Once more we were compelled to change our purpose.
When we left Tom Draw's it had been, as we thought, finally decided that
we were for this bout to visit that fair village no more, but when that
worthy announced his own determination to accompany us on our homeward
route, and when we had taken into consideration the fact, that,
independent of Tom's two hundred and fifty weight of solid flesh, we had
two noble bucks, beside quail, ruffed grouse, woodcock, and rabbit
almost innumerable to transport, in addition to our two selves and
Timothy, with the four dogs, and lots of luggage--when we, I say,
considered all this, it became apparent that another vehicle must be
provided for our return. So during the last jorum, it had been put to
the vote and unanimously carried that we should start for Tom's, by a
retrograde movement, at four o'clock in the morning, breakfast with him,
and rig up some drag or other wherein Timothy might get the two deer and
the dogs, as best he might, into the city.
"As for us," said Harry, "we will go down the other road, Tom, over the
back-bone of the mountain, dine with old Colonel Beams, stop at
Paterson, and take a taste at the Holy Father's poteen--you may look at
the Falls if you like it, Frank, while we're looking at the Innishowen--
and so get home to supper. I'll give you both beds for one night--but
not an hour longer--my little cellar would be broken, past all doubt, if
old Tom were to get two nights out of it!"
"Ay'se sure it would," responded Timothy, who had been listening, all
attention, mixing meanwhile some strange compound of eggs and rum and
sugar. "Whoy, measter Draa did pratty nigh drink 't out yance--that
noight 'at eight chaps, measter Frank, drank oop two baskets o'
champagne, and fifteen bottles o' 't breawn sherry--Ay carried six on
'em to bed, Ay'se warrant it--and yan o' them, young measter Clark, he
spoilt me a new suit o' liveries, wi' vomiting a top on me."
"That'll do, Timothy," interposed Archer, unwilling, as I thought, that
the secret mysteries of his establishment should be revealed any further
to the profane ears which were gaping round about us--"that'll do for
the present--give Mr. Draw that flip--he's looking at it very angrily, I
see! and then turn in, or you'll be late in the morning; and, by George,
we must be away by four o'clock at latest, for we have all of sixty
miles to make to-morrow, and Tom's fat carcase will try the springs most
consumedly, down hill."
Matters thus settled, in we turned, and--as it seemed to me, within five
minutes, I was awakened by Harry Archer, who stood beside my bed full
dressed, with a candle in his hand.
"Get up," he whispered, "get up, Frank, very quietly; slip on your
great-coat and your slippers--we have a chance to serve Tom out--he's
not awake for once! and Timothy will have the horses ready in five
minutes!"
Up I jumped on the instant, hauled on a rough-frieze pea-jacket, thrust
my unstockinged feet into their contrary slippers, and followed Harry,
on the tips of my toes, along a creaking passage, guided by the
portentous ruckling snorts, which varied the ilk profundity of the fat
man's slumbers. When I reached his door, there stood Harry, laughing to
himself, with a small quiet chuckle, perfectly inaudible at three feet
distance, the intensity of which could, however, be judged by the manner
in which it shook his whole person. Two huge horse-buckets, filled to
the brim, were set beside him; and he had cut a piece of an old
broomstick so as to fit exactly to the width of the passage, across
which he had fastened it, at about two feet from the ground, so that it
must most indubitably trip up any person, who should attempt to run
along that dark and narrow thoroughfare.
"Now, Frank," said he, "see here! I'll set this bucket here behind the
door--we'll heave the other slap into his face--there he lies, full on
the broad of his fat back, with his mouth wide open--and when he jumps
up full of fight, which he is sure to do, run you with the candle, which
blow out the moment he appears, straight down the passage. I'll stand
back here, and as he trips over that broomstick, which he is certain to
do, I'll pitch the other bucket on his back--and if he does not think
he's bewitched, I'll promise not to laugh. I owe him two or three
practical jokes, and now I've got a chance, so I'll pay him all at
once."
Well! we peeped in, aided by the glare of the streaming tallow candle,
and there, sure enough, with all the clothes kicked off him, and his
immense rotundity protected only from the cold by an exceeding scanty
shirt of most ancient cotton, lay Tom, flat on his back, like a stranded
porpoise, with his mouth wide open, through which he was puffing and
breathing like a broken-winded cab-horse, while through his expanded
nostrils he was snoring loudly enough to have awaked the seven sleepers.
Neither of us could well stand up for laughing. One bucket was deposited
behind the door, and back stood Harry ready to slip behind it also at
half a moment's warning--the candlestick was placed upon the floor,
which I was to kick over in my flight.
"Stand by to heave!" whispered my trusty comrade--"heave!" and with the
word--flash!--slush!--out went the whole contents of the full pail, two
gallons at the least of ice-cold water, slap in the chaps, neck, breast,
and stomach of the sound sleeper. With the most wondrous noise that ears
of mine have ever witnessed--a mixture of sob, snort, and groan,
concluding in the longest and most portentous howl that mouth of man
ever uttered--Tom started out of bed; but, at the very instant I
discharged my bucket, I put my foot upon the light, flung down the empty
pail, and bolted. Poor devil!--as he got upon his feet the bucket rolled
up with its iron handles full against his shins, the oath he swore at
which encounter, while he dashed headlong after me, directed by the
noise I made on purpose, is most unmentionable. Well knowing where it
was, I easily jumped over the stick which barred the passage. Not so
Tom--for going at the very top of his pace, swearing like forty troopers
all the time, he caught it with both legs just below the knees, and went
down with a squelch that shook the whole hut to the rooftree, while at
the self-same instant Harry once again soused him with the contents of
the second pail, and made his escape unobserved by the window of Tom's
own chamber. Meanwhile I had reached my room, and flinging off my
jacket, came running out with nothing but my shirt and a lighted candle,
to Tom's assistance, in which the next moment I was joined by Harry, who
rushed in from out of doors with the stable lanthorn.
"What's the row now?" he said, with his face admirably cool and quiet.
"What the devil's in the wind?"
"Oh! Archer!" grunted poor Tom, in most piteous accents--"them darned
etarnal Teachmans--they've murdered me right out! I'll never get over
this--ugh! ugh! ugh! Half drowned and smashed up the darndest! Now aint
it an etarnal shame! Cuss them, if I doos n't sarve them out for it, my
name's not Thomas Draw!"
"Well, it is not," rejoined Harry, "who in the name of wonder ever
called you Thomas? Christened you never were at all, that's evident
enough, you barbarous old heathen--but you were certainly named Tom."
Swearing, and vowing vengeance on Jem Lyn, and Garry, and the Teachmans
--each one of whom, by the way, was sound asleep during this pleasant
interlude--and shaking with the cold, and sputtering with uncontrollable
fury, the fat man did at length get dressed, and after two or three
libations of milk punch, recovered his temper somewhat, and his spirits
altogether.
Although, however, Harry and I told him very frankly that we were not
merely the sole planners, but the sole executors, of the trick--it was
in vain we spoke. Tom would not have it.
"No--he knew--he knew well enough; did we go for to think he was such an
old etarnal fool as not to know Jem's voice--a bloody Decker--he would
be the death of him."
And direful, in good truth, I do believe, were the jokes practical, and
to him no jokes at all, which poor Jem had to undergo, in expiation of
his fancied share in this our misdemeanor.
Scarce had the row subsided, before the horses were announced. Harry and
I, and Tom and Timothy, mounted the old green drag; and, with our
cheroots lighted--the only lights, by the way, that were visible at all
--off we went at a rattling trot, the horses in prime condition, full of
fire, biting and snapping at each other, and making their bits clash and
jingle every moment. Up the long hill, and through the shadowy wood,
they strained, at full ten miles an hour, without a touch of the whip,
or even a word of Harry's well-known voice.
We reached the brow of the mountain, where there are four cleared
fields--whereon I once saw snow lie five feet deep on the tenth day of
April--and an old barn; and thence we looked back through the cold gray
gloom of an autumnal morning, three hours at least before the rising of
the sun, while the stars were waning in the dull sky, and the moon had
long since set, toward the Greenwood lake.
Never was there a stronger contrast, than between that lovely sheet of
limpid water, as it lay now--cold, dun, and dismal, like a huge plate of
pewter, without one glittering ripple, without one clear reflection,
surrounded by the wooded hills which, swathed in a dim mist, hung grim
and gloomy over its silent bosom--and its bright sunny aspect on the
previous day.
Adieu! fair Greenwood Lake! adieu! Many and blithe have been the hours
which I have spent around, and in, and on you--and it may well be I
shall never see you more--whether reflecting the full fresh greenery of
summer; or the rich tints of cisatlantic autumn; or sheeted with the
treacherous ice; but never, thou sweet lake, never will thy remembrance
fade from my bosom, while one drop of life-blood warms it; so art thou
intertwined with memories of happy careless days, that never can return
--of friends, truer, perhaps, though rude and humble, than all of
prouder seeming. Farewell to thee, fair lake! Long may it be before thy
rugged hills be stripped of their green garniture, or thy bright waters
marred by the unpicturesque improvements of man's avarice!--for truly
thou, in this utilitarian age, and at brief distance from America's
metropolis, art young, and innocent, and unpolluted, as when the red man
drank of thy pure waters, long centuries ere he dreamed of the
pale-faced oppressors, who have already rooted out his race from half
its native continent.* [*Marred it has been long ago. A huge dam has
been drawn across its outlet, in order to supply a feeder to the Morris
Canal--a gigantic piece of unprofitable improvement, made, I believe,
merely as a basis on which for brokers, stock-jobbers--et id genus omne
of men too utilitarian and ambitious to be content with earning money
honestly--to exercise their prodigious 'cuteness. The effect of this has
been to change the bold shores into pestilential submerged swamps,
whereon the dead trees still stand, tall, gray and ghostly; to convert a
number of acres of beautiful meadow-land into stagnant grassy shallows;
to back up the waters at the lake's head, to the utter destruction of
several fine farms; and, last not least, to create fever and ague in
abundance, where no such thing had ever been heard tell of before.
Certainly! your well devised improvement is a great thing for a
country!]
Another half hour brought us down at a rattling pace to the village, and
once again we pulled up at Tom's well-known dwelling, just as the day
was breaking. A crowd of loiterers, as usual, was gathered even at that
untimely season in the large bar-room; and when the clatter of our hoofs
and wheels announced us, we found no lack of ready-handed and quick
tongued assistants.
"Take out the horses, Timothy," cried Harry, "unharness them, and rub
them down as quickly and as thoroughly as may be--let them have four
quarts each, and mind that all is ready for a start before an hour.
Meantime, Frank, we will overhaul the game, get breakfast, and hunt up a
wagon for the deer and setters."
"Don't bother yourself about no wagon," interposed Tom, "but come you in
and liquor, else we shall have you gruntin half the day; and if old roan
and my long pig-box wont carry down the deer, why I'll stand treat."
A jorum was prepared, and discussed accordingly, fresh ice produced, the
quail and woodcock carefully unpacked, and instantly re-stowed with
clean straw, a measure which, however, seemed almost supererogatory,
since so completely had the external air been excluded from the
game-box, that we found not only the lumps of ice in the bottom unthawed,
but the flannel which lay over it stiff frozen; the birds were of course
perfectly fresh, cool, and in good condition. Our last day's batch,
which it was found impossible to get into the box, with all the ruffed
grouse, fifty at least in number, were tied up by the feet, two brace
and two brace, and hung in festoons round the inside rails of the front
seat and body, while about thirty hares dangled by their hind legs, with
their long ears flapping to and fro, from the back seat and baggage
rack. The wagon looked, I scarce know how, something between an English
stage-coach when the merry days of Christmas are at hand, and a
game-hunter's taxed cart.
The business of re-packing had been scarce accomplished, and Harry and
myself had just retired to change our shooting-jackets and coarse
fustians for habiliments more suitable for the day and our destination--
New York, to-wit, and Sunday--when forth came Tom, bedizened from top to
toe in his most new and knowing rig, and looking now, to do him justice,
a most respectable and portly yeoman.
A broad-brimmed, low-crowned, and long-napped white hat, set forth
assuredly to the best advantage his rotund, rubicund, good-humored phiz;
a clean white handkerchief circled his sturdy neck, on the voluminous
folds of which reposed in placid dignity the mighty collops of his
double chin. A bright canary waistcoat of imported kerseymere, with vast
mother-of-pearl buttons, and a broad-skirted coat of bright blue cloth,
with glittering brass buttons half the size of dollars, covered his
upper man, while loose drab trousers of stout double-milled, and a pair
of well-blacked boots, completed his attire; so that he looked as
different an animal as possible, from the unwashed, uncombed, half-naked
creature he presented, when lounging in his bar-room in his every-day
apparel.
"Why, halloa, Guts!" cried Archer, as he entered, "you've broken out
here in a new place altogether."
"Now quit, you, callin' of me Guts," responded Tom, more testily than I
had ever heard him speak to Harry, whose every whim and frolic he seemed
religiously to venerate and humor; "a fellow doesn't want to have it
'Guts' here, and 'Guts' there, over half a county. Why, now, it was but
a week since, while 'lections was a goin' on, I got a letter from some
d--d chaps to Newburg--`Rouse about now, old Guts, you'll need it this
election?'"
"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted Harry and I almost simultaneously, delighted at
Tom's evident annoyance.
"Who wrote it, Tom?"
"That's what I'd jist give fifty dollars to know now," replied mine
host, clinching his mighty paw.
"Why, what would you do," said I, "if you did know?"
"Lick him, by George! Lick him, in the first place, till he was as nigh
dead as I daared lick him--and then I'd make him eat up every darned
line of it! But come, come--breakfast's ready; and while we're getting
through with it, Timothy and Jem Lyn will fix the pig-box, and make the
deer all right and tight for traveling!"
No sooner said than done--an ample meal was speedily despatched--and
when that worthy came in to announce all ready, for the saving of time,
master Timothy was accommodated with a seat at a side-table, which he
occupied with becoming dignity, abstaining, as it were, in consciousness
of his honorable promotion, from any of the quaint and curious
witticisms, in which he was wont to indulge; but manducating, with vast
energy, the various good things which were set before him.
It was a clear, bright Sabbath morning, as ever shone down on a sinful
world, on which we started homeward--and, though I fear there was not
quite so much solemnity in our demeanor as might have best accorded with
the notions of over strict professors, I can still answer that, with
much mirth, much merriment, and much good feeling in our hearts, there
was no touch of irreverence, or any taint of what could be called sinful
thought. The sun had risen fairly, but the hour was still too early for
the sweet peaceful music of the church-going bells to have made their
echoes tunable through the rich valley. A merry cavalcade, indeed, we
started--Harry leading the way at his usual slap-dash pace, so that one,
less a workman than himself, would have said he went up hill and down at
the same break-neck pace, and would take all the grit out of his team
before he had gone ten miles--while a more accurate observer would have
seen, at a glance, that he varied his rate at almost every inequality of
road, that he quartered every rut, avoided every jog or mud-hole,
husbanded for the very best his horses' strength, never making them
either pull or hold a moment longer than was absolutely necessary from
the abruptness of the ground.
At his left hand sat I, while Tom, in honor of his superior bulk and
weight, occupied with his magnificent and portly person the whole of the
back seat, keeping his countenance as sanctified as possible, and
nodding, with some quaint and characteristic observation, to each one of
the scattered groups of country-people, which we encountered every
quarter of a mile for the first hour of our route, wending their way
toward the village church--but, when we reached the forest-mantled road
which clombe the mountain, making the arched woods resound to many a
jovial catch or merry hunting chorus.
Mounted sublime on an arm-chair lashed to the forepart of the pig-box,
sat Timothy in state--his legs well muffled in a noble scarlet-fringed
buffalo skin, and his body encased in his livery top-coat--the setters
and the spaniels crouching most meekly at his feet, and the two noble
bucks--the fellow on whose steaks we had already made an inroad, having
been left as fat Tom's portion--securely corded down upon a pile of
straw, with their sublime and antlered crests drooping all spiritless
and humble over the backboard, toward the frozen soil which crashed and
rattled under the ponderous hoofs of the magnificent roan horse--Tom's
special favorite--which, though full seventeen hands high, and heavy in
proportion; yet showing a good strain of blood, trotted away with his
huge load at full ten miles an hour.
Plunging into the deep recesses of the Greenwoods, hill after hill we
scaled, a toilsome length of stony steep ascents, almost precipitous,
until we reached the back-bone of the mountain ridge--a rugged, bare,
sharp edge of granite rock, without a particle of soil upon it, diving
down at an angle not much less than forty-five degrees into a deep
ravine, through which thundered and roared a flashing torrent. This
fearful descent overpast, and that in perfect safety, we rolled merrily
away down hill, till we reached Colonel Beam's tavern, a neat,
low-browed, Dutch, stone farmhouse, situate in an angle scooped out of a
green hill-side, with half a dozen tall and shadowy elms before it--a
bright crystal stream purling along into the horse-trough through a
miniature aqueduct of hollowed logs, and a clear cold spring in front of
it, with half a score of fat and lazy trout floating in its transparent
waters.
A hearty welcome, and a no less hearty meal having been here encountered
and despatched, we rattled off again, through laden orchards and rich
meadows; passed the confluence of the three bright rivers which issue
from their three mountain gorges, to form, by their junction, the
fairest of New Jersey's rivers, the broad Passaic; reached the small
village noted for rum-drinking and quarter racing--high Pompton--thence
by the Preakness mountain, and Mose Canouze's tavern--whereat, in honor
of Tom's friend, a worthy of the self-same kidney with himself, we
paused awhile--to Paterson, the filthiest town, situate on one of the
loveliest rivers in the world, and famous only for the possession, in
the person of its Catholic priest, of the finest scholar and best fellow
in America, whom we unluckily found not at home, and therefore tasted
not, according to friend Harry's promise, the splendid Innishowen which
graces at all times his hospitable board.
Eight o'clock brought us to Hoboken, where, by good luck, the ferry boat
lay ready--and nine o'clock had not struck when we three sat down once
again about a neat small supper-table, before a bright coal fire, in
Archer's snuggery--Tom glorying in the prospect of the races on the
morrow, and I regretting that I had brought to its conclusion--MY FIRST
WEEK IN THE WOODLANDS