look
of the Irishman who asked me, with such an ugly leer on
his face, if there were no passage through. Not that I
told either of the two women of my fears. But, all the
same, I did not undress myself for a week, and sat in the
great easy-chair in our kitchen through the whole of
every night, waiting for the least sound of alarm.
Next to the savages, I had always lived in fear of
being discovered in my retreat by the police, who would
certainly think it strange to find a man and his mother
living in a shed, without any practicable outside door,
in what they called a vacant lot.
But I have read of weak nations in history which were
fain to call upon one neighbor whom they did not like to
protect them against another whom they liked less.
I made up my mind, in like wise, to go round to the
police-station nearest me.
And so, having dressed myself in my black coat, and
put on a round hat and gloves, I bought me a Malacca
walking-stick, such as was then in fashion, and called
upon the captain in style. I told him I lived next the
church, and that on such and such a night there was a
regular row among roughs, and that several of them went
storming up the alley in a crowd. I said, "Although your
men were there as quick as they could come, these fellows
had all gone before they came." But then I explained
that I had seen a fellow hanging about the alley in the
daytime, who seemed to be there for no good; that there
was a hand-cart kept there by a workman, who seemed to be
an honest fellow, and, perhaps, all they wanted was to
steal that; that, if I could, I would warn him. But
meanwhile, I said, I had come round to the station to
give the warning of my suspicions, that if my rattle was
heard again, the patrolmen might know what was in the
wind.
The captain was a good deal impressed by my make-up
and by the ease of my manner. He affected to be
perfectly well acquainted with me, although we had never
happened to meet at the Century Club or at the Union
League. I confirmed the favorable impression I had made
by leaving my card, which I had had handsomely engraved:
"MR. ROBINSON CRUSOE." With my pencil I added my
down-town address, where, I said, a note or telegram
would find me.
I was not a day too soon with my visit to this
gentleman. That very night, after my mother and Frida
had gone to bed, as I sat in my easychair, there came
over me one of those strange intimations which I have
never found it safe to disregard. Sometimes it is of
good, and sometimes of bad. This time it made me certain
that all was not well. To relieve my fears I lifted my
ladder over the wall and dropped it in the alley. I
swung myself down and carried it to the very end of the
alley, to the place where I had dragged poor Frida in.
The moon fell on the fence opposite ours. My wing-fence
and hand-cart were all in shade. But everything was safe
there.
Again I chided myself for my fears, when, as I looked
up the alley to the street, I saw a group of four men
come in stealthily. They said not a word, but I could
make out their forms distinctly against the houses
opposite.
I was caught in my own trap!
Not quite! They had not seen me, for I was wholly in
shadow. I stepped quickly in at my own slide. I pushed
it back and bolted it securely, and with my heart in my
mouth, I waited at my hole of observation. In a minute
more they were close around me, though they did not
suspect I was so near.
They also had a dark-lantern, and, I thought,
more than one. They spoke in low tones; but as they
had no thought they had a hearer quite so near, I could
hear all they said.
"I tell you it was this side, and this is the side I
heard their deuced psalm-singing day before yesterday."
"What if he did hear psalm-singing? Are you going to
break into a man's garden because he sings psalms? I
came here to find out where the girl went to; and now you
talk of psalm-singing and coal-bins." This from another,
whose English was poor, and in whom I fancied I heard the
Dane. It was clear enough that be spoke sense, and a
sort of doubt fell on the whole crew; but speaker No. 1,
with a heavy crowbar he had, smashed into my pine wall,
as I have a right to call it now, with a force which made
the splinters fly.
"I should think we were all at Niblo's," said a man
of slighter build, "and that we were playing Humpty
Dumpty. Because a girl flew out of a window, you think
a fence opened to take her in. Why should she not go
through a door? and he kicked with his foot upon the
heavy sloping cellar-door of the church, which just rose
a little from the pavement. It was the doorway which
they used there when they took in their supply of coal.
The moon fell full on one side of it. To my surprise it
was loose and gave way.
"Here is where the girl flew to, and here is
where Bully Bigg, the donkey, let her slip out of
his fingers. I knew he was a fool, but I did not know he
was such a fool," said the Dane (if he were the Dane).
I will not pretend to write down the oaths and foul
words which came in between every two of the words I have
repeated.
"Fool yourself!" replied the Bully; "and what sort of
a fool is the man who comes up a blind alley looking
after a girl that will not kiss him when he bids her?"
"Anyway," put in another of the crew, who had just
now lifted the heavy cellar-door, "other people may find
it handy to hop down here when the `beaks' are too near
them. It's a handy place to know of in a dark night, if
the dear deacons do choose to keep it open for a poor
psalm-singing tramp, who has no chance at the station-
house. Here, Lopp, you are the tallest,--jump in and
tell us what is there;" and at this moment the Dane
caught sight of my unfortunate ladder, lying full in the
moonlight. I could see him seize it and run to the
doorway with it with a deep laugh and some phrase of his
own country talk, which I did not understand.
"The deacons are very good," said the savage who had
lifted the cellar-door. "They make everything handy for
us poor fellows."
And though he had not planted the ladder, he was the
first to run down, and called for the rest to follow.
The Dane was second, Lopp was third, and "The
Bully," as the big rascal seemed to be called by
distinction, was the fourth.
I saw him disappear from my view with a mixture of
wonder and terror which I will not describe. I seized my
light overcoat, which always hung in the passage. I
flung open my sliding-door and shut it again behind me.
I looked into the black of the cellar to see the
reflections from their distant lanterns, and without a
sound I drew up my ladder. Then I ran to the head of the
alley and sounded my rattle as I would have sounded the
trumpet for a charge in battle. The officers joined me
in one moment.
"I am the man who spoke to the captain about these
rowdies. Four of them are in the cellar of the church
yonder now."
"Do you know who?"
"One they called Lopp, and one they called Bully
Bigg," said I. "I do not know the others' names."
The officers were enraptured.
I led them, and two other patrolmen who joined us, to
the shelter of my wing-wall. In a few minutes the head
of the Dane appeared, as he was lifted from below. With
an effort and three or four oaths, he struggled out upon
the ground, to be seized and gagged the moment he stepped
back. With varying fortunes, Bigg and Lopp emerged, and
were seized and handcuffed in turn. The fourth
surrendered on being summoned.
What followed comes into the line of daily life and
the morning newspaper so regularly that I need not
describe it. Against the Dane it proved that endless
warrants could be brought immediately. His lair of
stolen baggage and other property was unearthed, and
countless sufferers claimed their own. I was able to
recover Frida's and her mother's possessions--the locks
on the trunks still unbroken. The Dane himself would
have been sent to the Island on I know not how many
charges, but that the Danish minister asked for him that
he might be hanged in Denmark, and he was sent and hanged
accordingly.
Lopp was sent to Sing-Sing for ten years, and has not
yet been pardoned.
Bigg and Cordon were sent to Blackwell's Island for
three years each. And so the land had peace for that
time.
That winter, as there came on one and another idle
alarm that Frida's brother might be heard from, my heart
sank with the lowest terror lest she should go away. And
in the spring I told her that if she went away I was sure
I should die. And the dear girl looked down, and looked
up, and said she thought--she thought she should, too.
And we told my mother that we had determined that Frida
should never go away while we stayed there. And she
approved.
So I wrote a note to the minister of the church which
had protected us so long, and one night we slid the
board carefully, and all three walked round, fearless of
the Dane, and Frida and I were married.
It was more than three years after, when I received
by one post three letters, which gave us great ground for
consultation. The first was from my old friend and
patron, the Spaniard. He wrote to me from Chicago, where
he, in his turn, had fallen in with a crew of savages,
who had stripped him of all he had, under the pretext of
a land-enterprise they engaged him in, and had left him
without a real, as he said. He wanted to know if I could
not find him some clerkship, or even some place as
janitor, in New York.
The second letter was from old Mr. Henry in
Philadelphia, who had always employed me after my old
master's death. He said that the fence around the lot in
Ninety-ninth Avenue might need some repairs, and he
wished I would look at it. He was growing old, he said,
and he did not care to come to New York. But the Fordyce
heirs would spend ten years in Europe.
The third letter was from Tom Grinnell.
I wrote to Mr. Henry that I thought he had better let
me knock up a little office, where a keeper might sleep,
if necessary; that there was some stuff with which I
could put up such an office, and that I had an old
friend, a Spaniard, who was an honest fellow, and if he
might have his bed in the office, would take
gratefully whatever his services to the estate proved
worth. He wrote me by the next day's mail that I might
engage the Spaniard and finish the office. So I wrote to
the Spaniard and got a letter from him, accepting the
post provided for him. Then I wrote to Tom Grinnell.
The last day we spent at our dear old home, I
occupied myself in finishing the office as Friend Henry
bade me. I made a "practicable door," which opened from
the passage on Church Alley. Then I loaded my hand-cart
with my own chest and took it myself, in my working
clothes, to the Vanderbilt Station, where I took a brass
check for it.
I could not wait for the Spaniard, but I left a
letter for him, giving him a description of the way I
managed the goats, and directions to milk and fatten
them, and to make both butter and cheese.
At half-past ten a "crystal," as those cabs were then
called, came to the corner of Fernando Street and Church
Alley, and so we drove to the station. I left the key of
the office, directed to the Spaniard, in the hands of the
baggage-master.
When I took leave of my castle, as I called it, I
carried with me for relics the great straw hat I had
made, my umbrella, and one of my parrots; also I forgot
not to take the money I formerly mentioned, which had
lain by me so long useless that it was grown rusty
and tarnished, and could scarcely pass for money till it
had been a little rubbed and handled. With these relics
and with my wife's and mother's baggage and my own chest,
we arrived at our new home.
BREAD ON THE WATERS
A WASHINGTON CHRISTMAS
[No. This story also is "Invented Example." But it
is founded on facts. It is a pleasure to me, writing
fifty-four years after the commission intrusted to me by
the late Mrs. Fales, to say that that is a real name, and
that her benevolence at a distance is precisely
represented here.
Perhaps the large history of the world would be
differently written but for that kindness of hers.
I was a very young clergyman, and the remittance she
made to me was the first trust of the same kind which had
ever been confided to me.]
CHAPTER I
MAKE READY
"Only think, Matty, papa passed right by me when I was
sitting with my back to the fire and stitching away on
his book-mark without my once seeing him! But he was
so busy talking to mamma that he never saw what I was
doing, and I huddled it under a newspaper before he
came back again. Well, I have got papa's present done,
but I cannot keep out of mamma's way. Matty, dear, if
I will sit in the sun and keep a shawl on, may I not
sit in your room and work? It is not one bit cold
there. Really, Matty, it is a great deal warmer
than it was yesterday."
"Dear child," said Matty, to whom everybody came so
readily for advice and help, "I can do better for you
than that. You shall come into the study; papa will be
away all the morning, and I will have the fire kept up
there,--and mamma shall never come near you."
All this, and a thousand times more of plotting and
counterplotting, was going on among four children and
their elders in a comfortable, free-and-easy seeming
household in Washington, as the boys and girls, young men
and young women were in the last agonies of making ready
for Christmas. Matty is fully entitled to be called a
young woman, when we see her. She has just passed her
twenty-first birthday. But she looks as fresh and pretty
as when she was seventeen, and certainly she is a great
deal pleasanter though she be wiser. She is the oldest
of the troop. Tom, the next, is expected from Annapolis
this afternoon, and Beverly from Charlotte. Then come
four boys and girls whose ages and places the reader must
guess at as we go on.
The youngest of the family were still young enough to
write the names of the presents which they would be glad
to receive, or to denote them by rude hieroglyphs, on
large sheets of paper. They were wont to pin up these
sheets on certain doors, which, by long usage in this
free-and-easy family, had come to be regarded as the
bulletin-boards of the establishment. Well-nigh
every range of created things had some representation on
these bulletins,--from an ambling pony round to a "boot-
buttenner," thus spelled out by poor Laura, who was
constantly in disgrace, because she always appeared
latest at the door when the children started for church,
to ride, or for school. The youngsters still held to the
theory of announcing thus their wants in advance. Horace
doubted whether he were not too old. But there was so
much danger that nobody would know how much he needed a
jig-saw, that he finally compromised with his dignity,
wrote on a virgin sheet of paper, "gig-saw," signed his
name, "Horace Molyneux, Dec. 21," and left his other
presents to conjecture.
And of course at the very end, as Santa Claus and his
revels were close upon them, while the work done had been
wonderful, that which we ought to have done but which we
had left undone, was simply terrible. Here were pictures
that must be brought home from the frame-man, who had
never pretended he would send them; there were ferns and
lycopodiums in pots which must be brought home from the
greenhouse; here were presents for other homes, which
must not only be finished, but must be put up in paper
and sent before night, so as to appear on other trees.
Every one of these must be shown to mamma, an approved by
her and praised; and every one must be shown to dear
Matty, and praised and approved by her. And yet by
no accident must Matty see her own presents or dream that
any child has remembered her, or mamma see HERS or
think herself remembered.
And Matty has all her own little list to see to,
while she keeps a heart at leisure from itself to soothe
and sympathize. She has to correct the mistakes, to
repair the failures, to respect the wonder, to refresh
the discouragement, of each and all the youngsters. Her
own Sunday scholars are to be provided with their
presents. The last orders are to be given for the
Christmas dinners of half-a-dozen families of vassals,
mostly black or of some shade of black, who never forgot
their vassalage as Christmas came round. Turkey,
cranberry, apples, tea, cheese, and butter must be sent
to each household of these vassals, as if every member
were paralyzed except in the muscles of the jaw. But,
all the same, Matty or her mother must be in readiness
all the morning and afternoon to receive the visits of
all the vassals,--who, so far as this form of homage
went, did not seem to be paralyzed at all.
For herself, Matty took possession of the dining-
room, as soon as she could clear it of the breakfast
equipage, of the children and of the servants, and here,
with pen and ink, with wrapping-paper and twine, with
telegraph blanks and with the directory, and with Venty
as her Ariel messenger--not so airy and quick as Ariel,
but quite as willing--Matty worked her wonders, and
gave her audiences, whether to vassals from without or
puzzled children from within.
Venty was short for Ventidius. But this name, given
in baptism, was one which Venty seldom heard.
Matty corded up this parcel, and made Venty cord up
that; wrote this note of compliment, that of inquiry,
that of congratulation, and sent Venty on this, that, and
another errand with them; relieved Flossy's anxieties and
poor Laura's in ways which have been described; made sure
that the wagon should be at the station in ample time for
Beverly's arrival; and at last, at nearly one o'clock,
called Aunty Chloe (who was in waiting on everybody as a
superserviceable person, on the pretence that she was
needed), bade Aunty pick up the scraps, sweep the floor,
and bring the room to rights. And so, having attended to
everybody beside herself, to all their wishes and hopes
and fears, poor Matty--or shall I say, dear Matty--ran
off to her own room, to finish her own presents and make
her own last preparations.
She had kept up her spirits as best she could all the
morning, but, at any moment when she was alone, her
spirits had fallen again. She knew it, and she knew why.
And now she could not hold out any longer. She and her
mother, thank God, never had any secrets. And as she ran
by her mother's door she could not help tapping, to be
sure if she had come home.
Yes, she had come home. "Come in!" and Matty ran in.
Her mother had not even taken off her hat or her
gloves. She had flung herself on the sofa, as if her
walk had been quite too much for her; her salts and her
handkerchief were in her hands, and when she saw it was
Matty, as she had hoped when she spoke, she would not
even pretend she had not been in tears.
In a moment Matty was on her knees on the floor by
the sofa, and somehow had her left arm round about her
mother's neck.
"Dear, dear mamma! What is it, what is the matter?"
"My dear, dear Matty," replied her mother, just
succeeding in speaking without sobs, and speaking the
more easily because she stroked the girl's hair and
caressed her as she spoke, "do not ask, do not try to
know. You will know, if you do not guess, only too soon.
And now the children will be better, and papa will get
through Christmas better, if you do not know, my
darling."
"No, dear mamma," said Matty, crossing her mother's
purpose almost for the first time that she remembered,
but wholly sure that she was right in doing so,--"No,
dear mamma, it is not best so. Indeed, it is not, mamma!
I feel in my bones that it is not!" This she said with
a wretched attempt to smile, which was the more ghastly
because the tears were running down from both their
faces.
"You see I have tried, mamma. I knew all day
yesterday that something was wrong, and at breakfast this
morning I knew it. And I have had to hold up--with the
children and all these people--with the feeling that any
minute the hair might break and the sword fall. And I
know I shall do better if you tell me. You see the boys
will be here before dark, and of course they will see,
and what in the world shall I say to them?"
"What, indeed?" said her poor mother. "Terrible it
is, dear child, because your father is so wretched. I
have just come from him. He would not let me stay, and
yet for the minute I was there, I saw that no one else
could come in to goad him. Dear, dear papa, he is so
resolute and brave, and yet any minute I was afraid that
he would break a blood-vessel and fall dead before me.
Oh, Matty, Matty, my darling, it is terrible!"
And this time the poor woman could not control
herself longer, but gave way to her sobs, and her voice
fairly broke, so that she was inarticulate, as she laid
her cheek against her daughter's on the sofa.
"What is terrible? Dear mamma, you must tell me!"
"I think I must tell you, Matty, my darling. I
believe if I cannot tell some one, I shall die."
Then Mrs. Molyneux told the whole horror to Matty.
Here was her husband charged with the grossest
plunder of the treasury, and now charged even in the
House of Representatives. It had been whispered about
before, and had been hinted at in some of the lower
newspapers, but now even a committee of Congress had
noticed it, and had "given him an opportunity to clear
himself." There was no less a sum than forty-seven
thousand dollars, in three separate payments, charged to
him at the Navy Department as long ago as the second and
third years of the Civil War. At the Navy they had his
receipts for it. Not that he had been in that department
then any more than he was now. He was then chief clerk
in the Bureau of Internal Improvement, as he was now
Commissioner there. But this was when the second Rio
Grande expedition was fitted out; and from Mr. Molyneux's
knowledge of Spanish, and his old connection with the
Santa Fe trade, this particular matter had been intrusted
to him.
"Yes, dear mamma!"
"Well, papa has it all down on his own cashbook; that
book he carries in his breast-pocket. There are the
three payments, and then all the transfers he made to the
different people. One, was that old white-haired
Spaniard with the harelip, who used to come here at the
back door, so that he should not be seen at the
Department. But it was before you remember. The others
were in smaller sums. But the whole thing was done in
three weeks, and then the expedition sailed, and papa had
enough else to think of, and has never thought of it
since, till ten or fifteen days ago, when somebody in the
Eleventh Auditor's office discovered this charge, and his
receipt for this money."
"Well, dear mamma?"
"Well, dear child, that is all, but that now the
newspapers have got hold of it, and the Committee on
Retrenchment, who are all new men, with their reputations
to make, have got hold of it, and some of them really
think, you know, that papa has stolen the money!" And
she broke down crying again.
"But he can show his accounts, mamma!" What are his
accounts worth? He must show the vouchers, as they are
called. He must show these people's receipts, and what
has become of these people; what they did with the money.
He must show everything. Well, when the `Copperhead'
first spoke of it--that was a fortnight ago--papa was
really pleased. For he said it would be a good chance to
bring out a piece of war history. He said that in our
Bureau we had never had any credit for the Rio Grande
successes, that they were all our thunder; because
THEN he could laugh about this horrid thing. He said
the Navy had taken all the boners, while we deserved them
all. And he said if these horrid `Copperhead' and
`Argus' and `Scorpion' people would only publish the
vouchers half as freely as they published the charges, we
should get a little of the credit that was our due."
"Well, mamma, and what is the trouble now?"
"Why, papa was so sure that he would do nothing until
an official call came. But on Monday it got into
Congress. That hairy man from the Yellowstone brought in
a resolution or something, and the Committee was ordered
to inquire. And when the order came down, papa told Mr.
Waltsingham to bring him the papers, and, Matty, the
papers were not there!"
"Stolen!" cried Matty, understanding the crisis for
the first time.
"Yes--perhaps--or lost--hidden somewhere. You have
no idea of the work of those days night work and all
that. Many a time your father did not undress for a
week."
"And now he must remember where he put a horrid pile
of papers, eleven, twelve years ago. Mamma, that pile is
stolen. That odious Greenhithe stole it. He lives in
Philadelphia now, and he has put up these newspapers to
this lie."
Mr. Greenhithe was an underclerk in the Internal
Improvement Bureau, who had shown an amount of attention
to Miss Matty, which she had disliked and had refused to
receive. She had always said he was bad and would come
to a bad end, and when he was detected in a low trick,
selling stationery which he had stolen from the supply
room, and was discharged in disgrace, Matty had said it
was good enough for him.
These were her reasons for pronouncing at once
that he had stolen the vouchers and had started the
rumors.
"I do not know. Papa does not know. He hardly tries
to guess. He says either way it is bad. If the vouchers
are stolen, he is in fault, for he is responsible for the
archives; if he cannot produce the vouchers, then all the
country is down on him for stealing. I only hope," said
poor Mrs. Molyneux, "that they won't say our poor old
wagon is a coach and six;" and this time she tried to
smile.
And now she had told her story. All last night,
while the children were asleep, Mr. Molyneux had been at
the office, even till four o'clock in the morning, taking
old dusty piles from their lairs and searching for those
wretched vouchers. And mamma had been waiting--shall one
not say, had been weeping?--here at home. That was the
reason poor papa had looked so haggard at breakfast this
morning.
This was all mamma had to tell. She had been to the
office this morning, but papa would not let her stay. He
must see all comers, just as if nothing had happened, was
happening, or was going to happen.
Well! Matty did make her mother take off her jacket
and her hat and her gloves. She even made her drink a
glass of wine and lie down. And then the poor girl
retired to her own room, with such appetite as she might
for taking the last stitches in worsted work, for
stippling in the lights into drawings, for writing
the presentation lines in books, and for doing the
thousand little niceties in the way of finishing touches
which she had promised the children to do for them.
Her dominant feeling--yes, it was a dominant passion,
as she knew--was simply rage against this miserable
Greenhithe, this cowardly sneak who was thus taking his
revenge upon her, because she had been so cold to him.
Or was it that he made up to her because he was already
in trouble at the Office and hoped she would clear him
with her father? Either way he was a snake and a
scorpion, but he had worked out for himself a terrible
revenge. Poor Matty! She tried to think what she could
do, how she could help, for that was the habit of her
life. But this was now hard indeed. Her mind would not
now take that turn. All that it would turn to was to the
wretched and worse than worthless question, what
punishment might fall on him for such utter baseness and
wickedness.
All the same the children must have their lunch, and
they must not know that anything was the matter. Oh
dear! this concealment was the worst of all!
So they had their lunch. And poor Matty counselled
again, and helped again, and took the last stitches, and
mended the last breaks, and waited and wondered, and
tried to hope, till at five o'clock an office messenger
came up with this message.
4.45 P.M.
DEAR MATTY,--I shall not come up to dinner. There is
pressing work here. Tell mamma not to sit up for me. I
have my key.
I have no chance to get my things for the children.
Will you see to it? Here is twenty dollars, and if you
need more let them send in the bill. I had only thought
of that jig-saw--was it?--that Horace wants. See that
the dear fellow has a good one.
Love to all and ever yours,
PAPA.
"Poor, dear papa," said Matty aloud, shedding tears
in spite of herself. "To be thinking of jig-saws and
children in all this horrid hunt! As if hunting for
anything was not the worst trial of all, always." And at
once the brave girl took down her wraps and put on her
walking-shoes, that her father's commissions might be met
before their six-o'clock dinner. And she determined that
first of all she would meet Tom at the station.
At the station she met Tom; that was well. Matty had
not been charged to secrecy; that was well. She told him
all the story, not without adding her suspicions, and
giving him some notion of her rage.
And Tom was angry enough,--there was a crumb of
comfort there. But Tom went off on another track. Tom
distrusted the Navy Department. He had been long enough
at Annapolis to doubt the red tape of the bureaus with
which his chiefs had to do. "If the navy had the
money, the navy had the vouchers," that was Tom's theory.
He knew a chief clerk in the navy, and Tom was going at
once round there.
But Matty held him in check at least for the moment.
Whatever else he did, he must come home first; he must
see mamma and he must see the children, and he must have
dinner. She had not told him yet how well he looked, and
how handsome he was.
But after Tom had seen them he slipped off, pretended
he had unfinished preparations to make, and went right to
the Department, forced his way in because he was Mr.
Molyneux's son, and found his poor father with Zeigler,
the chief clerk, still on this wretched and fruitless
overhaul of the old files. Tom stated frankly, in his
off-hand, business-like way, what his theory was.
Neither Zeigler nor Tom's father believed in it in the
least. Tom knew nothing, they said; the Navy paid the
money, but the Navy was satisfied with our receipt, and
should be.
Tom continued to say, "If the Navy paid the money the
Navy must have the vouchers;" and at last, more to be rid
of him than with any hope of the result, Mr. Molyneux let
the eager fellow go round to his friend, Eben Ricketts,
and see if Eben would not give an hour or two of his
Christmas to looking up the thing. Mr. Molyneux even
went so far as to write a frank line to Mr. Ricketts, and
enclosed a letter which he had had that day from the
chairman of the House Committee,--a letter which was
smooth enough in the language, but horrible enough in the
thing.
Ah me! Had not Ricketts read it all already in the
evening "Argus"? He was willing, if he could, to serve.
So he with Tom went round and found the Navy Department
messenger, and opened and lighted up the necessary rooms,
and they spent three hours of their Christmas there.
Meanwhile Beverly had arrived from Norfolk. He had a
frolic with the children, and then called his mother and
Matty away from them.
"What in thunder is the matter?" said the poor boy.
And they told him. How could they help telling him?
And so soon as the story was finished, the boy had his
coat on and was putting on his boots. He went right down
to his father's office, he made old Stratton admit him,
and told his father he too had reported for duty.