Once there was a great noise in our house,--a thumping and battering and
grating. It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the garret.
I did it myself because I wanted it done. If I had said, "Halicarnassus,
will you fetch my trunk down?" he would have asked me what trunk? and
what did I want of it? and would not the other one be better? and
couldn't I wait till after dinner?--and so the trunk would probably have
had a three-days' journey from garret to basement. Now I am strong in
the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the one and spared
the other, and got the trunk down-stairs myself. Halicarnassus heard the
uproar. He must have been deaf not to hear it; for the old ark banged
and bounced, and scraped the paint off the stairs, and pitched
head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dinted
the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward, uncompromising,
unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.
By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus
loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of
my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rasped off three
knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had
crushed it against a sharp edge of the door-way.
"Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively.
"To be sure," I replied affirmatively.
He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore
traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed.
"Do you want me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked.
"No!" I answered promptly.
"Well, then, here it is. The next time you design to bring a trunk
downstairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out
the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar. It will make less
uproar, and not take so much to repair damages."
He intended to be severe. His words passed by me as the idle wind. I
perched on my trunk, took a pasteboard box-cover and fanned myself. I
was very warm. Halicarnassus sat down on the lowest stair and remained
silent several minutes, expecting a meek explanation, but, not getting
it, swallowed a bountiful piece of what is called in homely talk
"humble-pie," and said,--
"I should like to know what's in the wind now."
I make it a principle always to resent an insult and to welcome
repentance with equal alacrity. If people thrust out their horns at me
wantonly, they very soon run against a stone wall; but the moment they
show signs of contrition, I soften. It is the best way. Don't insist
that people shall grovel at your feet before you accept their apology.
That is not magnanimous. Let mercy temper justice. It is a hard thing
at best for human nature to go down into the Valley of Humiliation; and
although, when circumstances arise which make it the only fit place for
a person, I insist upon his going, still, no sooner does he actually
begin the descent than my sense of justice is appeased, my natural
sweetness of disposition resumes sway, and I trip along by his side
chatting as gayly as if I did not perceive it was the Valley of
Humiliation at all, but fancied it the Delectable Mountains. So, upon
the first symptoms of placability, I answered cordially,--
"Halicarnassus, it has been the ambition of my life to write a book of
travels. But to write a book of travels, one must first have travelled."
"Not at all," he responded. "With an atlas and an encyclopedia one can
travel around the world in his arm-chair."
"But one cannot have personal adventures," I said. "You can, indeed, sit
in your arm-chair and describe the crater of Vesuvius; but you cannot
tumble into the crater of Vesuvius from your arm-chair."
"I have never heard that it was necessary to tumble in, in order to have
a good view of the mountain."
"But it is necessary to do it, if one would make a readable book."
"Then I should let the book slide,--rather than slide myself."
"If you would do me the honor to listen," I said, scornful of his
paltry attempt at wit, "you would see that the book is the object of my
travelling. I travel to write. I do not write because I have travelled.
I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures. My adventures
are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book."
"A most original way of getting up a book!"
"Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world. Look at our
dear British cousins."
"And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent country
that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about their
shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."
"Just where they are right. Just why I like the race, from Trollope
down. They give you something to take hold of. I tell you,
Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer, and not the nature
of the scenery or of the institutions, that makes the interest. It
stands to reason. If it were not so, one book would be all that ever
need be written, and that book would be a census report. For a republic
is a republic, and Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how you stood on
the chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and bought a cake of
shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous price, or how your
baby jumped from the arms of the careless nurse into the Falls, and
immediately your own individuality is thrown around the scenery, and it
acquires a human interest. It is always five miles from one place to
another, but that is mere almanac and statistics. Let a poet walk the
five miles, and narrate his experience with birds and bees and flowers
and grasses and water and sky, and it becomes literature. And let me
tell you further, Sir, a book of travels is just as interesting as the
person who writes it is interesting. It is not the countries, but the
persons, that are 'shown up.' You go to France and write a dull book.
I go to France and write a lively book. But France is the same. The
difference is in ourselves."
Halicarnassus glowered at me. I think I am not using strained or
extravagant language when I say that he glowered at me. Then he growled
out,--
"So your book of travels is just to put yourself into pickle."
"Say rather," I answered, with sweet humility,--"say rather it is to
shrine myself in amber. As the insignificant fly, encompassed with
molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own littleness
uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is imprisoned, so I,
wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find myself niched into a
fame which my unattended and naked merit could never have claimed."
Halicarnassus was a little stunned, but, presently recovering himself,
suggested that I had travelled enough already to make out quite a
sizable book.
"Travelled!" I said, looking him steadily in the face,--"travelled!
I have been up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a
freshet, you took a superannuated broom and paddled me, around the
orchard in a leaky pig's trough!"