I never made a more unsatisfactory investment in my life than the one I
made in that restaurant. I felt as if I had been swindled, and I said so
to Halicarnassus. He remarked that there was plenty of cream and sugar.
I answered curtly, that the cream was chiefly water, and the sugar
chiefly flour; but if they had been Simon Pure himself, was it anything
but an aggravation of the offence to have them with nothing to eat them
on?
"You might do as they do in France,--carry away what you don't eat,
seeing you pay for it."
"A pocketful of milk and water would be both delightful and serviceable;
but I might take the sugar," I added, with a sudden thought, upsetting
the sugar-bowl into a "Boston Journal" which we had bought in the train.
"I can never use it, but it will be a consolation to reflect on."
Halicarnassus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to
put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of
base. He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but
I did. I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction;
and Halicarnassus paid his thirty cents, looking--and feeling, as he
afterwards told me--as if a policeman's gripe were on his shoulders. If
any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time
during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take
this occasion to explain the phenomenon. I gave the sugar afterwards to
a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off
the dust of my feet against Boston at the "B. & W.R.R.D."
Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of
Massachusetts Bay. It has three streets: Cornhill, Washington, and
Beacon Streets. It has a Common and a Frog-Pond, and many sprightly
squirrels. Its streets are straight and cross each other like lines on
a chess-board. It has a State-House which is the finest edifice in the
world or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was built,
as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation was
issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the Egyptian
style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington and
School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one
daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the
"Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of
chaste, compact, and classic elegance. In politics, it was a Webster
Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart and
waited for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting. Boston is
called the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their
bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.
I spent two hours and a half in Boston, and I know.
We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay on the
shining hills and scattered benedictions. Plenty smiled up from a
thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes, trod
heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth. Kindly cows stood in
the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God in their
dumb, fumbling way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the plains,
little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them, and no
premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any misgiving
of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight through the
piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in among the
robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed inexorable, and
made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but not for that was
the music hushed, nor did one color fade. Brooks leaped in headlong
chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and glided whispering
beneath the sorrowful willows. Old trees renewed their youth in the
slight tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril, and, leaping lightly
above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine, swaying dreamily in
the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill nor forest but sent up
a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker. Not an ox or cow or lamb or bird
living its own dim life but lent its charm of unconscious grace to the
great picture that unfolded itself, mile after mile, in ever fresher
loveliness to ever unsated eyes. Well might the morning stars sing
together, and all the sons of God shout for joy, when first this grand
and perfect world swung free from its moorings, flung out its spotless
banner, and sailed majestic down the thronging skies. Yet, though but
once God spoke the world to life, the miracle of creation is still
incomplete. New every springtime, fresh every summer, the earth comes
forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not only in the gray dawn of
our history, but now in the full brightness of its noon-day, may we hear
the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I look out upon the gray
degraded fields left naked of the kindly snow, and inwardly ask: Can
these dry bones live again? And while the question is yet trembling on
my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and beauty thrills into
bloom. Who shall lack faith in man's redemption, when every year the
earth is redeemed by unseen hands, and death is lost in resurrection?
To Fontdale sitting among her beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly on.
There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the dark
when I can help it. I love it. There is no solitude in the world, or at
least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the door-way of
the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the
darkness,--darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could only be sure
of rushing on till daylight doth appear! But with the frightful and not
remote possibility of bringing up in a crash and being buried under a
general huddle, one prefers daylight. You may not be able to get out of
the huddle even by daylight; but you will at least know where you are,
if there is anything of you left. So at Fontdale Halicarnassus branches
off temporarily on a business errand, and I stop for the night
a-cousining.
You object to this? Some people do. For my part, I like it. You say you
don't want to turn your own house or your friend's house into a hotel.
If people want to see you, let them come and make a visit; if you want
to see them, you will go and make them one; but this touch and go,--what
is it worth? O foolish Galatians! much every way. For don't you see,
supposing the people are people you don't like, how much better it is to
have them come and sleep or dine and be gone than to have them before
your face and eyes for a week? An ill that is temporary is tolerable.
You could entertain the Evil One himself, if you were sure he would go
away after dinner. The trouble about him is not so much that he comes as
that he won't go. He hangs around. If you once open your door to him,
there is no getting rid of him; and some of his followers, it must be
confessed, are just like him. You must resist them both, or they will
never flee. But if they do flee after a day's tarry, do not complain.
You protest against turning your house into a hotel. Why, the hotelry
is the least irksome part of the whole business, when your guests are
uninteresting. It is not the supper or the bed that costs, but keeping
people going after supper is over and before bed-time is come. Never
complain, if you have nothing worse to do than to feed or house your
guests for a day or an hour.
On the other hand, if they are people you like, how much better to have
them come so than not to come at all! People cannot often make long
visits,--people that are worth anything,--people who use life; and they
are the only ones that are worth anything. And if you cannot get your
good things in the lump, are you going to refuse them altogether? By no
means. You are going to take them by driblets, and if you will only be
sensible and not pout, but keep your tin pan right side up, you will
find that golden showers will drizzle through all your life. So, with
never a nugget in your chest, you shall die rich. If you can stop
over-night with your friend, you have no sand-grain, but a very
respectable boulder. For a night is infinite. Daytime is well enough for
business, but it is little worth for happiness. You sit down to a book,
to a picture, to a friend, and the first you know it is time to get
dinner, or time to eat it, or time for the train, or you must put out
your dried apples, or set the bread to rising, or something breaks in
impertinently and chokes you off at flood-tide. But the night has no
end. Everything is done but that which you would be forever doing. The
curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled into exquisite soft
shadowiness. All the world is far off. All its din and dole strike into
the bank of darkness that envelops you and are lost to your tranced
sense. In all the world are only your friend and you, and then you
strike out your oars, silver-sounding, into the shoreless night.
But the night comes to an end, you say. No, it does not. It is you that
come to an end. You grow sleepy, clod that you are. But as you don't
think, when you begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is just the
same as if you never did. For you have no foreshadow of an inevitable
termination to your rapture, and so practically your night has no limit.
It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other end floats off
into eternity. And there really is no abrupt termination. You roll down
the inclined plane of your social happiness into the bosom of another
happiness,--sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is bliss just as truly as
society to the lonely. What in the distance would have seemed Purgatory,
once reached, is Paradise, and your happiness is continuous. Just as it
is in mending. Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have a
way--which in time fossilizes into a principle--of mending everything as
soon as it comes up from the wash, a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit,
if you use the words thrift and economy in the only way in which they
ought to be used, namely, as applied to what is worth economizing. Time,
happiness, life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But
I see people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked
petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the
using and leave the user worse than they found him. This I call waste
and wicked prodigality. Life is too short to permit us to fret about
matters of no importance. Where these things can minister to the mind
and heart, they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only
pamper the appetite or the vanity or any foolish and hurtful lust,
they are foolish and hurtful. Be thrifty of comfort. Never allow an
opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence,
for any kind of good, to go unimproved. Consider seriously whether the
sirup of your preserves or the juices of your own soul will do the
most to serve your race. It may be that they are compatible,--that the
concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but
if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment
as to which it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will
become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for
souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once a soul, forever a
soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say. Money,
land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are worthless.
It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life that they
acquire value.
So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity
to fritter away your time over old clothes. You precipitate yourself
unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing. For you are not going to put
your stockings on. Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a week,
and in a week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of buttons.
But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes alone all the
same. For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing which you will do
instead is a funded capital which will roll you up a perpetual interest;
and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever abolished. I say forever,
because, when you have gone without the button awhile, the inconvenience
it occasions will reconcile you to the necessity of sewing it on,--will
even go farther, and make it a positive relief amounting to positive
pleasure. Besides, every time you use it, for a long while after you
will have a delicious sense of satisfaction, such as accompanies the
sudden complete cessation of a dull, continuous pain. Thus what was at
best characterless routine, and most likely an exasperation, is turned
into actual delight, and adds to the sum of life. This is thrift. This
is economy. But, alas! few people understand the art of living. They
strive after system, wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier
matters of the higher law.
--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I started for
Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good in
tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and begin
new at Fontdale.
We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a beautiful--_have_,
did I say? Alas! Troy _was_. But I must not anticipate--a beautiful veil
of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for
penance, but a silken gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's check. Yet
everybody fleers at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody looks
at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes great
eyes at it, and says, "What in the world"--, and ends with a huge,
bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature at being forced to
confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth of
my nail than any of its contemporaries. In fact, it is two yards long.
That is all. Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying that its
length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the other end
went with me, so that neither of us should get lost. This is an
allusion to a habit which I and my property have of finding ourselves
individually and collectively left in the lurch. After this initial
shot, everybody considered himself at liberty to let off his rusty old
blunderbuss, and there was a constant peppering. But my veil never
lowered its colors nor curtailed its resources. Alas! what ridicule and
contumely failed to effect, destiny accomplished. Softness and plenitude
are no shields against the shafts of fate.
I went into the station waiting-room to write a note. I laid my bonnet,
my veil, my packages upon the table. I wrote my note. I went away. The
next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my journey,
there was no veil. I remembered that I had taken it into the station
the night before, and that I had not taken it out. At the station we
inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it. It is as much as your life
is worth to ask these people about lost articles. They take it for
granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of stealing.
"Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?" asked Crene, her
sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips. "No, I 'a'n't
seen nothin' of it," says Gnome, with magnificent indifference.
"It was lost here last night," continues Crene, in a soliloquizing
undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.
"I do' know nothin' about it. _I_ 'a'n't took it"; and the Gnome tosses
her head back defiantly. "I seen the lady when she was a-writin' of her
letter, and when she went out ther' wa'n't nothin' left on the table but
a hangkerchuf, and that wa'n't hern. I do' know nothin' about it, nor I
'a'n't seen nothin' of it."
Oh, no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since
no one accused you or even suspected you, why could you not have been
less aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions? But we will
plough no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a
rock and grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,--my ample,
historic, heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air
filtered through--I will not say _stolen_ tissue, but certainly
through tissue which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair
equivalent. Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds
say to her, "O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours," and still
sighingly, "not yours! Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the
sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"? I believe I am
wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose
or poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because nobody of taste could
surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she cut
it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister, and
that there are two women,--nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of
grandeur and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every way
probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took three
quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister, and gave
the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at this very moment
there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad under
the silken shadows of my veil! And yet there are people who profess to
disbelieve in total depravity.
Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the spirit
of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into
Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North
Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes--so pretty to look at that
one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a
just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are--Crene's dark eyes
seen it tilting up into a baggage-crate and trundling off towards the
Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a formidable hitch in
the programme. A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps. I was
the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and
examining-counsel. The case did not admit of a doubt. There was the
little insurmountable check whose brazen lips could speak no lie.
"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have
drawn it from me.
"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.