the baggageman. “Goin’ to miss another--or do anything else?”
“No,” said Thomas, shortly.
He knew that the next train at five was the last. This would make it
possible to reach Fitzgerald at half-past nine. “Right in the heat
of the work. He’ll engage me to get rid of me,” laughed Thomas to
himself. Then he continued: “I never heard of a man missing every
train in a day, so I’ll risk calling on Laura before the next one
starts.”
Miss Sedgwick, the one he called Laura, lived out of town near the
railroad track, and two miles nearer New York than Winsonia station.
She was a captivating girl, and when Thomas was in her presence he
never took heed of time. He was lucky enough to find her at home. She
seemed glad to see him, and was much interested in his account of how
near he had come to catching some trains that day; and as nothing
is so engaging as a good listener, the minutes passed on pneumatic
tires. When at last he took note of the hour, it was five o’clock.
“That clock isn’t right, is it?”
“Yes, sir. Father keeps it at railroad time. Mercy! you’ve lost your
train again, haven’t you?”
“Laura, this time it’s bad. I won’t see him to-day, now, and
to-morrow may not do. Let me go and kick myself.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Tom. I hope to-morrow won’t be too late.”
Thomas squeezed her hand and left her, feeling rather blue.
The railroad track was but a block away, and he walked over to it,
not with suicidal intent, but just that he might tantalize himself
with a view of the train as it sped by, which it should do in about a
minute.
“At any rate,” said he, “it won’t be going around that dreadful
curve.”
It was the last of December, and the sun had set. When he reached
the track he saw, far away, a glimmer of the headlight of the
five-o’clock express.
Nearer and nearer it came. A moment more and it would rush by like a
meteor. But it didn’t. It slackened up at the very corner on which
Thomas stood, to allow an official of the road to jump off.
Thomas was not slow, if he did miss trains now and then. He swung
himself on to the smoker.
“Go’n’ far?” asked the brakeman.
“To New York,” was his reply.
“You’re in luck.”
“Well, I’ve not missed more than three or four trains in my life!”
said Thomas; and it was strictly true.
Half-past nine to the minute found him outside of the editorial rooms
of the “Courier-Journal.”
“Can I see Mr. Fitzgerald?” he asked of a boy who came in response to
a knock.
“No, sir; he went out of town yesterday. Be back to-morrow at twelve.”
* * * * *
“Did you get my letter already?” asked Mr. Fitzgerald of Thomas
Morley, when he came to his desk next morning and found that young
man waiting for him.
“Yes, sir; and here I am.”
“Well, sir, I like your promptness, and I’ll give you the place of a
man whom we had to discharge for being too slow. You seem to have
what a reporter needs most of all--the ‘get there’ quality.”
“I didn’t allow any trains to pass me,” said Thomas, modestly.
XXXV
THE WRECK OF THE “CATAPULT”
BY CL-RK R-SS-LL
The sea, the sea, the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free.
BARRY CORNWALL.
If there be those who love not the sea, with its storms, its seaweed,
its sharks and shrimps and ships, this is not the story for them,
and they would best weigh anchor and steer for some tale written by
a landlubber and full of green meadows and trees and such tommy-rot,
for this is to be chock-a-block with nautical phrases.
And who am I, you ask? I am Joseph Inland, the tenth of that name.
We have always lived and died here in Birmingham, and followed the
trade of cutlers; but when I was a babe of one year father told
mother ’twas time one member of the family followed the sea, wherever
it went, and that he intended to make a sailor of me.
So before I was six I had heard of sloops and ferry-boats and
belaying-pins and admirals and salt-junk, and longed to hear the wind
whistling through the maintopgallantmast, and could say “boat-swain”
as glibly as any sailor afloat. But father was in moderate
circumstances; and so, much as he would have liked to, he could
not afford to send me to sea when I was a boy, and that is why my
one-and-twentieth birthday came and went and I had never been farther
from Birmingham than my legs could carry me in a day; but you may be
sure that I subscribed to the “Seaman’s Daily,” and through a friend
who knew a sailor I had picked up such terms as “amidships,” “deck,”
“boom,” “bilge-water,” “forecastle,” and the like, so that I was a
seaman in everything save actual experience.
And in the amateur dramatic society of which I was a member I always
played sailors’ parts, and did them so well that when we played
“Hamlet” they changed the part of the grave-digger to that of a
sailor for me, and I made a great hit in it. The one who played
Hamlet didn’t like the change, as it interfered with his lines and
his business with a skull, and he refused to come on at all in that
act; but I sang a sea-song instead, and the newspaper came out and
said that my singing was no worse than his acting would have been,
which I thought pretty neat.
But enough of that. I was always fond of joking, and had nigh unto
a score of comical sayings that I used to repeat to my friends when
they would come to our house of an evening; but they didn’t often
come. My father said I was as comical a lad as he ever knew, and
would slap me on the back and roar that it was the funniest thing
he had heard in a twelvemonth when I made one particular joke, the
tenor of which I forget now. But all the jokes dealt with the sea.
Well, so much for my life up to my one-and-twentieth birthday. You
have learned that if ever a body was fitted for a sea life, that body
was mine.
By the time I was six-and-twenty I don’t believe there was a sea term
that I did not have at my tongue’s end, and I always wore my trousers
wide at the lower end, and kept a chew of tobacco in my mouth day and
night, although after a time I failed to notice any taste in it.
It was a gladsome sight to see me go rolling to my work in the
cutler’s shop (for I still followed the old trade), with a hearty
“Ho, landsman! good mornin’ to ye!” to all I met, in true sailor
fashion.
Our fare at home consisted of loblolly, ship’s-biscuit, salt-junk,
and plum-duff, with water drawn from casks. My dear old mother used
sometimes to wish for home-made bread and fresh meat and vegetables
and pump water; and I remember, one winter, brother died of the
scurvy; but I was better content than if he had died of some
landsman’s complaint, and mother was glad to put up with anything,
she was so proud that I was to be a seaman.
[Illustration]
I had a carpenter construct my parents’ bedroom so that the whole
floor could be rocked; and on stormy nights I would stay up and by
a simple mechanism keep it a-rocking until poor old mother would be
as sick as if she were in the Channel. But I never heard her murmur.
_She_ was fit for a sailor’s wife.
On such nights father never went to bed, but stayed down-stairs.
There was little of the seaman’s spirit in the old man.
When I was one-and-thirty I had a rare chance to ship before the mast
on a whaler sailing from Liverpool; but as business was pretty brisk
at the shop, I decided to wait, and the offer was not renewed when
she returned, three years later.
When I was forty dear mother entered her last port. The doctor, a
blundering landlubber, fond of landsmen’s phrases, said she died
of insufficient nutriment. Be that as it may or what it may, in
her I lost one whose heart was always on my going to sea. Douse my
top-lights if ever there was a craft that carried a stancher heart
from barnacle to binnacle than did the old lady, and I had her
buried in shrouds, with a cannon-ball at the foot of the coffin, as
befitted the mother of one who was going to be a seaman.
After she died I became even more impatient to be off to sea, for
there’s no air so pure as the sea air, no hearts so true as seamen’s
hearts, no weed like seaweed, and no water that’s fit to drink save
sea water; but business was pretty good, so, for the present, I
decided to stay ashore; but I always read the shipping news with as
much keenness as any sailor afloat.
* * * * *
And now I’ve come to the end of my yarn. I named it “The Wreck of
the ‘Catapult’” because it had a salty savor. It was the name of one
of my favorite Sunday-school books when I was a lad. Now I am an old
man, threescore and ten, and have been alone in the world a score
of years. Heaven denied me the blessing of children, but I have a
grandson who is as hot for the sea as I was.
Ah, me! Next week I am going to apply for admission to the Sailors’
Home; for although circumstances have prevented my ever seeing the
ocean or scenting its salty breezes, I have always been, and always
shall be, at heart a British seaman.
Shiver my timbers!
ESSAYS AT ESSAYS
[Illustration]
XXXVI
THE BULL, THE GIRL, AND THE RED SHAWL
There is no incident in all the realms of literature, from the “penny
dreadful” up to the three-volume novel, that has afforded so much
material for the pen of the writer of fiction as the delightful
episode of the bull, the young girl with the red shawl, and the young
girl’s lover. Sometimes the cast includes the lover’s hated rival,
but the story may be told without using him.
It is thirty-odd years since I first came across this thrilling
adventure in the pages of a child’s book, very popular at the
time. How well I remember how my young blood--to be exact, my
seven-year-old blood--thrilled as I mentally watched this frail
girl, with a start of just three feet, lead the tremendous and
horribly savage bull in a three-hundred-yard sprint, only to trip
at last on the only obstruction in the ten-acre field; how, just
as the bull reached her, she flung her red shawl a few rods to the
right; how the bull, leaving her, plunged after it; how she, weak
and trembling, ran to the stone wall and managed to vault it just
as her lover, a brawny blacksmith, who had seen the whole affair at
too great a distance to be of immediate service, reached the wall
and received her in his arms. “Oh, Kenston,” she murmured, “you have
saved my life!” And then she fainted, and I believe the bull ate up
the shawl; at any rate, its part in that particular story was ended.
I have always felt that, thrilling as this scene was, it had not been
worked for all it was worth; but an extensive reading since then has
brought me to the conclusion that, first and last, it has been worked
for its full value.
The next time that I read the enthralling narrative I was some years
older, but the memory of the other telling was still fresh within
me; and so, when, in the second chapter, I read about a savage old
bull, one Hector, the property of Squire Flint, the meanest man in
the county,--not that his meanness had anything to do with the story,
but it is one of the conventions that a savage bull shall be owned by
a cross, crabbed, and thoroughly stingy man,--I say, when I had read
thus far my pulse quickened. Inexperienced as I was, I somehow sensed
the coming situation. I seemed to know as by clairvoyance that,
however limited the heroine’s wardrobe might be in some respects,
there was one article of apparel that she surely possessed, or would
possess in time to meet the exigencies. True enough, in the very
next chapter her maiden aunt, a saintly old lady of ninety, died
and bequeathed to her sorrowing niece a red pongee shawl of great
value--as a bull-enrager. The book had seemed prosy at the start, but
now that I knew what was coming, and that it was _that_ that was
coming, I read on breathlessly.
[Illustration]
Needless to say that in the next chapter the young girl fell in love
with a strapping young fellow, who immediately proposed that they
take a walk. How well I knew, though they did not, where that walk
would lead them! The mad bull--in this case it was mad, although any
old bull will do, mad or not--was rampant in a lot a mile south of
the young girl’s house, and they started to walk due north; but I
knew full well that they would need to cross that particular pasture
before they got home, and a few pages later found them climbing over
a stone wall into the bull’s domain, and then they walked along,
intent only on their new-found happiness. The day was chilly,--in
the middle of a particularly hot July,--so that the girl could have
an excuse to wear her red shawl. Now, having brought two of the
actors upon the stage, the cue was soon given to the bull; and in a
moment the happy lovers, feeling the ground tremble beneath their
feet, turned and saw Hector, his horns gyrating with rage, his eyes
bulging out, and his head lowered as he thundered along straight for
the pongee bequest. To take her under his strong arm and to rush
forward were the only things for the young man to do, and he did
them; and then the rest ran as per schedule. I believe that in this
case the young man threw the girl into a tree and then plunged down
a woodchuck’s hole. At any rate, the girl was unharmed. That is the
one unalterable formula in constructing these bull stories: save the
girl unharmed. You may break the young man’s leg or arm, and you may
do what you will with the bull, but the young girl must come through
unscathed.
It was years before this moving incident ceased to hold me, and
in that time how many changes were rung on it! Once only was the
red shawl absent, and I wondered how in the world the bull was to
be infuriated, as he was a singularly mild beast in the earlier
chapters, and on Maydays had been festooned with garlands. Then, too,
the girl was in deep mourning--for her lover! But the ten-acre lot
was all right, and as the author was a clever man, I felt that he
would find a way to run the act with a small cast and no properties.
So I read on, and after wondering, together with the girl herself,
what could have caused the peaceful old bovine to chase her, tail up
and head down, the full length of a particularly long pasture, she
and I found out when she realized that, the day being sunny, she had
picked up her cousin’s parasol, which was necessarily of a brilliant
scarlet. She had no lover, for, as I say, he had died--two chapters
before the book was begun; but she did have presence of mind, and so
she inserted the point of the parasol in the bull’s mouth, and then
opened it, and while he was extracting it with his fore paws, she
reached the fence and vaulted it in the usual way.
The possibilities of the incident are by no means exhausted, and so
far from “Amos Judd” being the last story in which it was used, I
saw it in a tale published this month, and this time with the full
paraphernalia of hated rival, lover, red shawl, and all; but for me
it had lost its zest. To be sure, if they would make the hero an
athlete, and have him bravely stand his ground while the girl climbed
to the top of an enormous elm, and then, just as the bull lowered
his head to toss him, have the hero jump high in the air and make
the bull pass beneath him, and as he reached ground again seize the
bull, not by the horns, but by the tail, and, swinging it three times
around his head, dash it against a tree and stun it,--that is, if its
tail were securely welded to its body,--there would be an original
treatment of the subject. And if its tail were but loosely fixed to
it, the hero could pull it out, and the bull, filled with chagrin,
would walk off, dismayed and humiliated.
But, pending that form of the story, I am studiously avoiding all
novels that contain heroines with red shawls, or that make early
reference to fierce bulls, or that speak of a certain ten-acre
lot peculiarly adapted for lovers’ peregrinations; for, like the
successful burglar, I know the combination.
XXXVII
CONCERNING DISH-WASHING
Has the reader ever considered how much time is wasted every day by
busy women in the work of washing dishes? Of course, if a man has
plenty of money and, from philanthropic motives, engages a girl to
perform this unpleasant--I had almost said “duty”--this unpleasant
task, I suppose we cannot, strictly speaking, regard her time as
wasted, for she might else be loafing in an intelligence-office
without gaining a scrap of that article. I refer to the lives led
by weary housewives who, having no aid from a hired housemaid, day
out and day in will make themselves thin by the never-ceasing and
perfectly useless grind of dish-washing; for the dishes don’t stay
clean for more than a few hours.
For years I ate my meals in selfish content, little recking at what
cost the clean service was gained, until I discovered that my sister,
who is also my housekeeper, had sold her piano, not having time to
play upon it. I was shocked to think what a power this custom of
dish-washing had over the minds of the feminine portion of our public.
But this dreadful waste of time that is going on in thousands of
homes in this country every day was brought home to me in a still
more striking manner not long after. My sister went away to visit a
friend, and left me to keep bachelor’s hall. I had always had a good
taste for cooking, although hitherto my practice had been confined
to boiling eggs and buttering hot toast on a plate at the back of
the stove. The first meal that I prepared, a breakfast, consisted of
oatmeal, steak, fried potatoes, bread, butter, milk, and water. We
will pass over the meal itself, as its discussion is foreign to our
purpose. Indeed, the less said about it the better. It was nine when
I had finished eating, and dumped my dishes and knives and forks into
tepid water. I am a fast worker, but the clock in the neighboring
church had ceased striking twelve when my last dish was wiped and put
away.
I had hoped to do a little writing that morning, but it was now
time to get luncheon. Luckily, that meal called into play very few
dishes, and by two, or half-past, I had made an end of my second
stint. Feeling elated that I had a whole afternoon on my hands, I
prepared a course dinner. I found some cold soup in the refrigerator,
and I bought a bluefish, five or six pounds of beef for roasting,
some Parker House rolls, and a lemon-pie for dessert. There were
lettuce and eggs in the house, and plenty of canned vegetables. I
also made some good coffee, with the aid of a French coffee-pot, that
indispensable adjunct of a well-ordered household. I found that the
courses were very hard to manage so that they would follow in their
proper order. They weren’t even satisfied to finish together like
evenly matched racers, but the roast was burned five minutes before I
thought of warming up the soup, and ten minutes before I had scaled
the fish. Then the latter wouldn’t broil readily until most of it
was in the fire. The vegetables I forgot entirely, and I decided at
the last moment to deny myself the salad, as dinner was waiting and
I was hungry. I might add that I inadvertently cut the pie with the
fish-knife, and that cast a damper on the dessert. However, as I
said, the coffee was good--and, anyhow, I am digressing.
[Illustration]
It was seven when I emptied my dishes into the water, and I worked
with a will, as I had a very exciting novel that I was desirous
of finishing. It was a few minutes past eleven when I emptied my
dish-pan for the last time, and then I was ripe for bed.
As time wore on I became more dexterous in the use of the dish-cloth
and -towel, and the day before sister returned I devoted but six
hours to dish-washing. To be sure, I had given up course dinners,
because they took too many plates, and for other reasons that need
not to be quoted here.
As I say, I am a fast worker, and yet it took me over six hours a
day to clean the crockery. Assuming that a woman can do it in eight
hours, she wastes half of her waking moments in drudgery beside which
the making of bricks without straw would be a pastime.
There is absolutely nothing in the dish-washing habit to recommend
it. It is ruinous to hands and temper, and, indeed, I do not see
but that it is immoral. Anything that puts us in the proper mood for
swearing is immoral, and there is nothing in the whole housekeeping
routine so conducive to highly spiced language as dish-washing.
And to what purpose is this waste of time? I won’t go so far as to
advocate a return to the fingers that were used before forks for the
purpose of conveying food to the mouth, for that would but relieve
us from the washing of cutlery; but I will say that the man who will
invent a cheap yet very ornate dinner service that may be destroyed
after once using will have earned the undying gratitude of the women
of this country and a princely fortune besides.
And when he has invented it, sister may go on another visit.
XXXVIII
A PERENNIAL FEVER
The world hears much of the dangers of typhoid and yellow and scarlet
fever, and the skill of physicians is ever employed to reduce those
dangers to a minimum; but in every country, at all seasons of the
year, there is a fever that numbers its victims by the thousand, and
yet no doctor has ever prescribed for it, nor is there any drug in
the pharmacopœia that will alleviate it.
The malady to which I refer is hen fever.
If a city woman intends marrying a city man, and then moving out a
little way into the country, as she values her peace of mind, let her
make sure that he is immune. Unless, indeed, both are prepared to
come down with it at once. For it is unlike all other fevers in that
a man and his wife may have it together and be happy; but if he or
she have it alone, then woe be to that house.
The germs of hen fever are carried in a chance conversation, in a
picture of gallinaceous activity, in the perusal of a poultry-book.
A man hears or looks or reads, and the mischief is done. The subtle
poison is in his blood, although he knows it not.
Hen fever takes various forms. With some it is manifested in a desire
to keep a few blooded fowls and breed for points; with another, to
keep a few birds for the sake of fresh eggs and broilers: but in
whatsoever form it come, it will cause the upheaval of its victim’s
most cherished plans and habits.
He may have been an ardent admirer of Shakspere, and in the evenings
it has been his wont to read aloud to his wife while she knitted; but
now, little recking what she does, he reads to himself “Farm Poultry”
or “The Care of Hens,” or--and this is the second stage of the
disease--he reads aloud to her that hens cannot thrive without plenty
of gravel, that cracked wheat is better than whole corn for growing
pullets, that the best way to cure a hen of eating her own eggs is to
fill one with mustard, etc.
[Illustration]
Time was when he had an opinion on politics, on finance, on
literature, on the thousand and one things that make for
conversation, and his neighbors dropped in to hear him talk
engagingly of what he had read or seen; but now, when they come, he
tells them that his brown Leghorn hen laid twenty eggs in twenty-five
days, while his buff Cochin laid only eight in the same time; that
his white Plymouth Rock is crop-bound, and his Wyandotte rooster has
the pip.
Lucky indeed is his wife if he stick to the good old way of hatching
chickens by hens instead of kerosene-oil; for if he get an incubator
she had better get a divorce. How many homes have been wrecked by
patent incubators will never be known.
But even if the fevered one stick to the natural method of hatching,
there will be many times when his wife will wonder why she left a
comfortable and sociable home to spend her evenings alone; for he
will be in the hen-house, setting hens, or washing soiled eggs, or
divesting nestlings of the reluctant shell, or dusting his whole
flock with the snuff-like insecticide, or kerosening their roosts.
With some the fever never abates; with some it is intermittent; some
have it hardest in the spring of the year, when hens are laying their
prettiest, and profits may be figured in money as well as on paper.
But whether it be light or heavy, hen fever will run its course
without let or hindrance; and, as I have hinted, happy is the wife
who comes down with it simultaneously with her husband; for, though
their neighbors will shun them as they would a deadly pestilence,
yet they will be company for each other, and will prate ceaselessly,
yet cheerily, upon the best foods for laying hens, the best exposure
for coops, how many hens can live in one house with best results,
when a chicken should be weaned of bread, what breed of hens is least
idiotic, and kindred topics.