"This is the shortest way," she said, as we came to a corner.
"Then we won't take it," said I. The schoolmistress laughed a little,
and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go around.
[Footnote 13: From Part X of "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
We walked around Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray squirrels
were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us
in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of
the burial ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue slate-stone at
its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave
of a young man who was the son of an honorable gentleman, and who died
a hundred years ago and more. Oh, yes, died--with a small triangular
mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where
another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay
down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning,
with the night dews and the death dews mingled on his forehead.
"Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave," said I. "His bones
lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they
lie--which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and
several other burial grounds....
"Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out
there fighting another young fellow on the common, in the cool of that
old July evening; yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it."
The schoolmistress dropt a rosebud she had in her hand through the
rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woolbridge. That was all her comment
upon what I told her. "How women love Love!" said I; but she did not
speak.
We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
the main street. "Look down there," I said; "my friend, the Professor,
lived in that house, at the left hand, next the further corner, for
years and years. He died out of it, the other day." "Died?" said the
schoolmistress. "Certainly," said I. "We die out of houses, just as we
die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's homes
for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out
the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit
them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities.
The body has been called 'the house we live in'; the house is quite
as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the
Professor said the other day?" "Do!" said the schoolmistress.
"'A man's body,' said the Professor, 'is whatever is occupied by his
will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote
those papers you remember reading, was much more a part of my body
than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.
"'The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes around it,
like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First,
he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial
integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of
lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Third, his
domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the
whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose
outside wrapper.
"'You shall observe,' the Professor said, for like Mr. John Hunter and
other great men, he brings in that 'shall' with great effect
sometimes, 'you shall observe that a man's clothing or series of
envelopes after a certain time mold themselves upon his individual
nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when
we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the
beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and
depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky
which caps his head--a little loosely--shapes itself to fit each
particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets,
lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the
eyes with which they severally look.
"'But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
There is a shellfish which builds all manner of smaller shells into
the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it
with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See
what these are, and you can tell what the occupant is.
"'I had no idea,' said the Professor, 'until I pulled up my domestic
establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had
been making the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a nook or
a corner that some fiber had not worked its way into; and when I gave
the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it
broke its hold and came away.
"'There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await
but one brief process, and all their pictures will be called out and
fixt forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a
very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one
place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image
on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the
midst of this picture was another--the precise outline of a map which
hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all forgotten
everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall.
Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin
which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is
pulled away from the wall of Infinity, where the wrongdoing stands,
self-recorded.'
"The Professor lived in that house a long time--not twenty years, but
pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the
threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for
the last time--and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be
longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death
rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to
maturity; wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama
of life was played in that stock company's theater of a dozen houses,
one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever
entered his dwelling. 'Peace be to those walls forever,' the Professor
said, for the many pleasant years he has passed within them.
"The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in
imagination with tender interest wherever he goes. In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long--in his autumnal
sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its
mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the small
proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and
swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair
Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's
memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower
shores--up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where
Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to
lead the commencement processions--where blue Ascutney looked down
from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor
always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing
masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to
look through his old 'Dollond' to see if the Shining Ones were not
within range of sight--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks
that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadows of the rod of Moses,
to the terminus of their harmless stroll--the 'patulous fage,' in the
Professor's classic dialect--the spreading beech, in more familiar
phrase--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done
yet, and We have another long journey before us.]
"--and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs
that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demiblondes--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks
of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter
snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest
waves of the great land storm in this billowy region--suggestive to
mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out by
a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of
the forest--in that home where seven blest summers were passed, which
stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific
vision of the holy dreamer--
"--in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet
not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany--full of great and
little boys' playthings from top to bottom--in all these summer or
winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.
"This long articulated sigh of reminiscences--this calenture which
shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the
mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves that come
feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and
soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers--is for that friend of mine
who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the
same visions that paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
Charles."
Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress? Why, no--of course not.
I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes.
You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence
as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?
What did I say to the schoolmistress? Permit me one moment. I don't
doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as
I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting
young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a
familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is _nullum
tui negotii_.
When the schoolmistress and I reached the schoolroom door, the damask
roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I
felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every
morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.