DISENCHANTED.--HOME AGAIN.
I had secured the adoption of our dictionaries in every county visited
by me, and now the publishers desired me to remain on the Pacific
coast permanently, without salary, relying on commissions on sales of
their books made by me and my sub-agents by canvassing, from house to
house. This financial proposition was far from being alluring, for the
laws enacted by a national democratic rule of four years had ruined
many of the principal industries of this section, and the larger
cities required a license fee of twenty dollars per week from all
canvassing agents. Many houses displayed large signs, "No book agents
allowed here," and they kept ferocious dogs to enforce the rule. The
majority of the people were poor; the rich were already supplied with
dictionaries; and the schools would have no funds available with which
to buy reference books for nearly a year. Competing agents had visited
every house before my arrival on the coast, and I therefore resigned
my worthless position, and took the Eastern agency for a Tonic Port
which had, by its wonderful efficacy, delivered many from the horrors
of nervous prostration, anaemia, and kindred diseases which afflict so
many of the human race.
Another disenchantment,--another Eden becomes a Sahara. I had reached
the Pacific coast just when the departing rainy season had left all
nature fair as a poet's dream of love, and, vainly dreaming that this
was perpetual, it seemed as if I would sigh for no other heaven. But
the scorching heat and Siroccoes from the Mohave Desert followed close
upon the rear-guard of the retreating, life-giving rain-clouds, and
soon the lovely flowers died; the enchanting green grass withered; the
soul of the beautiful vanished, and the suffocating dust storms buried
the earth in a ghostly shroud, save where wealth was sufficient to
bring the mountain streams for irrigation.
I had for a time reveled in the dreams which fleetingly haunt all
mortals, that there I had found the lost Arcadia, where balmy zephyrs
fan the brow into ecstasy forever; but, alas! After a brief respite
I had, in that land which the real estate sharks called "Paradise,"
suffered more from alternating chilling winds and withering heat than
ever before; one day sweltering in the thinnest of seersuckers, and
perhaps the very next shivering in all the woolens I could command.
Without a shadow of regret or even a backward look, I bade farewell to
the Pacific and returned to the Atlantic of my youth, until the day
dawns and the shadows flee away.
I sojourned for some months in the cities of Richmond, Baltimore,
Providence, and Philadelphia, endeavoring to impress upon the minds of
the physicians the importance of prescribing my remedy, but with no
glittering financial success, lingering for weeks in the last named
city, on the very verge of the grave to which I was brought by the
filthy water of that grotesquely misnamed "City of Brotherly Love."
I had been, in former years, the champion school-book agent of New
England, and publishers had often told me that if I ever returned to
this vocation, they would gladly employ me. I applied to one of these
for a position, requesting a man who owed his success in business
entirely to my friendly aid and instructions, to speak a good word for
me, but he at once showed his gratitude by securing the appointment
for himself, being aided and abetted by an influential bald-headed
man who hated me, simply because I had sent to him a friend who
represented a hair restorer. Said bald-headed man had many reasons
to, and had often claimed to be, a friend of mine; but was foolishly
sensitive about his lack of hirsute adornment, and said I insulted him
by referring to his billiard-ball caput. Truly, gratitude is a lost
art, and some friends immediately become enemies when they can secure
from you no more plunder.
It is exceedingly difficult for a man who has passed the "death line"
of the half century, to find a place where he can do good and get
good; the hustling crowd of younger and stronger competitors push
him to the wall or trample him beneath their feet, in the terrific
scramble for the bare necessities of life. He drifts into the
depressing occupation of book or life insurance agency, and at once
every so-called friend, who pretended to worship him when he was
prosperous, gives him the cold shoulder, and "poor devil" is the most
complimentary epithet with which he is greeted.
Analogous with that wonderful Gulf Stream, once a myth, still a
mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all
of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny
childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the
temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as
the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely shores of old age,
snow-crowned and ice-veined; and individual destinies seem to resemble
the tangled drift on those broad gulf billows, strewn on barren
beaches, stranded upon icebergs, some to be scorched under equatorial
heats, some to perish by polar perils; a few to take root and
flourish, building imperishable landmarks; and many to stagnate in the
long inglorious rest of the Sargasso Sea.
But really to the faithful soul nothing is lost; though the great
prizes of earth are denied us, every heroic endeavor, every struggle
to benefit the world sends treasures on high to our credit in the
grand bank of heaven.
There are the thoughts that one by one died 'ere we gave them birth,
The songs we tried in vain to sing, too sweet, too beautiful for earth.
No endeavor is in vain;
Its reward is in the doing,
And the rapture of pursuing,
Is the prize the vanquished gain.
We are all conscious of these songs we have tried in vain to sing, and
we are confident we will yet sing them when the bodily impediments are
swept away, and, as the earthly shadows lengthen, as the chill winds
of old age strengthen, we more and more appreciate the wonderful
expression of this thought, in that sweetest of all poems of the minor
key, called "The voiceless."
"We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber;
But o'er the silent brother's breast,
The wild flowers who will stoop to number.
"A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those who never sing,
But die with all their music in them.
"Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow;
But where the glistening night dews weep
O'er nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.
"If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven."
We have done our best according to the light that has been given; we
will continue to do so until the end, and we are soothed and sustained
by the inspiring thought so sweetly expressed by one of our greatest
poets.
"I know not where God's islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.
"And so beside the silent sea,
I wait the muffled oar:
No harm from Him can come to me
On ocean or on shore."
Only waiting till the angels
Open wide the mystic gate,
At whose feet I long have lingered,
Weary, sad, and desolate;
Even now I hear their footsteps,
And their voices far away--
When they call me, I am waiting,
Only waiting to obey.
AFTERMATH