DEAD HEADS.
"D. H." Everybody knows what D. H. is. He sees it on the telegram that
costs him nothing. He sees it in the glass when he looks at himself, if
he rides free upon the train--Dead Head. It never had a pleasant sound,
and lately it has grown almost opprobrious. In the beginning, the
courtesy of a pass was extended to the drivers of the quill. The editor
and his family and his wife's mother and the pressman and the devil all
rode scot-free.
Then State Lycurguses _en masse_ with their families and their
mothers-in-law, members of every house of Congress, all kinds of
Judges, all people that were "their Excellencies," or "Honorables,"
_very_ rich men that could buy a couple of hundred miles of the
road and not mind it, and last, clergymen. These were classed with
children under eight years old, for they went at half-fare--rode one
half mile for nothing and paid for the other half. The ground of this
fractional manifestation of grace is debatable. Possibly it was
poverty, and if poverty, then to the shame of the churches that
received the earnest and incessant labors of men, and then sent them
out begging for a living. It is a hard, ugly word, but it is the true
one.
At length when, upon a single line of road, six thousand people were
all riding at once fare-free as a flock of pigeons; and when people who
held "complimentaries" were asked to hold their tongues when they ought
to tell the truth, and shut their eyes when they ought to keep them
open; and when editors began to discover that their passes made them
about the cheapest commodities in the market, and that, by reason of
the bit of pasteboard, they were doing more work for less money than
anybody else in America, then there began to be a lull in the
pass-system. Railroad Companies had spasms of resolutions that they
would confer the degree of D. H. upon nobody. That was incredible, for
when a railroad finds it for its _interest_ to issue a pass, you
may believe the pass will be forthcoming without a pang. But the
clergymen's half-loaf always seemed to me a sort of half-handed charity
that should have been resented, in a Christian way, instead of being
accepted. That, to-day, they generally recognize the fact that the
people who do not pay them should furnish their tickets, instead of the
people who never heard of them till they produced their credentials in
order to be numbered with the infants, is a more truthful and manful
view of the situation.
There are D. H.'s beyond the meaning of the railways. There was a
church in Otsego County, N.Y., with as many brains and as much
grace in it as in any country church of its time. It had a
minister, faithful, able, earnest, who preached out-and-out and
through-and-through Bible sermons. He was not a "star-preacher." He
knew little about astronomy save the Star of Bethlehem. That man
preached forty years for that church, and they never paid him a dollar.
They made "bees," and drew up his winter's wood, and cut his grain.
That was all.
Well, he was gathered to his fathers, but he had spoiled the church. He
had educated it to be D. H. without knowing it. After he died, the
deacons went looking about for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar minister,
and you can get about as much minister for that price as you can get
psalm-tune out of a file. Finally they tried five hundred dollars'
worth. It was a cheap article they got. It was hard to hear him preach,
but harder for them to pay him for it. They had been deplorably
educated. They were Dead-Heads.
Their church edifice stands to-day on a hill, like the Celestial City,
but it is a very dilapidated one. If you go there any summer Sunday,
you shall find it untenanted save by the fowls of the air. They had a
funeral there last season, for Death opens the old building sometimes,
and on a window-ledge near where the gray-haired singers used to strike
up "Mear" and "Corinth" and old "China," a mother-bird--a robin--sat
undisturbed upon her nest. The good old Elder's grave across the road
is sunken and weed-grown. "So runs the world away."
Writing of churches: By a sort of common consent, Modocs seem to be
excepted from any general plan of salvation but the _Quaker_ plan.
The writer once went as far West as the railroad could carry him, and
then took the bare ground into Nebraska till he struck the Indian
country, and found a Mission twenty years old in the wilderness. It is
probable that very few of them deserved baptizing, but they all wanted
washing. Having heard the little Indians sing hymns, you went about a
mile and saw where they had buried a horse, that the dead brave might
make a good appearance on the Happy Hunting Grounds, which they thought
he would reach in about fourteen days.
You saw red-ochre fellows who were well up in the three R's--"reading,
'riting and 'rithmetic"--who had slipped back into the old burrows as
naturally as woodchucks. You saw one young man, tolerably educated, who
had served in the Federal army, and served well, sunning himself on the
turfed slope of a summer wigwam. All that was left of his civilization
was the tatters of a pair of blue pantaloons. He had slipped back into
his blanket, and felt as much at home in it as a fawn in his spots,
though the comparison is greatly damaging to the fawn. You ask him
about this advance backwards, and he says, "'Mong white folks nothin'
but _Ingen_. 'Mong Ingen _nobody_--come back tribe be good Ingen as
any." And you have the situation clearly stated for your consideration.
You ask the missionary how many of the tribe he counts as Christian.
He enumerates, and you wish to see one. He points him out, a
villainous-looking old fellow with a lowering eye, and the most of his
head packed like a knapsack behind his ears, and you think a little
preliminary hewing and scoring would hardly come amiss to make him a
safe man to meet in the night-time, and trim him down to Christian
proportions. Say, with a hatchet, hew to a line commencing just in
front of his organ of self-esteem, and make a clean sweep of things
to a point just back of his ears. There would then be a better
organization to begin upon. After that, Robert Raike's recipe, plenty
of water with soap in it, would be in order. Then try catechisms.
Catch an Indian young, and something may be made of him if he doesn't
get away, but an old Indian is a tough creature to tame. You felt like
asking the missionary if, this man being a Christian, there were many
_sinners_ near by. If so, it seemed prudent to get back to the
railroad without standing very particularly upon "the order of your
going."