ONLY A PAGE OR SO.
The transaction concluded, the two still remained seated, falling into
familiar conversation, by degrees verging into that confidential sort of
sympathetic silence, the last refinement and luxury of unaffected good
feeling. A kind of social superstition, to suppose that to be truly
friendly one must be saying friendly words all the time, any more than
be doing friendly deeds continually. True friendliness, like true
religion, being in a sort independent of works.
At length, the good merchant, whose eyes were pensively resting upon the
gay tables in the distance, broke the spell by saying that, from the
spectacle before them, one would little divine what other quarters of
the boat might reveal. He cited the case, accidentally encountered but
an hour or two previous, of a shrunken old miser, clad in shrunken old
moleskin, stretched out, an invalid, on a bare plank in the emigrants'
quarters, eagerly clinging to life and lucre, though the one was gasping
for outlet, and about the other he was in torment lest death, or some
other unprincipled cut-purse, should be the means of his losing it; by
like feeble tenure holding lungs and pouch, and yet knowing and
desiring nothing beyond them; for his mind, never raised above mould,
was now all but mouldered away. To such a degree, indeed, that he had no
trust in anything, not even in his parchment bonds, which, the better to
preserve from the tooth of time, he had packed down and sealed up, like
brandy peaches, in a tin case of spirits.
The worthy man proceeded at some length with these dispiriting
particulars. Nor would his cheery companion wholly deny that there might
be a point of view from which such a case of extreme want of confidence
might, to the humane mind, present features not altogether welcome as
wine and olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory
considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for
evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a
somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's
words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way was
not to be condemned.
The other was not disposed to question the justice of Shakespeare's
thought, but would hardly admit the propriety of the application in this
instance, much less of the comment. So, after some further temperate
discussion of the pitiable miser, finding that they could not entirely
harmonize, the merchant cited another case, that of the negro cripple.
But his companion suggested whether the alleged hardships of that
alleged unfortunate might not exist more in the pity of the observer
than the experience of the observed. He knew nothing about the cripple,
nor had seen him, but ventured to surmise that, could one but get at the
real state of his heart, he would be found about as happy as most men,
if not, in fact, full as happy as the speaker himself. He added that
negroes were by nature a singularly cheerful race; no one ever heard of
a native-born African Zimmermann or Torquemada; that even from religion
they dismissed all gloom; in their hilarious rituals they danced, so to
speak, and, as it were, cut pigeon-wings. It was improbable, therefore,
that a negro, however reduced to his stumps by fortune, could be ever
thrown off the legs of a laughing philosophy.
Foiled again, the good merchant would not desist, but ventured still a
third case, that of the man with the weed, whose story, as narrated by
himself, and confirmed and filled out by the testimony of a certain man
in a gray coat, whom the merchant had afterwards met, he now proceeded
to give; and that, without holding back those particulars disclosed by
the second informant, but which delicacy had prevented the unfortunate
man himself from touching upon.
But as the good merchant could, perhaps, do better justice to the man
than the story, we shall venture to tell it in other words than his,
though not to any other effect.