As if with Heaven a bargain they had made
To practise goodness--and to be well paid,
They, too, devoutly as their fathers did,
Sin, sack, and sugar, equally forbid;
Holding each hour unpardonably spent
That on the leger leaves no monument.--_Parsons_.
Mr. Erastus Flintlock sat at his counting room, in his old
leather-bottomed arm chair. Vassall Morton, his newly emancipated
ward, just twenty-one, stood before him, the undisputed master of his
father's ample wealth.
"What, no profession, Mr. Morton? None whatever, sir?"
"No, sir, none whatever."
The old man's leathery countenance expressed mingled wrath and
concern.
Flintlock was a stanch old New Englander, boasting himself a true
descendant of the Puritans, whose religious tenets he inherited, along
with most of their faults, and not a few of their virtues. He was
narrow as a vinegar cruet, and just in all his dealings. There were
three subjects on which he could converse with more or less
intelligence--politics, theology, and business. Beyond these, he knew
nothing; and except American history and practical science, he had an
indistinct idea that any thing more came of evil. He distrusted a
foreigner, and abhorred a Roman Catholic. All poetry, but Milton and
the hymn book, was an abomination in his eyes; and he looked upon
fiction as an emanation of the devil. To the list of the cardinal
virtues he added another, namely, attention to business. In his early
days, he had come from his native Connecticut with letters to Morton's
father, who, seeing his value, took him as a clerk, placed unbounded
trust in him, and at last made him his partner. He was a youth of slow
parts, solid judgment, solemn countenance, steady habits, and a most
unpliable conscience. He had no follies, allowed himself no
indulgences, and could enjoy no other pleasures than business and
church-going. He attended service morning, afternoon, and evening, and
never smiled on Sundays. His old age was as upright and stiff-necked
as might have been augured from such a youth. He thought the rising
generation were in a very bad way, and once gave his son a scorching
lecture on vanity and arrogance, because the latter, who had been two
years at college, very modestly begged to be excused from carrying a
roll of sample cotton, a yard and a half long, from his father's store
at one end of the town, to the shop of a retail dealer at the other.
"What, no profession, Mr. Morton?"
"None whatever, sir."
Morton was prepared for the consequence of these fatal words, and
sought to arm himself with the needful patience. It would be folly, he
knew, to debate the point with his guardian, who was tough and
unmanageable as a hickory stump; who would never see any side of a
question but his own, and on whose impervious brain reasons fell like
rain drops on a tarpauline. Flintlock, therefore, opened fire
unanswered, and discoursed for a full hour on duty, propriety, and a
due respect for what he called the general sense of the community,
which, as he assured his auditor, demands that every one should have
some fixed and stated calling, by which he may be recognized as a
worthy and useful member of society. Sometimes he grew angry, and
scolded his ward with great vehemence; then subsided into a pathetic
strain, and exhorted him, for the sake of his excellent father, not to
grow old in idleness and frivolity. Morton, respectful, but obdurate,
heard him to an end, assured him that, though renouncing commerce and
the professions, his life would by no means be an idle one, thanked
him for his care of his property, and took his leave; while the old
merchant sank back into his chair, and groaned dismally, because the
son of his respected patron was on the road to perdition.
A moment's retrogression will explain the young man's recusancy.
On a May evening, some two months before the close of his college
career, Morton sat in lonely meditation on a wooden bench, by the
classic border of Fresh Pond. By every canon of polite fiction, his
meditation ought to have been engrossed by some object of romantic
devotion; but in truth they were of a nature wholly mundane and
sublunary.
He had been much exercised of late upon the choice of a career for his
future life. He liked none of the professions for itself, and had no
need to embrace it for support. He loved action, and loved study; was
ambitious and fond of applause. He had, moreover, enough of the
American in his composition never to be happy except when in pursuit
of something; together with a disposition not very rare among young
men in New England, though seldom there, or elsewhere, joined to his
abounding health and youthful spirits--a tendency to live for the
future, and look at acts and things with an eye to their final issues.
Thierry's Norman Conquest had fallen into his hands soon after he
entered college. The whole delighted him; but he read and re-read the
opening chapters, which exhibit the movements of the various races in
their occupancy of the west of Europe. This first gave him an impulse
towards ethnological inquiries. He soon began to find an absorbing
interest in tracing the distinctions, moral, intellectual, and
physical, of different races, as shown in their history, their
mythologies, their languages, their legends, their primitive art,
literature, and way of life. The idea grew upon him of devoting his
life to such studies.
Seated on the wooden bench at the edge of Fresh Pond, he revolved, for
the hundredth time, his proposed scheme, and summed up what he
regarded as its manifold advantages. It would enable him to indulge
his passion for travel, lead him over rocks, deserts, and mountains,
conduct him to Tartar tents and Cossack hovels, make him intimate with
the most savage and disgusting of barbarians; in short, give full
swing to his favorite propensities, and call into life all his
energies of body and mind. In view of this prospect, he clinched his
long-cherished purpose, devoting himself to ethnology for the rest of
his days.
He had a youthful way of thinking that any resolution deliberately
adopted by him must needs be final and conclusive, and was fully
convinced that his present determination was a species of destiny,
involving one of three results--that he should meet an early death,
which he thought very likely; that he should be wholly disabled by
illness, which he thought scarcely possible; or that, in the fulness
of time, say twenty or twenty-five years, his labors would have issue
in some prodigious work, redounding to his own honor and the
unspeakable profit of science.