worldly gains, and so he was; but he owed much to the economy and good
sense of the quiet woman who was glad to be his helper.
“Oh, you will shine enough, Martha, so that I shall be proud of you!
After the furniture is once in the house we will invite everybody—yes,
everybody, rich and poor. It’s great folly for a man to make social
distinctions for himself as soon as he has a few thousands. I want
to have them all enjoy the house. It’s the handsomest house in the
village, and they’ll all be glad to come. The caterer will provide the
supper, and you’ll just have to shake hands with the guests and look
pleased.”
“What do you think I had better wear, Josiah?”
“Oh, you must have a new dress for the occasion! I like garnet. Get a
garnet silk with a good deal of velvet, and you’ll look handsome;” and
Mr. Midland smiled in his big-hearted way that had won him friends
from his boyhood.
The new moon had risen in the west, and the stars were coming out
brightly, as if all nature even was glad at Mr. Midland’s success. As
they left the house the church bell rang out.
“Let us go,” said Mr. Midland. “The minister told me the other day that
an evangelist was coming here. I forgot all about it, but it might pay
us to go and hear him once. Religion isn’t a thing of emotion to me,
but I like to hear good preaching. I’ve never had any notion of joining
a church myself, but I don’t know what the community would be without
the churches. Property would go down pretty quickly.”
The minister, as was human, felt the blood quicken in his veins as the
successful railroad-man and his wife entered. Not that they were more
important than poor people, but he knew that money consecrated to good
ends is a power almost unlimited. He could only silently pray that some
word would be uttered which would touch Mr. Midland’s heart.
The young evangelist preached not an extraordinary sermon, but a
simple talk upon the power of a good life—a life that came but once
and was spent so quickly. Mr. Midland sat like one awakened out of
sleep. True, he had made money; he had a good moral character; but
he would go through life but once, and he was living entirely for
himself. He had never realized what a wonderful gift from heaven
this life is, with all its possibilities to help others, to make the
poor comfortable, the sad happy, to remove the causes of crime and
discontent. He seemed, all at once, to have made a voyage of discovery,
and to have found a new land.
He said little on the way home, except to tell Martha that he felt
strangely, and that she must go to bed and sleep, but he would sit
up awhile and think. Mr. Midland did think long and carefully by the
shaded lamp. He thought over his whole past experience. He had been
prospered, and he owed all to a Higher Power. And after he had thought,
he prayed.
In the morning he said: “Martha, I have given up the house-warming. I
have decided to use the money to send a boy to college to become a
preacher;” and then he added, “for a man who turns the life of another
heavenward does the greatest work in the world, and I must help to do
the greatest hereafter.”
Mrs. Midland looked confused for a minute, and then she said, half
audibly, “I am very glad, Josiah.” After that night Mr. Midland’s face
took on an expression that was noted till his death, years afterward.
It was as though he had talked with the angels, and joined a new
brotherhood. The genial man became more genial, more considerate,
more self-controlled. It became literally true that, like his Master,
“he went about doing good.” Without children of his own, he devoted
his property to the giving of the Gospel to the people. He joined
heartily, by voice and money, in all that elevated mankind. He built
houses for the poor; he educated orphans; he held prayer-meetings in
sparsely-settled districts; he labored for temperance; he became the
idol and ideal man of the community. He carried out his plan of using
the house-warming money to educate a young man for the ministry, and
lived to see his gift return a thousand-fold interest.
HANNAH AND JOE.
IN THE YEAR 1851 Captain Budington, of Groton, Conn., passed the winter
in Cumberland inlet, west of Greenland. Here he met Joe and Hannah
on the island of Kim-ick-su-ic, so called because its flat centre,
covered with grass, resembles a dogskin. Hannah was twelve years old,
dressed in fur pantaloons and short fur overdress, and bore the name of
Too-koo-li-too in her own language. Joe was a good deal older, and his
real name was Ebierbing.
A few years afterward a merchant from Hull, England, Mr. Bolby, met
them at Cumberland gulf, where they had come off the island to trade,
and prevailed upon them to take the long journey to England. When he
reached home he made a large company, and in the presence of these
guests the young woman Hannah was married to Joe. Mr. Bolby took them
to several places in England and Scotland, and they were finally
presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Queen was deeply
interested in these people from the far North in British America, and
asked them to dine with her. If the Queen was pleased with the sincere,
uneducated, fur-dressed pair, Hannah was no less pleased with the
gracious Queen in her elegant home, so entirely different from a snow
hut. She always said Victoria was “very kind, very much lady.” After
two years they returned to Cumberland inlet, and in 1860 Charles F.
Hall, the explorer, met them.
Everybody in both England and America had become deeply interested in
the fate of Sir John Franklin. He had left England in 1845 with two
ships, the “Erebus” and “Terror,” with one hundred and thirty-four
persons, in search of the North Pole. After two years relief parties
were sent out to find them. Lady Franklin spent all her large fortune
in sending out ships to search for her missing husband.
Finally, in 1850, the graves of three of the men were found at the far
North, on Beechy island, west of Hannah’s home, so that the course
which Franklin took was known. Four years later Dr. Rae, of England,
heard from the Eskimos that a large company of white men had starved
on King William Land, far to the northwest of Baffin’s bay, and he
obtained from the Eskimos many articles which belonged to Franklin and
his men.
After England had spent over five million dollars in searching for
Franklin it was ascertained that both his ships had gone to pieces in
the ice off the west coast of King William Land, and that his poor
men had starved and frozen, as they wandered over the ice in a vain
search for food or friends. Then skeletons were found in boats or in
snowbanks, and their boots, watches, and silver had become the property
of the Eskimos. Sir John died two years after the ships left England,
and must have been buried in the ocean.
Some persons believed that the Franklin party were not all dead.
Charles Francis Hall was an engraver at Cincinnati, O. He was poor, and
with no influential friends, but he felt that the Lord had called him
to the work of finding some of the Franklin men. He read all he could
find about Arctic life. He asked money of prominent men and learned
societies, and finally, after enough obstacles to discourage any other
man, obtained funds to build a boat and put up twelve hundred pounds
of food for the journey. A New London firm gave him a free passage on
one of their ships, and he went, in 1860, to the far North, discovering
relics of Sir Martin Frobisher’s expedition, made three hundred years
before. His boat was lost, so he had to return to America, and brought
with him Joe and Hannah, who had been with him two years, and who were
devotedly attached to him.
In 1864 Hall started again with Joe and Hannah, and north of Hudson bay
lived five years among the Eskimos, eating their raw food and living in
their igloos or snow huts. Joe, with great skill, would kill a walrus,
which sometimes weighs two thousand pounds, or would watch two whole
nights near a hole in the ice where the seal comes up to breathe, that
he might spear it for his master.
In 1866, May 14, the only child of Joe and Hannah died, while on one
of Hall’s journeys. According to custom, the distracted mother at the
plain funeral carried the dead baby in a fur blanket suspended from
her neck. Captain Hall put this note in the fur cap covering the head
of the child: “These are the mortal remains of little King William, the
only child of Ebierbing and Too-koo-li-too, the interpreters of the
lost Franklin Research Expedition. God hath its soul now, and will keep
it from harm.”
Later, Hall visited King William Land, and brought away one hundred and
twenty-five pounds of relics of Franklin and his men. Among these was
a complete skeleton, proved from the filling of a tooth to be that of
an officer of the ship “Erebus.” Hall felt sure now that all the party
were dead. Joe and Hannah came back to the States with Hall, bringing
a little three-year-old girl whom they adopted. They bought her of
her parents for a sled. Hannah named her Sylvia Grinnell, after the
Grinnell family, celebrated for their gifts towards Arctic research,
but her real name was Punna.
Captain Hall made his third voyage in the ship “Polaris” in 1871 for
the North Pole, taking his devoted Joe and Hannah and little Punna.
He reached a higher point in Smith sound than had been reached by
any other vessel at that time, and anchored in a harbor protected by
an iceberg four hundred and fifty feet long and three hundred broad,
calling the place Thank God harbor. In the autumn of this year Hall
died very suddenly, and his men spent two days in digging a grave only
two feet deep. He was buried at eleven in the forenoon, but so dark was
it in that high latitude that lanterns were carried. Poor Hannah sobbed
aloud at the death of her best friend. The party on the “Polaris”
determined to return, but, being caught in the ice, were obliged to
abandon her and throw the provisions and clothing out on the ice-floe.
In the midst of this work, in the night, the ship drifted away, with
fourteen persons on board, leaving on a piece of ice one hundred yards
long and seventy-five broad Captain Tyson and eight white men and nine
Eskimos, including three women and a baby eight weeks old. Hannah and
Punna were among them.
A dreadful snow-storm came on, and the shivering creatures huddled
together under some musk-ox skins. Later they built a little house
from materials thrown out of the ship, and floated down Baffin’s bay
and Davis strait, the ice constantly crumbling and the sea washing over
them. They used all their boats save one for fuel, and were only kept
alive through the heroic efforts of Joe and another Eskimo, Hans, who
caught some seals for them, which were eagerly eaten uncooked, without
removing the hairy skin. They had only a little mouldy bread, and the
sufferings of the children from hunger were painful to witness.
Once, when nearly all were dead from starvation, Joe saved them by
killing a bear. He and Hannah refused to leave Captain Tyson and the
party when they were drifting past their homes at Cumberland inlet,
even when it was probable that the Eskimos themselves must be used
for food by the famished white men. After drifting one thousand five
hundred miles in six months (one hundred and ninety-six days), one of
the most thrilling journeys on record, the party were rescued off the
coast of Labrador by the English ship “Tigress.”
Hannah and Joe settled at Groton in 1873, in a little house purchased
for them by their good friend, “Father Hall.” Joe became a carpenter,
and Hannah made up furs and other articles on her sewing-machine.
The next year Hannah, at the age of thirty-eight, died of consumption,
her health broken by the exposure on the ice-floe. She had long been an
earnest Christian, loving and reading her Bible daily. She was tenderly
cared for by Mrs. Captain Budington and others, saying at the last,
“Come, Lord Jesus, and take thy poor creature home!” A handsome stone
marks the grave of the faithful Hannah in the cemetery. Joe came often
to the graves on the hillside of Groton, and said at last, “Hannah
gone! Punna gone! Me go now again to King William Land; I have to
fight; me no care.” He went with Lieutenant Schwatka in the Franklin
search party, June 19, 1878, and never returned to the United States.
BURTON CONE’S REASON.
YEARS after Coleridge wrote the beautiful “Hymn before Sunrise in the
Valley of Chamouni,” which Felicia Hemans said she would give all her
poems to have written,—among a group of strangers standing in awe
before Mont Blanc was a man who seemed forty-five, from his hair fully
half gray and his quiet, dignified bearing, though he must have been
younger. He was absorbed in his own thoughts. He did not look at any
face about him, but seemed spell-bound by the sublimity of the scene.
In that vast mountain, white with eternal snows, with the rivers,
fed by the glaciers, turbulent at its base, the sun clothing it with
rainbows, he saw the same God who had compassed his life, as the
stalwart pines hedged in the grand mount before him.
After a time, as through that as yet undeveloped science of unseen
power between mind and mind, he felt a presence. He was conscious of
eyes fixed upon him, conscious that somebody he had known and loved
was near him. A hand was laid on his shoulder.
“Burton, you’re the last man in all the world I thought of seeing. Ten
years since you and I travelled together, and you yet on the wing? I
supposed you had settled down to some life-work, and was surrounded by
loves and cares ere this. You and I have stood here together before.”
The speaker was a genial, generous man, somewhat Cone’s junior in
look and manner, whose sorrows, whether many and great or not, could
not long crush his happy heart. His sympathies were quick, his hopes
naturally bright, and his nature ardent. The decade that had passed
since the former companionship had aged one more than the other. The
one had been giving time and heart to business, but had lived alone,
though a crowded world was about him. The other had been kept young and
fresh by the love of a cheerful wife and sunny daughter, and the years
had gone by rapidly and more than ordinarily well stored with good
deeds.
“Come, Burton, I am tiring of this road and grandeur. Let’s go back to
the hotel and have one of the old friendly talks. Nature has lost half
its beauty now that only one pair of eyes sees it—and I have no one
to tell of the beautiful or strange things I have seen. You don’t need
friendship as I do. You are made of sterner stuff. You are Mont Blanc
personified.”
Cone’s mind was full of the grandeur before him, but his heart, cold as
he was, was keenly alive to the needs of those who had been friends, so
together they walked arm in arm to their lodgings.
“Now, let’s talk over the ten years, Cone. Ten years make a fool or a
wise man of a fellow—carry him up to the gates or down to the depths.”
“Tell me what they have done for you, Marsh. You know how much I have
to thank you and your young wife for the sunshine you put into my life
when we travelled together before. She seemed like a sister to me. She
understood me; and that is where most women fail. They do not know
us, or we do not know them, so our true natures never come side by
side; but she seemed to feel the pulse of my life. She knew just when
I needed jovial words and when I needed sympathy or quiet. She had the
tact I have heard so often described, but seldom seen, and a pure, good
heart back of it. I fear all hasn’t gone right with you. Can it be that
you are walking alone, like myself?”
Tears gathered in Marsh’s eyes. He had almost a woman’s heart and a
woman’s love. “It isn’t hard for you to stand alone, but for me it is
crushing. I buried my wife in England six months ago. We came for her
health, but she failed rapidly and went away soon after we arrived.
Our little girl is boarding with friends, and I wander anywhere,
everywhere,—so I can forget. I cannot go back to America. Nothing
binds me there. I seem unfit for labor, and I am adrift. You know she
was like an anchor. I depended upon her judgment, upon her help, upon
her love. When a woman leans entirely upon a man, and she is taken
away, he may feel as though something dear and beautiful had gone out
from him; but when a woman has strength enough to be a companion, a
counsellor, in the deeds and plans of every day,—when she is not a
pet merely, but a guide to everything noble,—when, whether you will
or not, you are kept upon a plane of right and duty and manhood,—what
shall a poor relying heart do?”
“Would you wish to forget, Marsh? I would put such a blessing away in
my heart and grow strong from daily looking at it.”
“I can’t keep it, Cone. I must get away from such memories. I feel as
though I drifted hither and thither, because there is no hand on the
helm. To remember is misery: to forget might be relief.”
“And yet, do you not owe such a wife a loving, yearning remembrance?
One might forget a flower that blossomed for his pleasure for a day or
a week; but hold in grateful memory a spring that opened in the desert
of a parched life and became an unfailing supply. Memories sometimes
are almost as sweet as present realities, and sometimes we are made
even stronger by the one than by the other.”
“That may be good philosophy for those who have never loved and lost.
No one can know till he has the trial. I have one left, I know, but
that does not fill the place of the other, and perchance no one ever
could.”
“You must go back with me to our fatherland. I am nearly through my
journeying, for it seems idle work for me now. Besides, I have had
premonitions that I should make ready for another journey. You seem
startled. Ten years have worn upon me, for they have been years of
constant and hard labor. I could not forget, and would not; but hope
will fade into fruition by and by.”
“Cone, you ought to tell me of your life. Much as you respected my
wife, you never raised the curtain from the scenes which transpired
before we met you. Why have you lived to your age, and taken no heart
into your own to bless and hold? Your principles are like adamant, and
would keep you anywhere, but every man and woman needs to have his or
her heart uncloistered, that others may grow strong and unselfish with
him. This working out life’s plan alone, with no giving or receiving of
loves, seems a mistake to me. Has your heart anything hidden away in
it, or are you proof to what you may think the weaker acts of life?”
Cone’s face seemed a little troubled. Not one man or woman out of ten
thousand reaches the age of forty without having loved or been loved,
and felt blessed joy or bitter pain in one or the other. Was he indeed
different from the rest of mankind? He manifested no partiality for
women, except a deference that everybody pays to what it supposes
exalted and ennobling. He had received numerous proofs of their esteem
for him, and indications that they would not repel his attentions. He
was often the subject of remark, from his striking face and manner, but
when all the queries had been asked and unanswered they said, “There
must be a reason for all this, and time will tell it.”
He had been touched in heart by Marsh’s utter helplessness. He knew
better than anybody else what a centre she had been to his thought and
his affections. He sympathized with him. Perhaps the doors of his own
inner sanctuary, locked for a half-score years, might swing back just
once, and let a weary friend come in and find consolation.
“Come to-night, Marsh, and I will talk with you. Good-by till then.”
Alone and unperceived he stole out to sit under the majestic shadows
of Mont Blanc, and worship. Nobody with a God in his heart ever stands
there without holding communion with Him. No wonder that the lofty
peaks, echoing cañons, and wondrous waterfalls of our own country
have written the names of more than one poet on the pages of American
literature! Such scenes are the nurseries in which great minds develop.
Such grand handiwork of the Builder draws every man very near to Him.
Burton Cone had never forgotten the scenes through which he had passed.
Though some things had been laid away and sealed with the seal of
silence for over a dozen years, they were fresh to him as though they
had taken place that very morning. Perhaps he did not need sympathy
as some need it; perhaps he did not wish to burden others with his
feelings.
It seemed almost twilight in the room, the lights were turned down so
low.
“Sit down, Marsh, till we talk of the past. You have wondered if
there is anything back of this life you have known. Aye, much, very
much! You have wondered if I ever loved, and why I did not love some
one now, when I so reverence woman. Away back in New England, in a
little town near a beautiful city on the Connecticut, is the home of
my childhood. That is precious to me, though I have not seen it for
years. Near it is a large brick house, painted white, with long rows
of firs and pines leading to it. It looks like an old castle. In that
home was a young girl who from her childhood was my ideal. We played
together as children, we roamed through the woods and meadows, we read
and sang and talked of things beyond our years, because her nature
held me above myself. She was not beautiful to others, perchance; but
to me her large dark eyes, high brow, and glossy hair, with her quiet,
dignified manner, made her a queen. She never seemed to do wrong. She
had to ask no one’s forgiveness. She never made mistakes. She had no
need for regrets. Nobody thought to be rude or rough to Mary Fairchild,
or in her presence. She was always calm, always genial and kind,
always considerate. She never seemed like the rest of us. I fancied
she had been sent from heaven to keep our earthly minds and tastes
somewhat akin to theirs. I always feared she might at any time take her
departure to the land where she seemed rightly to belong.
“She went away to receive her education, and I studied hard to make
myself, if possible, some day worthy of her. Occasionally she wrote me,
and those letters seemed to me of peculiar value. I read each one over
and over again, till I knew every word and how every letter was made.
The slightest allusion to friendship for me seemed a mine of joy, and I
put the letter next my heart to read as often as I should get a little
leisure. She never gave me encouragement that she loved me more than
others, always treating us all in the same gracious, kindly way. I was
naturally timid, and though I did not tell her I loved her my desire
to be in her company, my extreme joy when I met her, my blushing
cheeks and my glad eyes, must have told her over and over again that
I idolized her. I was active, energetic, ardent, but I lacked her
spirituality and finer qualities of soul. She revelled in all that was
beautiful and artistic. I never expected that she could love me as I
did her. I thought her nature too ethereal, but I hoped that I might
sometime live in her presence and be guided by her blessed spirit in my
daily life.