CHAPTER XXV.

PRECIOUS CARGOES.

The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of TIME, and the locomotive

was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household

goods and gods from East to West in thirty days. To be sure, the roads

had three dimensions, length, breadth and--_thickness_;--who ever knew

a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?--but he drove early and late,

and tired out the family dog and took him aboard--the dog that had

developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats

to pieces in the Catskills. He has made that journey since in thirty

hours, and his account between the old time and the new stands 1:24--a

pretty formidable balance when the commodity is a thing so precious as

time.

Take that piece of animated nature called the commercial traveler, who

slings his little knapsack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the

world is mine oyster!" He is as much a product of the locomotive as a

puff of steam. He is a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great

house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trundled about the world by

sample, and he girds up his loins and keeps it company. The engine has

made him possible. He is about as wonderful as the Arabian Genius that

came out of the little bottle and clouded all the land. Let us say he

travels fifteen thousand miles a year; that he keeps upon the track ten

years without breaking his neck; that he begins his commercial raids

at the age of twenty-two, unships his little knapsack, buys out the

wholesale house he "represented," and retires from the road at

thirty-two, thus making a beginning so noble that it fairly laps over

upon the ending.

Now, could you set back his almanac for him about a generation, a

couple of hundred years would be little enough to accomplish the work,

and he must bequeath the unfinished business to his great-grandson--a

legacy from his dead and gone ancestor. Here he is now, with the work

done, all the silver on his dining-table, and not a thread of it in

his hair! Those witches and wizards of locomotives have drawn a cargo

of more than two centuries about the world for him, upon which _he_

could draw at will, and his draft was honored every time. They have

made his days "long in the land," no matter what he thought of his

father; made a young Methuselah of him, two hundred and fifty years

old if a day, and the grasshopper not a grain heavier.

The modern cars have taken aboard what was little thought of in the

early history of locomotives--_breathing_ material. Ventilation

has by no means attained perfection, but remember the low, narrow

boxes, almost as close as mortality's "long home," that they used to

call coaches, in which people made sardines of themselves, and caught

colds and influenzas and asthmas and catarrhs and other musical

instruments, and you will not feel like being very querulous over the

discomforts of modern locomotion. That ancient fashion--it was the best

the stupid old world knew--of boxing a man up in cars full of nitrogen,

was an abomination to chemistry and comfort. A stove in the center, a

sort of altar for the rendering of unseemly offerings that Sir Walter

Raleigh is said to be answerable for, used to form a torrid zone about

eight feet broad, subdued into a pair of temperates, and eked out at

the ends with a couple of frigids, and there you have the climate of

the old railroads. Then, what with those who broke fast on bolognas and

the blessed vegetable that used to keep the girls of Weathersfield

a-crying, you had all the odors of Cologne _except_ cologne.

Did you ever watch a kitten under a receiver when the air-pump began to

rob her of her breathing material?--the signs of distress, the furry

sides working like a busy bellows, the bewildered looking about for

help? If it was a talented kitten, perhaps she discovered the fatal

orifice in the brazen floor whence her life was escaping, and clapped

her paw upon it, as cats have done before now, and so stopped the

robbery and won respect and saved her life. This time the victim is not

a cat but a king, to-wit, one of the American sovereigns, secured in an

old-time car, with nothing aboard to make breath of. It is curious to

see how he degenerates by a series of melancholy transitions into a

miserable vegetable. You put him into the car brisk and bright as

nature will let him be. The sixth hour he grows irritable; the tenth,

dull. His fancy leaves him in the fifteenth. He begins to think how far

it is to dinner, and how much he will eat, for he is just passing

through the brute region, on his way from humanity down to vegetation,

where his epitaph might be, "gone to grass." The eighteenth hour he is

surly; the twentieth, dumb. The twenty-fourth "does" for him and the

metamorphosis is complete, the necromantic experiment is over. He

cannot remember who wrote Milton's "Paradise Lost." He forgets the name

of the principal character in Hamlet. He runs up a few rounds of the

multiplication table just to see if they are all there. He ceases to

think at all, looks steadily out of the window and sees nothing. He

ceases to count anything in the census. He is not so much as

Nebuchadnezzar. He is grass.

But "all things have become new." What speed in the engine; what

priceless cargoes of time and oxygen upon the train; how fast and long

we live in a little while! Let us be glad. Uneasy people sometimes wish

they had been born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or Methuselah,

or somebody who looms up gigantically in the mists of history. It is

better to live in the days of the Steam-engine. It has conquered more

worlds than Alexander, traversed vaster wildernesses than the

Israelite, and reclaimed them as it went; and behold, by the power of

the Engine we live to be hundreds of years old, and never give it a

thought!

Studying life on the railroad train and looking into a kaleidoscope are

somewhat alike. You cannot exhaust the figures in the one, and almost

every turn of the wheels brings up a new and curious combination in the

other. And so I find myself wondering why I omitted this, forgot that,

and ever thought I could possibly be content with the few chance

glimpses at thirty miles an hour that are here recorded.

The Engineer has rung the bell, the Conductor has pulled the cord, the

Passenger Train has gone. There is nothing now to be done except to

ship by a dull freight train a little heavy

[Illustration: BAGGAGE]

BAGGAGE

CHAPTER I.

MY STARRY DAYS.

There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special

claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the

jurisdiction of the State of New York, where I first began to "see

stars," not meaning those early experiments upon the glare ice of

Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like Mercury's, and my head went

down like the flintlock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star used

to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods--I loved to fancy it

would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for

beech-nuts--a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an

earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always

inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings

of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not

more than a breath or two farther off.

I have heard since that it has charmed no end of poets to write verses

to it that never were sent; that it is called Venus, when it deserves

an honest womanly name--Mary or Rachel, Ruth or Eve. Is it not strange

that we christen a great beautiful world as we would not dare name

anybody's daughter, unless her mother had an extra pair of feet in

daily use, or her father were content to be called "Towzer"--at least

now that the turbaned "aunty," who opened her mouth like a piano and

laughed clear across the plantation, has been "amended" and counted in

among the souls to be saved.

If the heathen began the nomenclature of the skies, pray let it be

ended by Christians. There are no Alexanders about, to be crying for

new worlds. They are glittering into the field of view every night or

two, and the business of naming goes on after the fashion of dead and

dusty idolaters. Had Adam made such work "calling names" when the Lord

bade him, he would have been sent down on his knees there in Eden to

weed onions unto tears and repentance. Let our star-finders give

them a hint--those keen fellows who shall, by-and-by, roll that date

of theirs, _Anno Domini 3,000_, over and over like a school of

dolphins--that _we_, at least, have abandoned Latin and Greek gods;

that our poultry are quite safe for all anybody in America, be he fool

or philosopher, ordering a cock served up to Æsculapius.

But if ever anything thoroughly belonged to the owner, the heavenly

Dipper--that magnificent utensil knobbed at the angles and riveted

along the handle with seven stars--belonged to me. I should have

clutched it long ago if, like the dagger of Shakespeare's man, it had

only hung "the handle toward my hand;" as much household ware as its

humble cousin forty times removed, that hung by a little chain beside

the well. From that celestial dipper--or so I thought--the dews were

poured out gently on the summer world. It was the only thing about the

house perfectly safe from thieves and rust; for was it not of a truth a

treasure laid up in heaven? And how sadly right I was; for there, only

last night, blazed the Dipper as if it were fire-new, while the home of

my boyhood has faded out like a dream and vanished away.

There was yet another trinket of domesticated heaven, if I may say so.

No matter what name the Chaldeans called it by, to me it will always be

the star in the well. A gray sweep swayed up above that well like an

acute accent; and in its round liquid disc, that gave me glance for

glance, I used to see sometimes the double of a star straight from the

top of heaven. It was plainer than any pearl that "ever lay under

Oman's green water." They that drank at that well in the old days, long

ago sat down by the river of crystal in the Kingdom of Life, but its

dark disc, like a strange unwinking eye, still watches the zenith from

its depths, and sometimes a star is let down into it till it kindles as

if lighted by a thought.

That handful of household stars is a part of my heritage. No matter how

dim the night, how disastered the sky, I close my eyes and they yet

rise strangely beautiful and shine across the cloudy world even as they

always shone since their illustrious kindred began to sing together.

The prayer of the athletic savage was "for light." But our terrestrial

day is only a veil thick-woven of sunbeam warp and woof. The dewy hand

of Night withdraws it, and lo! the heavens are all abroad! Let Ajax

mend his prayer, and let the burden be for calm unclouded night.

But there is another constellation not less precious than my sidereal

possessions--a cluster of day-stars as resplendent as if they were

called Arcturus every one. They shine with a warm and genial

ray--undimmed, thank God! by any care or cloud. Time is not, as most

men think, a natural product. It is only fragments of duration

fashioned into shape. The whirling worlds of God are so much burnished

machinery for making times and seasons. They ripple the everlasting

current of white and dumb duration. It swells in ages, undulates in

years; and all along the ceaseless solemn flow, sparkle like syllables

of song the days of all our lives. The tumbling planets end their work,

and man's begins. Whoever stamps the image and superscription of a

worthy deed, a sterling truth, a splendid fact, upon a day, has

hallowed and brightened it evermore. The day a man is born who rallies

the sluggish race and puts it on its honor for all time, stands out

from the rank and file of the dull almanac and halts you like a

sentinel. The day a man is dead who gave some _other_ day a might

and meaning it never had before, is strewn with immortelles and borne

abreast with marching ages.

Take a twenty-fifth of January, one hundred and eleven years

ago--standing there in its place as plain as yesterday, illuminated all

over, like an old saint's legend, with Scottish song that comes to a

man like the beat of his heart,--and tell me if you think it worth

while for anybody to be born on that recurring day with any hope of

wresting it from "Robert Burns, Poet"? True, the Ettrick Shepherd saw

the light on a twenty-fifth, but the best we can do for him is to let

his "Skylark" warble up to the top of the wintry morning if it can.

The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months,

with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank

white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant

truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right

on--the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of

truest power.

And what more can any one do for that seventh of February than he did

to be born in it, whom Dombey shall lead gently by the hand far down

another age, for whom Little Nell shall plead with a forgetful world,

and who left us the voice of Tiny Tim for a perpetual benediction--"God

bless us, Every one!"

THE OLD-TIME FOURTH.

I would not give much for the American who has nowhere in the year a

day domed like a tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, the

FOURTH OF JULY is one of my days with stars in it, and bells withal,

that shine and ring and roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that

always sets the heart pounding with the concussion of the anvil and the

feet keeping step to the frolic of Yankee Doodle. It lights up the time

when you could stand upright under life's Eastern eaves; when day broke

in the thunder of a six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor of

the village bell, and the bare and barkless spar they had raised and

planted the night before, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed out

with the broad field of stars.

On comes the drum-major, now with "eyes to the front all," and now

facing the music with backward step, his arms swaying up and down, the

horizontal baton grasped firmly in his hands, as if he were working

the band with a _brake_, and playing streams of martial melody on

mankind. Then the snarl of the snare-drums, all careened for punishment

like refractory boys of the old-fashioned stripe, and the growl of the

big bass brother at their heels, and the fifes warbling up and down in

the grumble and roar, possessed and summoned up my soul--shall I say it

and give thanks?--possess and summon up my soul to-day. Then came the

flag with an eagle on it, and two spontoons beside it to pierce that

eagle's enemies. Then the patriots of the Revolution, who remembered

when there was no such thing as a Fourth of July with a big F; old

smoky fellows, two or three, with eagles in their eyes--old fellows

gnarled like the hemlock, but honored like the pine, that had smelled

powder at Bennington; and the orator of the day with an eagle in his

eye; and the clergyman who had prayed a short prayer and fired a long

gun at Yorktown or somewhere, with an eagle in _his_ eye.

Then, to the tune of "Bonaparte crossing the Rhine," out stepped the

white-legged infantry, with breasts and backs of blue, each with an

eagle sewed upon a bright tin plate, all garnished round with stars and

fastened to his hat, and that eagle's royal tail feathering out at the

top the while, to plume him up like Henry of Navarre.

Then came the riflemen in green frock-coats and caps befringed, and

horns slung at their sides, that once were tossed defiant upon a shaggy

head that might have answered back the bulls of Bashan, and had, for

anything you know, an eagle in _its_ eye; and on they went, their

rifles lightly borne to the order of "_Trail_--ARMS!" Ah, it was

"the hunters of Kentucky" all over again. It was the whole Boone

family in the flesh. It was an apparition of the dark and bloody

ground.

Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of

hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with

eagles in _their_ eyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder

and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus

snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering

on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood,

springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified

bull-thistle--and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your

heart on fire together!

Then came the citizens by twos, as the pairs went into the ark, and the

girls in white frocks with sashes and ribbons of blue, as if they had

just torn out of heaven and brought away with them some fragments of

azure for token; but there are no eagles any more in the line--only

white doves and angels unfallen. Then the mouth of the orator was

opened--a coop of rhetorical eagles, and they flew abroad and swooped

down upon our feelings and bore them aloft triumphant, and perched upon

our souls and made eyries in our lofty hearts, and we were better and

braver for it all. Then came the dinner in a "bower"--have you quite

forgotten the dining-hall of green branches?--with such dainty roasters

as the Gentle Elia would have wept over and then devoured, and toasts

that foamed over the tops of the goblets and set themselves aright in

the cups; and a flight of hurrahs went up with the eagles--and the day

was done.

Do you think I would exchange that dear absurd old day for "the pomp

and circumstance" of any later pageant? A Fourth-of-Julyism has somehow

become an object of contempt. People tell us, but not always in good

English, that speeches are idle, because they have heard that silence

is golden, and, like the green spectacles of Moses and the talk of the

rascal in the Vicar of Wakefield, should be labeled "_fudge_." As if

it was not an _idea_ clothed in a snug jacket of words, and not

a deed at all, that first gave the Fourth of July a meaning and a gift

to mankind! As if the elder Adams' recipe to pickle the day--I write

with no irreverence--to pickle the day in "villainous saltpetre" would

not be sure to keep it! As if the roar of artillery--thank God for the

blank cartridges of Independence!--were anything more than that

eloquent whisper uttered under the shadow of King's Mountain in the old

North State, "these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free,"

translated into the dialect of gunpowder! Shine on, starry day of my

boyhood! Thy thunders, thy eagles, and thy memories, be they blessed

forever!

THANKSGIVING.

I am sorry for the man--especially the woman--who has nowhere a day or

two touched with some tender grace; a day of which, travel fast and far

as he may, he is never out of sight; that warms his heart for him,

makes him gentler, purer, younger than before, more like a woman and

just as much of a man. Everywhere else in Christendom the year has

three hundred and sixty-five days, but in America it has a day of

grace, and as much a New England product as Joel Barlow or Indian corn:

for we count three hundred and sixty-five days and THANKSGIVING.

As everybody knows, the day was the most blessed of blunders. Those

single-minded, grand old fellows--old when they were young--that

drifted across the sea in the cup of a Flower like a parcel of bees,

bringing, some of them, their stings with them, and from whose rude

beginnings this broad continent now hums like a hive in June, had

garnered their corn, and tugged up their back-logs, and kicked the

light snow of "squaw winter" from their Spanish-leather boots, and hung

up their tall hats on the pegs behind the door, and picked their flints

for such game as red Indian and black bear, and spread open their

Bibles, and made ready for a sojourn before the fire; then came one of

the American savages they never shot at--to-wit: Indian Summer.

For past the yellow regiments of corn

There came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;

And June returned and held her by the hand,

And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.

So they made ready for a second planting right away, and declared it a

goodly land, where a very thin slice of autumn was sandwiched between

two summers, and decreed a Thanksgiving, and called the neighbors

together, and lifted up their voices and sang some such quaint song

as--

"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,

Your Maker's praises spout;

Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,

And wag your tails about!"

and clasped each other's hands, and feasted abundantly, and took "a

cup of kindness," and grew so warm with what they had and what they

_would_ have, that when Euroclydon and all the rest of them did come,

and that right early, their gratitude never froze, but wintered it

through; and so Thanksgiving remains even until now.

Dear Starry Day, when three generations met together and--not to betray

confidences--"righteousness and peace kissed each other." What

friendships were brightened in thy fire-light! what wrongs were roasted

under thy fore-stick! Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Pleiades.

Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked up in a coverlet of crust, and,

brooded in the bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how

comfortable they were! Out of the glowing cavern of the brick oven,

squatted in the wall beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what

gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like dead knights in

armor, "whose souls are with the saints, we trust;" what whiffs of

Indian pudding! what blended breezes of abundance! Thy doughnuts of

orthodox twist, and tinted like cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin

pans of memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant to the angle of

perfect content, and fit and fill the mouth of recollection.

Surely heart and stomach are next-door neighbors, for now,

Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces smile a welcome home; thy dear old

faces, every one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse the fire to a

hearty roar of greeting! Wheel out the great table laden like the palm

of Providence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us "ask a blessing!"

Let us give thanks!

CHRISTMAS.

Methuselah died pretty well along in his years of discretion, but a

world at his age would hardly have been out of its swaddling bands.

There is a star, less than two thousand years old, that lights a day

for us, the fairest, youngest of all the spangled multitude--the very

Benjamin of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer never summoned it.

Numbered in the celestial census, I am sure it will not be there when

the constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It is immortal as

the candle of the Lord. It is the Star in the East that lights up

CHRISTMAS for us with a wonderful radiance.

If there is ever a time in all the year when the two worlds touch, I

think it is Christmas Eve. What less than a first small act of faith is

that hanging a million of empty stockings by a million pins at night,

and then tumbling the trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful

and sleepless expectancy that they will find them all filled in the

morning? Let a man play Saturn and _eat_ his children and be done

with it; but let him not set a dog on their angels--a cur of a fact,

that should have been born with its nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus

or Kriss Kringle, and worry him out of the children's sweet kingdom of

dreams.

Whoever wants to make his children older than any wholesome grandfather

ought to be, has only to strip the world stark naked before their

faces; bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair of burnished

interrogation-points for ever dancing in another pair of eyes, resolve

the thrones and paradises and angels they see in the plighted clouds,

into a heavy and delusive fog; and, by-and-by, for the quicksilverish

atoms of humanity that hunt out every grain of true gold in the rubbish

of life, full of marvel and fancy and poetry as any old ballad, he will

have a row of little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical donkeys

all draped in wet blankets.

I visited, not long ago, the house where something happened to me when

I narrowly escaped being too young to be counted, but you can never

guess what was the first thing I looked for. It was not, as you might

think, the threshold worn smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet

that have played truant forever, nor the dear home-room with its

altar-place for beech and maple offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness

under the stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet counsel together by

night.

It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged

edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their

lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest

structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why?

Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift.

What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a

rude unlettered monument to the dead past.

They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the

morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with

whom I joined hands and hearts are--_where_ are they? There are

fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are

broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human

speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women,

full of care. _Has_ the sparkle of life utterly vanished from the

cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the

laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?

Oh, Comrades! oh, Sweethearts! Let me give you a touch of the time when

happiness was the very cheapest thing in the round world: let me give

you "a merry Christmas" out of the loneliness!

But children are not out of fashion, and so the world is not bankrupt.

Herod--he deserves the compliment and he shall have it--Herod was

nothing less than devilish shrewd when he fancied he could quench

Christmas in the blood of the children; for if ever two things were

made for each other, a merry child and a merry Christmas are the two.

What the poor creatures did that were born and grown before the clock

of the Christian era struck "one" nobody can tell. We all _need_

such days--the young that they may never grow old; the old that they

may always be young. I think it might be written among the beatitudes:

"Blessed are they whose sons are all boys and whose daughters are

all girls."

It was when Cæsar Augustus decreed that "all the world" should be

enrolled--an edict never to be repeated on the planet until the coming

of the Seventh Angel--and everybody was on the move to report in his

native city--for in that country the leap from a howling wilderness

to a city was as easy as a panther's--if it didn't _howl_ it had a

_mayor_!

Among those who came to Bethlehem on this errand were a man and his

wife from Nazareth, and, as the tavern was crowded, they went to the

barn, and there the Chief of Children was born, and cradled in a

manger.

And that was the first Christmas.

There were Angels without, who brought their glory with them, and they

stood and sang, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to the

men of good will!"

And that was the first Christmas Carol.

A few Shepherds watching their flocks not far away came just as they

were, in their every-day clothes, and wondered and glorified, and were

glad.

And that was the first Christmas Party.

Some travelers from the East--and wise, as you may know, by the

cardinal point--were seeking the Christmas, but no one could tell them

anything, till a STAR journeyed on before, and halted, like Gibeon's

sun, over where the young child was--ah, always now as then, find

Christmas and a child is not far off--and they unfolded their

treasures, and gave him gold and frankincense and myrrh.

And that was the first Christmas Gift.

The shepherds are dead, the "wise men" are East, and the angels in

Heaven. But the star and the child and the manger are everywhere. Come,

let us have a frolic together! Even the turkey has a merry-thought in

its breast; and are we not better than a _flock_ of turkeys? Let

us advertise for a good digestion and a downy pillow, and a pleasant

dream and a Merry Christmas. Let us do it in these words:

WANTED--A debtor to be forgiven.

WANTED--A wrong to be forgotten.

WANTED--A heart to be lightened.

WANTED--A home to be brightened.

Wherever the Star halts, there shall be no lack of carols. Bid the

singers begin! And the same old manger chorus swells sweetly again--"On

earth peace to the men of good will!" Shine on, gentle Star! Merry

Christmas, Good Night!

CHAPTER II.

"No. 104,163."

"The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of San Francisco," so I read

in my evening paper, "will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st

of October. Tickets, five dollars in gold."

And then I turned to the glittering roll of fortunes. There they were,

heaped up in an auriferous pyramid curiously balanced on its apex. At

the bottom lay a poor little "$100 in gold," not worth minding, and up

swelled the shining structure,--$1,000--$5,000--$10,000--$25,000--

$50,000--until away at the top blazed clear across the column,

"$100,000 IN GOLD!"

All gold from the land of Gold, the unearthed Ophir of the Solomonic

time. Everything had a bilious tint. It was as if I was seeing creation

through an Oriental topaz. I felt for my ears, lest I had somehow

swapped with Midas for his transmuting touch. No railway conductor was

ever more clamorous for tickets than my heart was. Gold was 113 that

day, so I counted out $5.65, turned it into a Post-office order, and

transmitted it to the nearest agent. The ticket came, a strip of paper

tawny as the Tiber, a faint reflection of "great heaps of gold," as

Clarence said, but not to drown for, as Clarence _did_. It was

covered with "a strange device"--the ticket was--like the handkerchief

the Alpine traveler carried in his hand, who talked Latin and cried

"_Excelsior!_"

To think what splendid possibilities might lurk in that oblong piece of

paper was enough to take one's breath away! I said not a word to

Lucy--that's my wife--but folded it tenderly, as if it were a napkin

with ten talents in it, and laid it away with a gold half dollar and a

broken ring and a curl of hair and a stray pearl that had tumbled out

of an old brooch, and a bit of ribbon and a faint suspicion of dead and

gone fragrance--"all and singular" the contents of a little box that,

forty years ago, would have been a "till" in the upper right-hand

corner of a chest of drawers, and as nearly like an old-fashioned heart

as two things can be that are made to hold the same sort of little

trinkets of love and memory that everybody else foregoes and forgets.

The ticket lay there a month and I never said a word, but I began to

get my money back right away. I tripped up the rounds of the golden

ladder every day, and, strange to tell, I was totally unable to

_stop_ going up until I reached the top and stood with both feet

perched upon "$100,000 in gold." I tried to steady myself a little and

be persuaded that $25,000 would be comfortable. I did my best to

cultivate a sentiment of respect for $50,000, but the paltry sum sank

below the horizon, and like the Spaniard overwhelmed at sight of the

sea, who went down upon his knees on Gilboa or somewhere, I saw nothing

but the golden ocean of $100,000. And why not? Was not the one quite as

easy to get as the other? To be sure, in the glow of my story the

capital prize that stood upon its head as a pyramid, has been fashioned

into a ladder like Jacob's, with the angels of Imagination and Fancy

going up and down thereon, and at last all melted into a sea, has

inundated the whole landscape; but I tell you a man with a hundred

thousand dollars may defy rhetoric and mixed metaphors with impunity.

I thought I would make my will, and "give and bequeath to my

well-beloved wife Lucy" fifty thousand dollars. When I had counted this

out by itself, the heap of gold glittered so that it dazzled me out of

my discretion, and I asked Lucy, in a quiet way, whether if I had

$100,000 in gold and should will her fifty thousand free and clear, it

would be enough. She laughed and said she thought it would be liberal!

I then told her what I had done. Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered

mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given

to dreaming. That mother of hers--she is seventy-six if she is a

day--will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of

the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only

sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. She will sit

down any time upon a damp bank of crimson and gold cloud that flanks

the sunset, and never think of taking cold more than she did forty

years ago. She is always seeing faces in the fire, and laying plans

that will never be hatched, and altogether has a thousand luxuries that

the tax-gatherer can not possibly get into his schedule. Lucy betrays

her lineage. When I give her a "ten" sometimes, she will fold her arms,

swing slowly to and fro in the rocking-chair, and pay it all out over

and over, and get her money's worth in ever so many things useful and

beautiful, and the green-backed decimal will be snugly lying all the

while in that same box of momentous trifles. I think ten dollars go as

far with Lucy as twenty-five do with most people, and by the same sign

make her two and a half times as happy.

"Port"--that is the name of my boy--saw not a glimmer of gold for days

and days after Lucy had her saffronian vision. He toiled on like

Bunyan's fellow with the muck-rake at his calling, nor saw the angel,

golden even as a sunflower, that floated overhead. It seemed a pity to

wrong him out of his inheritance, and so I told him. I said, "Port, we

are a rich family," and showed him the strip of paper. He ticked off

the figures slowly, like a clock just running down, 1-0-4-1-6-3, and

said--nothing. I thought he lacked gratitude, and so I made a plunge

into the dark ages for something to punish him with, and came up with

the brand-new fact that ingratitude is a crime so base the ancients

never thought it worth while to make a law against it, as nobody,

probably, would ever be guilty of it. "Port" went out, and I at once

set about erasing the last cypher of the bequest I had made the boy, so

that what had read $10,000 became $1,000, and I devised all the rest

for the cultivation of gratitude in the human family.

Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, like the strings of

David's harp, and October was about done, and the drawing was at hand.

But what mattered it all? We had entered into possession already. We

had invested one hundred thousand of the prize in the best of

securities, and we were receiving eight thousand dollars a year, for

you see it was $100,000 in gold, to-wit: $113,000 in greenbacks. We

owed no man anything. We had traveled all over the broad domain of

Columbus' magnificent "find." We had given two thousand dollars a year

to objects of benevolence. We had bought exquisite works of art, and

sent a dozen poor painters of good pictures abroad. We had imported

rare old English books and strewn them upon our tables and given them

to our neighbors. We presented an illustrated copy of "Paradise Lost"

to our wood-sawyer one day, a copy reinforced like his breeches, with

leather, and he was very grateful, and sat down upon it when he ate his

bread and cheese and said it was "good," and we were gratified. We

purchased a sober horse and a modest carriage, and propped up the line

fence and shingled the kitchen. In a word, the gaunt wolf I had been

trying for years to keep away from the door, had been brained at last

with a golden club, and his skin lay upon the carriage floor for a

foot-robe.

There was a legion of people we wanted to help--a great many of them

when we first began, and I told Lucy to get a quire of paper and make

a catalogue, but somehow or other they got fewer as we thought about

it, until she numbered every one upon her fingers that seemed to have

much hold upon our affections. Those I pensioned off in the most

liberal manner, and had quite a warm and genial feeling about my

heart, as if I had really been beneficent and _done_ something, when I

had only been benevolent and _wished_ something. We had two or three

wealthy neighbors who had gathered richness as damp logs gather moss,

and that was about all there was of it--aggregating golden egg after

golden egg, flattening themselves out like an incubating goose

ambitious to cover the whole nest, and calling the proceeding

"enterprise." I would set these mossy fellows an example that should

rebuke them to the tips of their ears. And so I gave twenty thousand

dollars for a public library to be free to all residents of the town

forever. We had made Christmas "merry" and New Year "happy" for many a

heart that would else have had neither one nor the other.

I am glad now to be able to state that there was only one man whom I

had the least desire to humble when I became an hundred thousand

strong, and he was an insurance agent--a retired doctor, who, growing

weary of saving lives with pills, had taken to insuring lives with

policies. He was always tormenting me "to insure." He looked me over

like an undertaker with a measure in his eye. He kept me constantly

reminded of the fact of death, as if it were inevitable. I hardly ever

saw him that I did not fancy him rushing around to my widow the next

day after I had won the wager, paying her the amount of insurance, and

thence away to the printing office with a card flickering in his hand,

inscribed with words and figures following, to-wit:

AGENT OF THE SO-AND-SO INSURANCE CO.:

I thank you for the prompt payment of the sum of $10,000, for which

amount you had insured my late husband's life.

Gratefully,

LUCY.

Late husband indeed! The pulses of a pound of cold putty are lively

compared with my circulation at the idea of that sort of "late"--too

late ever to be again "on time." Well, all I want of that doctor is

that he shall solicit me once more, when I will say, "Insure? Do I look

like a man who needs help for his perishing family? Examine my

will--Lucy, $50,000! 'Port,' $20,000! Accept an invitation to my Free

Library. Be silent and be happy. Good morning," and with this nightcap

for his importunity, I would pass graciously on like a great

harvest-moon when it gives the last touch to the ripening regiments of

corn.

And the thirty-first of October came at last, and the supreme hour for

the turn of the wheel away there in the city of the Golden Gate, but

what should I care? The capital prize had all been won, and invested,

and given away and expended. I had _rehearsed_ the fortune and it

had left no corroding care--that word "corroding," heart-gnawing it

_ought_ to mean; think of a lively rodent, say a squirrel, in a

beating heart!--had kindled no passion, scattered no Greek fire of

pride or envy anywhere. What _more_ need I desire, and yet I could

hardly help wondering if they knew I had purchased the ticket 104,163;

whether when--not if, for there is never an "if" in the land of dreams

and of Spain--when the capital prize should be declared off to me out

of the great wheel, they would not telegraph me at once from San

Francisco, for I certainly would pay the expense without a murmur. I

went to the door once or twice to see if the telegraph messenger might

not be coming, and I at once gave him one hundred dollars in gold. But

night distanced the telegram and reached me first. Possibly, though,

the agent in Chicago may write me by the evening mail, and I gave one

hundred dollars in gold to the man that licked the envelope, and one

hundred dollars in gold to the man who delivered the letter. But the

mail came and the letter did not. I was sorry for the loss the clerk in

the post-office had suffered, and made up my mind to make him librarian

of my Free Library at a salary of a thousand dollars a year.

Along in the evening Lucy and I had a little discussion as to whether

we should not take the prize in gold, say double eagles, and put them

all to roost on the dining table, and call in a few friends to see the

golden aviary with its blessed birds of Paradise, and borrow the

neighbor's steelyards, as somebody did in the touching story of the

"Forty Thieves," or some other Arabian Night's entertainment, and

weigh the hundred thousand avoirdupois, and then send it back to

Chicago and have the dead metal return all in full leaf, green as

Vallombrosa, say an hundred 1,000-dollar bills, or a thousand

100-dollar bills, Lucy and I could hardly tell which.

The first of November dawned as brightly as November ever dawns, and

with it came the tidings that my "$100,000 in gold" had somehow, by

mistake no doubt, been drawn by somebody else, and that ticket 104,163

was worth--well--about a twist for a cigar-lighter! My imagination

slipped down the golden ladder that, like the Patriarch's, had an angel

at the top and a pillow of stone at the bottom--slipped down from its

high estate and made a Rachel of itself, "and would not be comforted."

I left the parlor, where I had been sitting for the last month because

I thought I could afford to, and went away disconsolate into the

kitchen, but "Willie," the mocking bird, was singing a pleasant song. I

returned to the parlor and Lucy, the heiress to the half of my fortune,

was laughing a pleasant laugh, and "Port," whom I had forgiven in a

codicil, and left $20,000, said he did not care a "Continental" for the

whole business, which, considering that Continental currency, toward

the last of it, was sold low, at about so much a peck, "dry measure,"

may be taken as a pretty forcible expression of his perfect

cheerfulness under the disaster.

But _was_ it a disaster? Had I not had the prize, and enjoyed it

and shared it and bequeathed it? My fortune had never tempted a thief.

It had neither put the prayer of the Lord nor of Agur out of fashion:

"Give us this day our daily bread!" "Give me neither poverty nor

riches!" So far as I have heard, "104,163" was the lucky number after

all, and I certainly believe nobody ever before received so much for so

little--$100,000 in imperishable gold for five dollars and sixty-five

cents, true coin of the realm of an imagination and a fancy both warmed

into a life curiously fresh and new by the touch of a hope, never to be

realized, of mere material wealth.

"One blast upon a bugle horn,"--if we may trust a man who was more

conscientious in the telling of fiction than most men are in relating

the truth,--was "worth a thousand men." Jericho came down at the blast

of a horn.

Fame's shall give breath, and all the land shall give heed. Gabriel's

shall sound, and the dead shall be intent. But cornucopia the golden

is the _exalted_ horn among the nations. They always see the

glittering millions lavished from the broader end that flares and

blossoms like a tulip, but it is strange they do not oftener discern

the diminished man coming out at the other and the lesser end of the

self-same horn. The wealth may make a ladder and rig it out with rounds

commanding loftier planes and broader views, but there must be a foot

bold enough to climb them, and a brain balanced enough to regard the

grander horizons and the growing lights undizzied and undazzled, and a

heart true enough to be touched and softened and kindled by it all into

the living belief that these words are worthy of all acceptation:

"Faith, Hope, Charity--these three, but the GREATEST of these

is Charity." A belief lodged in the head is _there_, but a belief

lodged in the heart is _every_where.

As for Lucy and I, our "castles in Spain" are all builded and peopled,

the lawns around them are Elysian, the sky above them is clear heaven,

sunshine plays forever around their purple towers. Let us make fast the

door against the wolf we thought we had killed with a bludgeon of gold,

and betake ourselves again with cheerfulness and content to our

possessions in Spain--ours forever and a day by the power of the charm

that lay hid in the ticket I purchased--and Lucy, "Port" and I do

earnestly wish that all the readers of this chapter from life, if they

do not draw the Capital Prize, may at least gain that next best

thing--the treasure wrapped up, like a rose in a bud, in Number

104,163.

CHAPTER III.

OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.

"I find the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved

mother, which were measured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures up

one of the sweetest images in the world. He was revisiting the home of

his infancy; he was retracing the little paths around it in which he

had once walked; and strange flowers could not efface, and rank grass

could not conceal, and cruel ploughs could not obliterate, his

"shortest footsteps," and his mother's beside them, measured by his

own.

And who needs to be told whose footsteps they were that thus kept time

with the feeble pattering of childhood's little feet? It was no mother

beside whom Ascanius walked "with equal steps" in Virgil's line, but a

strong, stern man, who could have borne him and not been burdened;

folded him in his arms from all danger and not been wearied;

everything, indeed, he could have done for him, but just what he needed

most--could not sympathize with him--he could not be a child again. Ah,

a rare art is that,--for, indeed, it is an art, to set back the great

old clock of time and be a boy once more! Man's imagination can easily

see the child a man; but how hard it is for it to see the man a child;

and he who had learned to glide back into that rosy time when he did

not know that thorns were under the roses, or that clouds would ever

return after the rain; when he thought a tear could stain a cheek no

more than a drop of rain a flower; when he fancied that life had no

disguise, and hope no blight at all--has come as near as anybody can to

discovering the North-west passage to Paradise.

And it is, perhaps, for this reason that it is so much easier for a

mother to enter the kingdom of Heaven than it is for the rest of the

world. She fancies she is leading the children, when, after all, the

children are leading her, and they keep her, indeed, where the river is

narrowest, and the air is clearest; and the beckoning of the radiant

band is so plainly seen from the other side, that it is no wonder she

so often lets go her clasp upon the little finger she is holding, and

goes over to the neighbor's, and the children follow like lambs to the

fold; for we think it ought somewhere to be written: "Where the mother

is, there will the children be also."

But it was not of the mother, but of the dear old-fashioned

grandmother, whose thread of love spun "by hand" on life's little

wheel, and longer and stronger than they make it now, was wound around

and about the children she saw playing in the children's arms, in a

true love-knot that nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; for

do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, when summer days are over and

autumn winds are blowing, as they come bleating from the yellow fields,

by the crimson thread we wound about their necks in April or May, and

so undo the gate and let the wanderers in?

Blessed be the children who have an old-fashioned grandmother. As they

hope for length of days let them love and honor her, for we can tell

them they will never find another.

There is a large old kitchen somewhere in the past, and an

old-fashioned fireplace therein, with its smooth old jambs of

stone--smooth with many knives that have been sharpened there--smooth

with many little fingers that have clung there. There are andirons,

too--the old andirons, with rings in the top, whereon many temples of

flame have been builded, with spires and turrets of crimson. There is a

broad, worn hearth, worn by feet that have been torn and bleeding by

the way, or been made "beautiful," and walked upon floors of tesselated

gold. There are tongs in the corner, wherewith we grasped a coal, and

"blowing for a little life," lighted our first candle; there is a

shovel, wherewith were drawn forth the glowing embers in which we saw

our first fancies and dreamed our first dreams--the shovel with which

we stirred the sleepy logs till the sparks rushed up the chimney as if

a forge were in blast below, and wished we had so many lambs, so many

marbles, or so many somethings that we coveted; and so it was we wished

our first wishes.

There is a chair--a low, rush-bottom chair; there is a little wheel in

the corner, a big wheel in the garret, a loom in the chamber. There are

chests full of linen and yarn, and quilts of rare pattern, and samples

in frames.

And everywhere and always the dear old wrinkled face of her whose firm,

elastic step mocks the feeble saunter of her children's children--the

old-fashioned grandmother of twenty years ago. She, the very Providence

of the old homestead--she who loved us all, and said she wished there

were more of us to love, and took all the school in the Hollow for

grand-children besides. A very expansive heart was hers, beneath that

woolen gown, or that more stately bombazine, or that sole heir-loom of

silken texture.

We can see her to-day, those mild blue eyes, with more of beauty in

them than time could touch or death do more than hide--those eyes that

held both smiles and tears within the faintest call of every one of us,

and soft reproof, that seemed not passion but regret. A white tress has

escaped from beneath her snowy cap; she has just restored a wandering

lamb to its mother; she lengthened the tether of a vine that was

straying over a window, as she came in, and plucked a four-leaved

clover for Ellen. She sits down by the little wheel--a tress is running

through her fingers from the distaff's disheveled head, when a small

voice cries "Grandma!" from the old red cradle, and "Grandma!" Tommy

shouts from the top of the stairs. Gently she lets go the thread, for

her patience is almost as beautiful as her charity, and she touches the

little bark in a moment, till the young voyager is in a dream again,

and then directs Tommy's unavailing attempts to harness the cat. The

tick of the clock runs faint and low, and she opens the mysterious door

and proceeds to wind it up. We are all on tip-toe, and we beg in a

breath to be lifted up one by one, and look in the hundredth time upon

the tin cases of the weights, and the poor lonely pendulum, which goes

to and fro by its little dim window, and never comes out in the world,

and our petitions are all granted, and we are lifted up, and we all

touch with a finger the wonderful weights, and the music of the little

wheel is resumed.

Was Mary to be married, or Jane to be wrapped in a shroud? So meekly

did she fold the white hands of the one upon her still bosom, that

there seemed to be a prayer in them there; and so sweetly did she

wreathe the white rose in the hair of the other, that one would not

have wondered had more roses budded for company.

How she stood between us and apprehended harm; how the rudest of us

softened beneath the gentle pressure of her faded and tremulous hand!

From her capacious pocket that hand was ever withdrawn closed, only to

be opened in our own, with the nuts she had gathered, the cherries she

had plucked, the little egg she had found, the "turn-over" she had

baked, the trinket she had purchased for us as the product of her

spinning, the blessing she had stored for us--the offspring of her

heart.

What treasures of story fell from those old lips; of good fairies and

evil, of the old times when she was a girl; and we wondered if

ever--but then she couldn't be handsomer or dearer--but that she ever

was "little." And then, when we begged her to sing! "Sing us one of the

old songs you used to sing mother, grandma."

"Children, I can't sing," she always said; and mother used to lay her

knitting softly down, and the kitten stopped playing with the yarn upon

the floor, and the clock ticked lower in the corner, and the fire died

down to a glow, like an old heart that is neither chilled nor dead, and

grandmother sang. To be sure it wouldn't do for the parlor and the

concert-room now-a-days; but then it was the old kitchen and the

old-fashioned grandmother, and the old ballad, in the dear old times,

and we can hardly see to write for the memory of them, though it is a

hand's breadth to the sunset.

Well, she sang. Her voice was feeble and wavering, like a fountain just

ready to fail, but then how sweet-toned it was; and it became deeper

and stronger, but it couldn't grow sweeter. What "joy of grief" it was

to sit there around the fire, all of us, except Jane, that clasped a

prayer to her bosom, and her we thought we saw, when the hall-door was

opened a moment by the wind; but then we were not afraid, for wasn't it

her old smile she wore?--to sit there around the fire, and weep over

the woes of the "Babes in the Wood," who lay down side by side in the

great solemn shadows; and how strangely glad we felt when the

robin-red-breast covered them with leaves, and last of all when the

angels took them out of the night into Day Everlasting.

We may think what we will of it now, but the song and the story heard

around the kitchen fire have colored the thoughts and lives of most of

us; have given us the germs of whatever poetry blesses our hearts;

whatever memory blooms in our yesterdays. Attribute whatever we may to

the school and the school-master, the rays which make that little day

we call life, radiate from the God-swept circle of the hearthstone.

Then she sings an old lullaby she sang to mother--_her_ mother sang to

her; but she does not sing it through, and falters ere 'tis done. She

rests her head upon her hands, and it is silent in the old kitchen.

Something glitters down between her fingers and the firelight, and it

looks like rain in the soft sunshine. The old grandmother is thinking

when she first heard the song, and of the voice that sang it, when a

light-haired and light-hearted girl she hung around that mother's

chair, nor saw the shadows of the years to come. O! the days that are

no more! What spell can we weave to bring them back again? What words

can we unsay, what deeds undo, to set back, just this once, the

ancient clock of time?

So all our little hands were forever clinging to her garments, and

staying her as if from dying, for long ago she had done living for

herself, and lived alone in us. But the old kitchen wants a presence

to-day, and the rush-bottomed chair is tenantless.

How she used to welcome us when we were grown, and came back once more

to the homestead.

We thought we were men and women, but we were children there. The

old-fashioned grandmother was blind in the eyes, but she saw with her

heart, as she always did. We threw our long shadows through the open

door, and she felt them as they fell over her form, and she looked

dimly up and saw tall shapes in the door-way, and she says, "Edward I

know, and Lucy's voice I can hear, but whose is that other? It must be

Jane's," for she had almost forgotten the folded hands. "Oh, no, not

Jane, for she--let me see--she is waiting for me, isn't she?" and the

old grandmother wandered and wept.

"It is another daughter, grandmother, that Edward has brought," says

some one, "for your blessing."

"Has she blue eyes, my son? Put her hand in mine, for she is my latest

born, the child of my old age. Shall I sing you a song, children?" Her

hand is in her pocket as of old; she is idly fumbling for a toy, a

welcome gift to the children that have come again.

"Come, children, sit around the fire. Shall I sing you a song, or tell

you a story? Stir the fire, for it is cold; the nights are growing

colder."

The clock in the corner struck nine, the bed-time of those old days.

The song of life was indeed sung, the story told, it was bed-time at

last. Good night to thee, grandmother! The old-fashioned grandmother

was no more, and we miss her forever. But we will set up a tablet in

the midst of the memory, in the midst of the heart, and write on it

only this:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF THE

OLD-FASHIONED GRANDMOTHER.

GOD BLESS HER FOR EVER.

CHAPTER IV.

OUT-DOOR PREACHING.

The miracle of Spring is beginning.

Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and shivering in the cold

North wind. The joints of rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a

moan in the maples. The skeleton orchards are gray and brown upon the

Southern slopes, but the sun is shining and the clock of Time ticks in

the heart of May. A January fire rolls and roars up the chimney's

capacious throat; the water-pail is nightly glazed with ice, but the

birds are abroad and their songs are in all the air. Not a wisp of hay

remains in the wide, deep bay of the barn, and the cows decline "to

give down," and the lambs are going where the good lambs go, though the

lilacs are budding and the willows have fringed the streams with green.

How full of the dear old music of Summer are wood, orchard and field.

Even the great empty barn, with its ribs of oak, is a-twitter with

swallows that dart in and out at the diamond doors in the gables, and

the mud-walled cottages that are built along the rafters. The robins

are singing the self-same song they sang a thousand years ago, and the

finches are untarnished and golden as ever. Down by the marsh the

bobo'-links are ringing their little bells, and swinging to and fro

upon the little bushes that sway in the wind. The brown thrushes have

built their nests in the fence-corners and the heaps of brush; a

Baltimore oriole flickered like a flake of fire through the garden,

this morning, and drifted away behind the barn; we frightened up a

whip-poor-will yesterday, from among the withered leases, and found a

blue-bird's nest with a single egg in a hollow stump in the pasture. A

little gray couple are busy building in the cleft of the bar-post, and

a small Trojan in speckled jacket is about to keep house on the loaded

end of the well-sweep that goes up forty times a day and comes down

with a bang. Why didn't the little idiot take up his quarters in the

bucket! A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and

to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as

blue as the sky.

There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a

small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail

of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the

depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the

buds make it May, and May it shall be.

Yesterday was Sunday, as clear and as cool as charity, and yesterday I

got into good company for once in a way, and went to church in the

woods. The gray temple that God built looked dull and empty as I

approached, but as I entered, the birds were singing an anthem and

Nature had begun to work a miracle.

Last winter we floundered to the January service, and the drifts, how

huge they were, and the white arms of the forest were stretched out in

silent benediction, stern and cold, like the blessing of old Puritans.

Now, the earth is strewn with withered leaves of a gone summer that

rustled articulately beneath the thoughtful foot, and said, as words

can never say it: "In the midst of life we are in death," and thus the

Sermon began.

And then the birds all around joined in to sing, and the wood-dove to

mourn with her mate, and so this passage of Scripture was read out:

"The winter is over and gone; the time of the singing of birds is come,

and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land."

And after that, two sparrows who were blown away last autumn by the

keen Northeaster, and that nobody thought to see again, sang a simple

song, the burden whereof was, "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground

without Him."

A delicate white flower, that had lifted away a counterpane of damp

gray leaves, stood up in its place at the foot of a great tree, and

what did we have then, but "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not

quickened except it die. Behold, I show you a mystery! we shall not all

sleep, but we shall all be changed."

And the little stars of pink and white flowers that were clustered in a

constellation about the mossy rock, lifted up their voices and sang,

even as they did in Time's morning: "There is one glory of the sun, and

another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star

differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of

the dead." And thus the doctrine was demonstrated, and a robin that

minute began to sing.

Then there went noiselessly over the dead leaves as they lay, and over

the preachers, and over them that prayed, a small shadow; and, looking

up, a white breath of cloud was drifting by, and it said as it went,

"Thus passeth human life," and the wind breathed a low sigh, and the

service went on.

And all the while the birds were busy as busy could be, carrying

timbers and tapestry and couches of down for the homes they were

building, and one sang as she wrought, "The better the day," and her

mate took it up with "The better the deed," and the Sabbath unbroken

shone on.

A few bees, brave as their fellows that dared the dead lion of old

Samson's time, went trumpeting along the neighboring fields, a feeble

charge against the living lion of the North. Walking along the grand

old aisles upon whose floor last summer's dead were lying, let us

recall the time before the first snow fell, and the relenting year

looked back and smiled, so sad and sweet a smile, even as our dead who

stand sometimes upon the holy threshold of a dream; when the last

breath of those dead leaves went heavenward like a prayer, and Indian

Summer charmed the drowsy earth and golden air. But there is no dying

now. The graves are opened! Lo, the violet comes; the lady-slippers

dance upon the air while wild Sweet Williams stand admiring by.

Grand sermons preached they all, of faith and hope and beauty yet to

be, and as you turned away, there in the field a passage from the

Sermon on the Mount, wrapped in green silk, was lying, and what was it

but, "Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not,

neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed

like one of these."

So with fragments of sermons and snatches of songs strewn along the

way, you leave the temple of the Lord and bear away with you some of

the preachers and some of the singers and some of the beauties of the

great congregation in that mighty minster. You dismantle a fallen tree

of one of Nature's studies, a broad green mat of moss, a piece of

velvet from the very loom that wove the glory of morning, and bear it

home for Sunday Reading. Perusing it awhile, you wonder you could ever

have set foot on such a dainty piece of work, for there, written in

God's "fine hand," are maple groves and close-fed pastures for some

tiny herd; and little pines like filaments of feathers; and emerald

hills full-crowned with woods; and in small valleys, like dimples in a

baby's cheek, a mimic lily, as starlight in a tear; the least of Alps

with sand-grain cliffs; spears for atomies, tipped with a drop of red;

trees a full round inch in height, touched at the top with something

like a sunset; a clover-field broad as a linnet's wing, and tufts of

shrubs that might hide a hunted gnat from some small sportsman in those

mimic fields; a landscape done in little; a picture Nature painted on

Holidays and Sundays, and so hid death that, in some fallen tree, lay

like a Titan all abroad.

And this bright landscape fair as Eden land, unrolled upon a dinner

plate, was served up for Love-of-Beauty's feast, where Fancy sat as

guest, and Hope stood by. How earnest Nature is in all she does; how

finished, all her work from moss to mountain. The tint on girlhood's

lip is well laid on, indeed, but with no greater care than set these

rubies in the green fields of Moss-land.

And so that plate of moss "reads like a book." A month ago those pines

were not; nay, the small mountain where they grow was not embossed upon

the velvet, and here you look upon the _programme_ of what Earth

shall be--the finished miracle of Spring; what Earth shall be, despite

complaint and evil prophecy.

Take Nature at her word, even as the birds that trust her, and so toil

and sing though snows have drifted to the heart of May. Look not abroad

for token that the end is near. No telescope shall ever bring to view

time's brown October. But when the birds forget to build their summer

homes and bless the woods, and roses lose their flush and fragrance;

when on just such another scroll of mossy landscape as you are reading

now, no promises are made, then know that earnest Nature has wearied of

her work and seeks a Holiday at last.

CHAPTER V.

THE STORY OF THE BELL.

The Roman knight who rode, all accoutred as he was, into the gulf, and

the mouth of the hungry Forum closed upon him and was satisfied,

vanquished, in his own dying, that great Philistine, Oblivion, which,

sooner or later, will conquer us all.

But there is an old story that always charmed me more. In some strange

land and time they were about to cast a bell for a mighty tower; a

hollow, starless heaven of iron. It should toll for dead monarchs--"the

king is dead!"--and make glad clamor for the new prince--"long live the

king!" It should proclaim so great a passion or so grand a pride that

either would be worship, or, wanting these, forever hold its peace.

Now this bell was not to be digged out of the cold mountains; it was to

be made of something that had been warmed with a human touch or loved

with a human love. And so the people came like pilgrims to a shrine,

and cast their offerings into the furnace and went away. There were

links of chains that bondmen had worn bright, and fragments of swords

that had broken in heroes' hands. There were crosses and rings and

bracelets of fine gold; trinkets of silver and toys of poor red copper.

They even brought things that were licked up in an instant by the red

tongues of flame; good words they had written and flowers they had

cherished; perishable things that could never be heard in the rich tone

and volume of the bell.

And the fires panted like a strong man when he runs a race, and the

mingled gifts flowed down together and were lost in the sand, and the

dome of iron was drawn out like leviathan.

And by-and-by the bell was alone in its chamber, and its four windows

looked forth to the four quarters of heaven. For many a day it hung

dumb; the winds came and went, but they only set it a sighing; birds

came and went, and sang under its eaves, but it was an iron horizon of

dead melody still. All the meaner strifes and passions of men rippled

on below it. They out-groped the ants, and out-wrought the bees, and

out-watched the Chaldean shepherds, but the chamber of the bell was as

dumb as the pyramids.

At last there came a time when men grew grand for right and truth, and

stood shoulder to shoulder over all the land, and went down like

reapers to the harvest of death; looked into the graves of them that

slept, and believed there was something grander than living; glanced on

into the far future and discerned there was something bitterer than

dying, and so, standing between the quick and the dead, they quitted

themselves like men.

Then the bell woke in its chamber, and the great waves of its music

rolled gloriously out and broke along the blue walls of the world like

an anthem; and every tone in it was familiar as a household word to

somebody, and he heard it and knew it with a solemn joy. Poured into

that fiery furnace-heart together, the humblest gifts were blent in one

great wealth, and accents feeble as a sparrow's song grew eloquent and

strong; and lo, a people's stately soul heaved on the tenth wave of a

mighty voice!

We thank GOD in this our day for the furnace and the fire; for the

offerings of gold and the trinkets of silver; for the good deed and the

true word; for the great triumph and the little song.

CHAPTER VI.

"MY EYE!"

That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it lest somebody should

think it original; but then there is really no more slang in it, as I

apply it, than there is in Agur's prayer--the man who wanted what

could be spared precisely as well as not, and who proposed to make his

pantaloons without any pockets. The application changes the nature.

Thus, I spread mustard upon a piece of linen and clap it upon the nape

of a fellow's neck, and it is a blister. I veneer therewith a pink and

white slice of Israelitish abomination, and protect it with a thin

section of bread, and it is--oh, blessed transformation!--it is a

sandwich! So with the topmost phrase of this chapter; a boy without

any brim to his hat shouts it in the street, and it is slang; but I

take it to christen an essay as full of eyes as Juno's Argus,

and--_presto!_--it becomes a Christian name.

Perhaps there is nothing of which there is so many--if we except

blades of grass and grains of sand--as eyes. From the potato that

watches you _perdu_ from its native hill, to a peacock's tail, about

everything is gifted with an eye. There's the eye you put the thread

through, and the eye which you catch with a hook, my girl, when

you used to fasten your dress behind; and the eye of Day, and the

Daisy, my poet; and the "dry eye," which we have been told once or

twice that congregations were entirely out of. There's a violet in

the garden-border with an eye of blue. There's a fly on the

window-pane--six legs, and "eyes" enough in its head to carry any

question with an overwhelming affirmative. There's "Black-eyed Susan,"

in the play, that makes you hum "All in the Downs the fleet was

moored," and snuff salt water, and make a fool of yourself. I can

recall but three things at the moment so poor as not to be blessed

with at least two eyes: the needle, the Cyclops, and the man of one

idea!

Homer--one of him--says Juno was ox-eyed; and though, from all

accounts, Juno was rather a coarse creature, yet everybody has taken to

likening his love to somebody's "nigh" ox; and there is something

beautiful in the great lamp-like eyes of an amiable creature that comes

meekly under the yoke and never makes complaint. Like Darwin's

_other_ monkeys, we are all imitative animals; and how many of us

would ever have thought to look into a bullock's eyes at all if the

blind native of seven cities had not set the example, nobody can tell;

but then it is the Greek fashion to praise the women and the oxen in

the same breath.

"Ladies and gentlemen, here is one of the most _ve_racious animals

that swims in the sea. He follers ships if so be somebody may be

throwed overboard!"

The speaker was a rough man, with one arm and a grizzled lip. The

subject of his discourse lay in a tank of water, and watched him as he

talked. The thing was a sea-tiger, and resembled an exaggerated seal.

Its large, round, dark head was lifted out of the water; but that head

was illuminated by a pair of the most splendid eyes in the world. I can

not say there was any trace of _soul_ in them, albeit there might

be a tender memory of the soles of the copper-toed shoes of the last

little boy he had masticated and swallowed; but ah, those eyes!--they

were large and gentle and pensive. You wouldn't have been a bit

surprised had he burst out with one of Moore's melodies about

"No pearl ever lay under Oman's green water."

If the keeper was as "veracious" as he declared the tiger was, of a

truth those eyes were the most mendacious couple that ever kept

company. If there is no surviving relative to object, I should like to

call one of them Ananias and the other Sapphira. It was a case of love

at first sight. Such wistful, melting glances as that miserable beast

turned upon the ladies who shook their fans at him, and the little

children who "made eyes" at him in return, nobody but a captivating

woman could hope to rival.

The dingy plaster wall of a smoke-house is as utterly blank as your

last lottery ticket. Now fancy the dirty leather apron of some son of

Vulcan hung ignobly thereon, and then fancy, as you look at it, an

impossible eye breaking out all at once in an improbable place in that

wall and close to the apron--an eye small, twinkling, uncertain, and

you have the expression of an elephant's countenance. And yet we boys

and girls have all been led up to Columbus, Hannibal, Romeo, and the

rest of them, and bidden to mark the sagacious glitter of that sinister

crevice. The word "sagacity" is completely ruined for all human uses.

It belongs to the baggage-smashers of the brute creation; and whenever

you read of some "sagacious" statesman you immediately think of an

elephant. Without the intelligence of a horse or the affection of a

dog, and with no beauty either of mould or motion, the beast's eye

tells the story of what Cooper's Sachem calls "the hog with two tails."

The remembrance of an eye is the most tenacious of memories. You may

forget the fashion of face and figure, but if

"There's a light in the window for thee,"

the expression of an eye will sometimes be all that remains to you of a

dead friend. There it is that the soul comes the nearest to escaping.

There it is more nearly undressed and out of doors than it can possibly

be any where else without dying.

"Was Aaron Burr tall?" asked one woman of another who once saw that

recreant "child of many prayers" just for one moment at Albany.

"I don't know," was the reply; "but such a glance as he gave you! I

have always remembered him as the man with the living eyes." Ah, the

flash of the soul's artillery has photographic powers beyond the art of

the artist, and _its_ proofs, of all the printing in the world are

imperishable!

Do you remember the pretty pebbles you used to gather out of the beds

of the brooks--the notes of the sweet low tune they ran by? Dripping

from the water, they were red rubies and green garnets and golden opals

and blue sapphires--precious stones every one; but the glory and

glamour of the brooks once gone, they grew dim and dull and valueless.

It is so with human eyes. You can not always be sure of their color. A

pale, light eye may deepen and darken, when the soul is stirred behind

it, till you declare it black as midnight; and a brown eye may be

fairly bleached blue in the light and fire of passion. The elder

Booth's eyes were all colors in a night; and Charlotte Cushman's, as

Meg Merrilies, kindled into a broad white blaze, like a pine-knot fire.

A nose brought to an edge, and a couple of small black eyes, form, as

astrologers say, "an inauspicious conjunction." Such eyes are apt to

_snap_, a dreadful hemlock quality, to which a strabismus, so violent

that the vicious members seem trying to get at each other under the

bridge of the nose, is a blessing and a beauty. Let us not be

censorious. Let us wish the owners of all such eyes a great deal of

self-control, or a little of the grace of God.

But whatever you do, I pray you never call anybody's eyes "orbs,"

unless you are re-writing Milton's Paradise Lost. And don't call them

"organs." There was a country printer and editor whose wristbands would

have been always in mourning with his hands, if he had worn a shirt,

and who always had a stale copy of his paper sticking out of a

side-pocket, and smelling musty--for he used poor ink and poor ideas to

match--and he was forever talking of his "organ," wherever he was, and

quoting from his "organ," until people laughed about it, and said

"there was a complete outfit for some itinerant Italian with musical

proclivities. There was an 'organ,' and there was a monkey, and nothing

lacking but the man to grind it, and a piece of green baize!" If you

wish to know about a word, set the children to using it. Fancy little

Johnny's cry of "Oh, I've got something in my organs!" or a sound of

lamentation in Ramah--leastwise in the door-yard--with Jenny's wail

that her sun-bonnet keeps tumbling over her orbs! When children and

grown folks talk alike, and the boy speaks as if he were crazy, you may

be sure the man talks as if he were a fool.

I had a friend. He was murdered in Illinois. The man that killed him

was never so true to anybody as was this friend to me and mine. He was

buried without song or sermon. He has gone to a good place, if he has

gone _any_where. I am not certain, but I _hope_ so, for there was too

much genuine nobility about him to perish utterly away--to be snuffed

out like a candle, as if he had never been. His name was--PEDRO. His

eyes, dark in the shadow, russet in the sun, talked English all the

while. Wronged by word or blow, they pleaded for him with a touching

pathos. Caressed, they laughed and sparkled like living fountains.

Stretched upon the threshold in the genial sun, a large human content

worth praying for shone in his eyes. There was a great deal too much

meaning in them for a creature whose "spirit goeth downward," and

almost enough for a being with a soul to be saved. What gave those eyes

their eloquence? Did the mere machinery of a dog's life light them up

so wonderfully, wistfully, sorrowfully? There were love in them, and

hope and abiding trust and an honest heart. What lacked he to entitle

him to two names like a Christian, instead of one? He knew plenty of

people with whom he never could have exchanged qualities without

getting the worst of the bargain. But he did better than to be a

contemptible man, for he was a noble dog. His eyes look inquiringly,

wistfully, after me through the shadows of the years that are past.

They are the immortal part of him. They will last out a human memory.

Hereaway! PEDRO! Hereaway!

The kernel of the proverb, "Love me, love my dog," is that you are

getting pretty near a man when you have made friends with his dog. Now,

I hate "black and tans," the tantivying creatures, their mouths full of

needles, a bark as sharp as a razor, and the whole case of instruments

on all sides of you at once; but I insist that I love dogs. "Black and

tans" are _not_ dogs; they are cutlery.

And now, to come right home and make a personal matter of it, this

gossip would never have seen the light had I not suffered the temporary

loss of one eye, and that set me thinking. Our "body servants," the

most of them, came into the world as Noah's caravan went into the

ark--in _pairs_. Two hands, two feet, two ears, two eyes; and they

are matched spans, every one. The truth is, I never thought much about

having any eyes at all until one of them went under a cloud. None of us

do. A man never feels his ears, no matter how long they are, while they

_work_ well, unless he lays hold of them with his hands. With some

men, though, their ears are their "best hold." So with the eyes. When

the sight is keen and clear, we just take in day and its glories, and

the charm of color, and the witchery of shadow, we hardly know how. We

_feel_ them no more than we do the window-panes through which come

the sunset and the starlight. But let something go wrong, and you are

brought to a lively sense of possession in a twinkling. You begin to

discover how rich you were without knowing it, and what an incalculable

blessing you would lose if only one eye should be extinguished. I

breathed air one night, a while ago, that eight hundred friendly people

had just breathed for me; and I stood with my left shoulder to an open

window with a chill breeze through it, and my left eye fell to weeping

for the folly of the thing; and then impalpable crows began to build a

nest of most palpable sticks, and fairly filled the unfortunate eyrie

until it ceased to be a window, and became a--_rookery_! And the

eye was closed until the unseemly birds could be persuaded to build

elsewhere.

I think, if you touch a man's eye roughly, you come within one of

touching his soul; and I came to think at times that the crows were

foraging in my perceptive faculties for material wherewith to put my

eye out.

The first thing done was to pickle the offending member in strong

brine, as if it were an onion; but the miserable business of corvine

nidification went on. Had you thrust both those hard words into my eye

together, it couldn't have hurt me a bit worse than the crows did.

Having made pickles, it was thought best to put up a sardine or two.

Flax seed was expressed and impressed in an oleaginous bag, whose

slippery contents wriggled about on the tremulous lid like a packet of

angle-worms. But the crows liked linseed and kept on. Things looked

serious, as far as I could see them with a solitary eye; but there was

a comfort: if I had half as many eyes, I had twice as many friends, and

they were tender-hearted women. I was a sort of Mungo Park, in a small

way, only I had a wife to look into my eye whenever I asked her, which

was every few minutes; and I wasn't in Africa, and I didn't lie under a

tree, and my female friends were not negroes, and they didn't sing,

"He has no mother to bring him milk,

No wife to grind his corn."

With these exceptions I was _precisely_ like Mungo Park. The ladies

were solicitous and helpful. One suggested bread and milk; it was

brought and set upon the top of the stove. Another, an alum curd; it

was made and set under the stove. A third, Thompson's Eye-water; it

was brought and thrown into the stove. A fourth, Pettit's Eye-salve;

it appeared and was set upon the table.

Sandwiches were pronounced good; and hand-breadths of mustard, tawnier

than the river Tiber, were spread behind my ears, and a careless crow

dropped a stick or two. It was getting too warm for them, but I could

not see why. In fact, I couldn't see much of anything. It grew warm; it

waxed hot. The skin rolled up like tattered bits of parchment, and the

sandwich lunch was over.

It was time to call the Doctor. He came. Shrewd, skillful, patient, he

mastered the situation. He saw the dishes of sea-water standing about,

and the bags of linseed, and the plasters of mustard, and the alum

curds, and the lotions, and the unguents, and he fell upon my eye, and

he opened it as a Baltimore boy opens an oyster. He got no help from

me; but he saw the crows. Looking about, he took a rapid inventory of

what there was in the room that had not already been put into my eye.

He gazed inquiringly at the bureau and a large rocking-chair. The sheet

of zinc on which the stove stood arrested his attention. "You haven't

used that, have you?" "No," said I; and he whipped out a little bottle,

said "_Zinc_," shook it, pried open my eye with an earnestness

that would not be denied, and poured the zinc square into it. Did you

ever lie on your back in the bottom of a shot-tower when they were

raining lead? If you never did, you don't want to. And then the Doctor

rolled my unfortunate optic about like a billiard ball, until the

liquid was swashed over the whole surface. I thought then, and I still

think, he meant to burn up the crows' nest, possibly the crows. That

eye was better; the birds dropped a few more sticks; but they hung

about the old place still.

It was then thought best to give the cellar the usual spring cleaning,

and feed the pig with the product. Rotten apples were recommended; and

a Russet, that needed to be sent to the cooper's, leaned lazily over to

one side on a little plate, ready for use.

A kind lady from Massachusetts, for whose interest I shall always be

grateful, said that hen and chickens were good--hen and chickens

smothered in cream. That puzzled me. It was too late for hens and too

early for chickens. But the lady set a dozen pairs of little nimble

feet flying about the neighborhood for the poultry; and one day she

came, bringing a handful of small, green plants, chuckle-headed and

cunning, and the secret of the fowls was out. They were "house-leeks."

The brood was put in a tumbler and placed upon the bureau.

But the mischief went on in the aviary. I think one of the crows was

setting, ready to lay or hatch, or something, while the other was

building a door-yard fence. It was the ninth day, when even puppies

pass the limit of total eclipse, and something must be done. Another

lady, also from the Bay State, proposed, as the cooking and baking had

been done, and the pig comforted, that we should feed the--_sheep_!

She named carrots. The girls down stairs were set to washing carrots,

and the procession of the golden vegetable began to move. First, a boy

with a carrot in his claw, like Jupiter's eagle with a thunderbolt in

his talon. Then a lady with a carrot on a tea-plate. Then a man with

an immense fellow on a platter. Then more carrots. Last, a grater, and

the business began. My patient, anxious wife sat up all night grating

carrots. It sounded, in the middle watches, like the rasp of a distant

saw-mill. Everything was the color of Ophir. For twenty-four hours,

once in eighteen minutes, did she apply that carrot; and the crows

began to grow uneasy. Their nest began to tumble to pieces. The

repeated and tremendous assaults proved too much for them. The eye

that had looked like an angry moon in a watery sky began to clear up,

and recover its blue-white porcelain look once more.

The bandage was whipped off; but the team didn't pull even. My right

eye had gone ahead in the business of seeing, and straightened the

traces till they twanged like fiddle-strings. The left eye was drooping

and languid. Things had a cloudy look. I saw two doctors, when only one

had come in. I had two wives, with a face apiece, growing on a single

stem, like a couple of cherries. My Massachusetts friends came in with

their doubles. But the worst of it was, I had four feet, like a

quadruped. Think of the expense! Imagine the boots! It was a worry. But

I began this article. The crows are taking flight--to return, I trust,

in the only English Poe's raven ever knew--"nevermore."

I am indebted to the Doctor and I always mean to be. There can be no

doubt that he made those crows uneasy. The zinc was worse than the

crows, and they could not abide peacefully in one place. He has gone

into the eye-business altogether, for he is a Surgeon in the Navy. He

is going to _sea_.

The brightest May sun breaks out of the cloud. It kindles the hills; it

touches up the woods, just ready to bud. A robin sings that same old

song by the window.

Thank GOD for Light. His resplendent creation--Light, that came into

being the moment He called it, like an instant and ready angel,

watching at His feet.

Thank GOD for eyes--the most delicate and exquisite of all our

servants. Let us be Persians, and worship the Sun. Let us be

Israelites, and pray with our faces toward the EAST.

CHAPTER VII.

THE OLD ROAD.

In almost every old neighborhood there is an old road, disused and half

forgotten, and we like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, and

wander, in a summer's day, along its deserted route.

Our grandfathers had a species of indomitable directness in making

roads and making love that was wonderful to see. They did not believe

in the line of beauty; there was nothing curvilinear about them, either

in word or deed. They went by square and compass, and life and religion

were laid out like Solomon's Temple. And so, straight over the hill,

and right through the big timber, and plump into the swamp, and bounce

over the "corduroy," went the old road.

Its long bridges are broken and mossy now, and brown birds in white

waistcoats build nests beneath them, undisturbed by the small thunder

of the rumbling wheels.

Nobody goes that way, not even the boys bound out for school; for, ever

so many years ago, in a November day, they have heard, a stranger went

down by the old mill--you can see the rim of its dry gray wheel from

here--and was never heard of more.

Years after, among the hemlocks, human bones were found, and to this

day, on windy nights, groans come out of the gulf, and the troubled

ghost is thought to be walking still.

Over yonder are a broad-disked sunflower and a heap of stone. The

latter was once a hearth, for a house stood there, and after the

stranger disappeared the tenant grew suddenly rich, as the times went,

and showed gold with unknown words upon it, that none of the neighbors

could make out, and pretty soon he took all that he had and went West;

as some said to the "Genesee Country," and others to "the Ohio," which

was yet more like a dream than the Genesee.

After that, nobody would live in the house, and it grew ruinous, and

was haunted, and people saw a light there in dark nights, or thought

they did, and the children shunned it, except in the brightest of

mornings, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing, and the

cows went lowing, Indian file, to the pasture; and after awhile, the

old house tumbled down and crumbled away. Such stories thrive along old

roads, even as the Mayweed, and the thistles, that nobody ever cuts,

and on whose pink tops the yellow-birds rock up and down, like little

boats at anchor, till the Fall winds whistle away the golden birds and

the white down.

Even the brooks that used to tinkle across the track and under the

little bridges, have somehow run dry, or gone another way, and you will

see an old trough, dusty and bleached, by the roadside, the strip of

bark, that brought the water from the hills, broken and scattered, and

the earth worn hard and smooth with the tramping of many feet. Very

long ago, a tin cup used to hang there, tethered with a string, for the

sake of thirsty travelers. We like to stand by the deserted place,

where only a broken thread of ice-cold water trickles its way down to

the roadside, and fancy how eagerly, in the broad summer days, the

horses, panting through the heavy sand and up the rocky hills, thrust

their noses deep into the overflowing trough of crystal coolness,

while, now and then, the cautious drivers pulled up their heads with a

jerk, until they heard the long-drawn breath of inarticulate content.

We like to think that the dripping cup was borne to bearded lips that

were eloquent and true of old, and lips, maybe, of beauty, that are

dusty and dumb to-day; that bees from the shimmering fields came

bugling thither, and crept, with dainty feet, along the trough's damp

edge; that birds sat there, and drank and rendered their little thanks,

and rode away upon the billowy air; that now and then a squirrel, red

and sleek, with snowy throat, flashed chattering along the zigzag

rails, and flashed away again; or a gray rabbit, with little noiseless

leap and listening ears, took hurried draughts and squatted among the

alders till the panting dog had lapped the nectar of the wayside

spring.

There, where the Maple wears its crown, a lazy gate is swinging in the

wind, sole relic of a fence that straggled round a home, of which the

weedy, tangled hollow alone gives proof.

It may have been some Rachel dwelt therein, who met a second Jacob at

the spring, and Fancy listens for the words they said, not found in

"Ovid's Art of Love,"--the maid a matron, and the matron dead.

And then, strolling thoughtfully along, where the track grows dim, and

loses itself in the grass, we come to the beeches, whereto, we like to

think, glad children once made pilgrimage. That chafed and sturdy limb

has borne a weight more precious than its leaves. Upon the stout old

arm, swayed to and fro like canaries in a ring, swung clusters of

laughing girls and boys, and then beneath it, hand-in-hand, made bows

and courtesies to the passing traveler, while tattered hats of straw

and wool tossed here and there proclaimed the coming stage. Ah! there

_were_ days when, over the old road, ran the yellow, mud-stained

coach; laboring up its hills, and pitching along its log-ways, and

lurching in its deep-worn tracks, and rattling down its steeps, and

splashing through its brooks.

And there, in that roofless dwelling, whose clap-boards rattle in the

wind, behold "the stage house" of the elder time. Very grand people

used to get out of that stage sometimes, and quite as grand were the

dinners that the bustling landlady and her girls set forth. Then it was

that the blacksmith, in his dusty shop across the road, was wont to

lean upon his hammer, and discuss the merits of wheel-horse and leader.

You can see, even to this day, the burned and blackened ring in the

greensward where he used to "set the tire." Of the smithy and the man,

no other trace remains.

Children sometimes wander out to the old road, and wonder where it

leads, and whether to the end of the world; and we delight to join them

in conjecture; to think what stalwart men they were, that, ax in hand,

so bravely cut their way through the dim resounding woods, and rolled

their cabins up; to think what "beauty" and what "beast" in elder times

did pass along this road; what laughter echoed and what jests went

round; that canvas-covered wains in many a camp were scattered towards

the West, and red fires twinkled through the leafy tents; that soldiers

in some old campaign, and ponderous cannon went that way to battle, and

returned at last, but _fewer_ than they went. This was the route

of them, perhaps, who founded cities in the brave young West, its

future sinews and its coming men; of newly-wedded pairs bound for the

later Canaan; of murderers hastening from the hue and cry.

Across its beaten path the deer have trooped, the Indian noiseless

stole, the forest shadows fallen at high noon. Westward it went to some

great lake, they said, where fields all ready for the plow grew green

to the water's edge, where springs came early and golden autumns

lingered late.

Along that way, trampled beneath the driver's feet, the mail-bag went

and came, and now and then a letter from the West; a great brown sheet,

and traced with awkward pen and faded ink, yet how like a ballad ran

the homely missive: of green March fields, and February flowers; of

Nature's meadows waiting for the scythe; of clustering grapes that

mantled all the woods; of nearest neighbors but two miles apart; of

dreams of plenty and of peace. Blended therewith were memories of home

and words of love sent back, and a little sigh, half breathed, for

faces they never more should see.

What tidings went, sometimes, of fortunes won, and fame, by errant

sons; of girls whose graves were made where the sunbeams rest, "when

they promise a glorious morrow."

Thus slowly to and fro crept the sweet syllables of love, the

untranslated Gospel of the human heart; and, though long on the way,

they never grew chilly or old.

Ah, those letters on huge, buckram foolscap, crackling when you opened

them like a fire in the hemlocks, that used to be written when letters

were as honest as an open palm! Those old, half-naked letters, their

blue ribs showing through, ventured out at long and painful intervals,

were indited "after meeting," and were sure to contain religion, death

or a wedding. The old-time writer, though wicked as Captain Kyd on week

days, was bound to have religion enough in his letter to float it on

Sunday, and he was no hypocrite that did it, for it was the deliberate,

passionless transcript of his better self. Lay side by side an old

letter of 1840 and a new letter of 1874: the one right-angled, neat and

snug in its white or buff jacket, wearing a medallion as if it belonged

to the legion of honor, self-folding, self-sealing, self-paying, and

ready for the road. The other in its shirt-sleeves, broad, long, and

possibly five-cornered, written across its baggy back like a note at

the bank, "for here you see the owner's name,"--an "18-3/4" or a "25"

done in red ink in a corner, and sealed with a pat of shoe-maker's wax

or a little biscuit of dough. But as honest hearts were done up in

those rude letters as ever were set going, and the awkward pages were

more richly illuminated than an old Saint's Legend, with unadorned and

simple friendship.

But over on the new route they have strung the Telegraph, where the

rise of flour and the fall of foes are transmitted by the same flash,

and the price of barley and a priceless blessing go flickering along in

company. The houses on the old road--what few there are left--stand

with their backs to the railway and the telegraph; and the wheeled

World, as it goes thundering by, looks askance upon the back-kitchens

and pig-pens of the old-time.

But the houses on the new road are very new, and smell of paint; the

blinds are very green, and the people very grand. The East and the West

have kissed each other across the Continent, and every body and thing

between is brisk as a flea, and breathless as a king's trumpeter. Even

Consumption has whipped up its pale horse to a gallop, and dashed into

the steeple-chase of the Age.

And year after year the old road grows dimmer, and the grass gets green

across the track, and it is rechristened "the long pasture," and is

surrendered to the lowing herds and the singing birds. In the midst of

a region humming with life, it alone is silent, and almost awakens

human sympathy, so wandering and lost and desolate it is.

Sometimes, as you dust along the turnpike, you can see it as it comes

in sight round a clump of tangled trees, and "makes" as if it would

venture into the new thoroughfare and go somewhere, but it never does,

for, speedily sinking back into the hollow, it is lost among the

willows.

Like a very old memory in the heart is it, and all forget it but the

Year. Spring remembers it, and borders it with green and sprinkles it

with the gold coin of the dandelion and the little stars of the

Mayweed. Summer sends the bees thither to bugle among the

thistle-blows, and the ground-sparrows build in its margins, and the

faded ribbon of yellow sand grows bright in its glowing sun. The winds

waft the breath of the morning over its desolate way, and the rains

long ago beat out the old footprints it used to bear. Autumn sighs as

it follows it through the ravine and among the hemlocks, and the drifts

that Winter heaps are unbroken and stainless.

No bolder feet, old Road, ever left their impress on other pathways; no

truer hearts than hastened on thy rugged way, have ever turned

beautiful in the "better land." If there were ever those whose laugh

was music, then thy woods have heard it. The daughters of the West are

passing fair, but those young brows of old, whose white flashed white

again from thy singing streams, and eyes glanced back to eyes--no

brighter and no purer were ever bent above a classic wave.

Like thee, those brows are furrowed and those eyes are dim. Like thee,

Ambition's line fades from the eye of Time, and like the dusty

"runways" of thy brooks, soft pulses have grown dry and dumb.

CHAPTER VIII.

A BIRD HEAVEN.

Does any theological reason exist why there should not be in some

blessed planet or other a Bird Heaven, a realm where the green gates of

Spring are forever opening and the fruits of Summer are for ever

ripening, whose skies are full of the downiest of clouds and the

softest of songs?

Were I to be constituted the Peter of the gate of that Paradise, there

are very few birds to which free entrance should not be given, except

Cochin China, Shanghai, and Bramah Pootrah hens; the raven should be

admitted for the sake of the poet, and even the owl should have a

hollow tree all to itself, and a meadow of mice for its portion; but

for prowling cats and naughty boys, for snares and for fowlers, there

should be no salvation. No early frosts, no chilling rains, the

cherries all free, and great fields of grain for the pigeons. Birds,

everywhere birds! Not a bush but would have a song in it, all trees

would be "singing trees," and all nests sacred as so many little arks

of the Covenant.

Wicker baskets full of pearls with life in them, emeralds with song in

them, swinging from bending bough, hidden in the grass, rocking among

the rushes, like the little Moses of old, and everybody as loving as

Pharaoh's daughter; no serpent in _this_ Eden to charm; no sky

scarred with arrows, no plumage ruffled by storm--wouldn't it be a

_love_ of a place, that Bird Heaven?

Just a few people that should be forever saying over to themselves,

"not a sparrow falleth to the ground without Him," might live there,

and the eaves, the chimneys and the peak of the barn-rafters should be

full of the twitter of swallows, and the martin-box should never be

untenanted. The gate-post should have a cleft for a wren to dwell in;

the orchard be filled with the homes of the robin and goldfinch, and

the currant-bushes thickly peopled with sparrows; nightingales should

sing the night out, and the larks go heavenward to make song in the

morning. The plaint of the whip-poor-will should be there, and the

mourning of the wood-doves heard from the twilight of the groves.

Flotillas of white sea-fowl should float upon the smooth waters, and

the mote below the edge of the cloud at anchor far up in the noon,

should darken into shape, for an eagle should be there in the sunshine.

The old tree-trunks in the pasture should be the homestead of

blue-birds all the year long, and the lilacs, like the burning bush of

the mountain, should be a-blaze with the wings of red-robin and oriole,

and be not consumed.

Time would forget to go on, and would tarry with June in such a midst.

And the poet who so plaintively asked,

"Where are the birds that sang

An hundred years ago?"

would find them there, with the sweet old song that charmed an humbler

world. And, may be, we should learn the bird language then, and would

know what the robins were saying, and the chirping of sparrows be

turned to the choicest of English.

There in the meadow, all the days in the year, Robert o' Lincoln should

ring his chime of bells; there in the leafy cloisters, "Bob White"

should be incessantly called; there on the nodding thistle-blossoms,

the yellow-bird should ride as the summer wind went gently by.

And what would a June be without roses? And so the sod should be

enameled, and the woods should not be lonely for them. The timid

children of the Rainbow, that fled before the plowshare, should grow

bold again, and start up like young quails from their hiding, and

cluster round the door-stone, and swing themselves up to the roof by

green shrouds of their own, and swing themselves down the damp, mossy

sides of the spring, and be numbered with the household.

And here, to this Bird Heaven, one should come who all his earthly life

long was a loving child of Nature; who saw in the feather fallen from

the blue bird in its flight the tinting of the Hand that touched the

tented sky with azure; in the red bird's glowing wing, the

finger-prints of Him who wove a ribbon of the falling rain, and bound

therewith the cloudy brow of storm: Audubon should come and go at will.

The freedom of the planet should be his.

And the world adjoining, and lying in full sight, should be a Tophet

for the slayers of robins and sparrows; the men whom want of worth

makes "fellows"; who lurk about the woods, in the yet unraveled leaf,

and prowl in the orchards white with the sweet drift of apple-blossoms,

and murder the builders of the homes of song; the ruffians who, in

bright top-boots and game-bag cap-a-pie, return elated with two dead

blue-birds and a lark without a head, who break a thrush's wing, and

misname it "sport," and pass disguised as men. And in that Tophet they

should play Nimrod, with kicking muskets shooting empty air; the crows

should live with them, and Nero to fiddle for them, and a filer of saws

for orchestra; and so, like Alexander the coppersmith, they should be

rewarded "according to their works."

Who can imagine a birdless June, or could love a grove rich as

Vallombrosa in leafy beauty, that sheltered no bird, rustled with no

wings, along whose green corridors floated no little song?

With what elegance of form, grace of motion, brilliancy of coloring,

and sweetness of utterance do they fill the summer world. How like

carrier-doves are they, forever bringing messages of peace from the

bosom of Nature even to our own; and a wintry thing indeed is the

happiness that has no birds in it.

As he can not be altogether evil who cherishes a flower, makes friends

with the little violet until it pleads for him, so they who love birds

for their beauty and song have yet something in themselves that is

lovely.

And this lingering trace of an Eden-born nature gives to the denizens

of the air a commercial value beyond that of the provision market. Who

would think, _without_ thinking, that more than seventeen thousand

song birds are annually sold in New York? The linnets, finches and

thrushes of the Hartz Mountains, the canaries from Antwerp and

Brussels, the skylarks from English fields, and the painted sparrows

from Java are among the multitude. Seventy-five thousand dollars

expended in a single city every year for birds, not to be grilled or

fricasseed, but to be admired for their beauty or loved for their song!

Here are the figures for a single year of this graceful trade in the

city of New York:

12,500 Canaries $31,250

600 Gold Finches 600

75 Blackbirds 525

30 Nightingales 425

600 Linnets 600

100 Skylarks 400

700 Fancy Pigeons, imported 4,000

20 Gold and Silver Pheasants 200

650 Parrots 4,900

300 Birds of Paradise 900

150 Mocking Birds 2,250

600 Java Sparrows 900

250 White and Red Cardinals 575

80 Fire Birds 225

------ -------

17,000 $47,750

In 1873, ninety-five thousand canaries were sold in America--birds

enough to make a golden cloud and hide the sun at high noon. And how

kind it was of Chief Justice Chase to decide, in 1872, that in the

intent of the law imposing a tax upon imported animals, birds were

_not_ animals, and so the wings and the warblers enter the United

States duty free!

Who can help following those wicker cages with their little tenants,

as, borne here and there, they make "the winter of our discontent" a

summer; to some gloomy room with its one window and its narrow strip of

sky; to the chamber of the invalid and the garret of poverty. There,

under the dim sky-light, and there, by the one window, and there, by

the couch of languishing, the captives sit and sing--sing, though no

"sweet South" is blowing, and no soft sky is bending, and no green

branch is rustling; sit and sing while the fall rains beat upon the

panes; while the snows drift white upon the threshold; and then, when,

through the smoky air and the dull window, there comes a gush of

sunshine, what a burst of the old woodland melody there is, till the

listening heart is full of the sweet thoughts of summer, and so they

sing out sorrow's night, and "joy cometh in the morning."

It is with a sort of regret, shared perhaps by nobody else, that I end

these sketches. We always get into the _habit_ of things, and habit

comes to rest easily, like an old garment. I do not now remember much

of anything I was not a little sorry to part with, except a jumping

toothache. But the best thing I can do, after wishing my readers a

pleasant trip by the World on Wheels and a pleasant Station at last,

is to

SWITCH OFF.

[Illustration]

PUBLISHED BY S. C. GRIGGS & CO., CHICAGO.

OLD-TIME PICTURES AND SHEAVES OF RHYME.

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Getting On in the World;

OR, HINTS ON SUCCESS IN LIFE.

By WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.,

_Prof. of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Chicago._

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Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained

as printed.