Rest! Ah, what a delicious word to the sick and wearied man. Rest in mind and body! How unsatisfactory appear the gaudy pictures of the dreamer of Patmos compared with the simple words of the Master, "I will give you rest." I can hardly say why I selected Hampton for rest. I knew nobody here, and had never been here. But somehow I had taken up the impression that it was one of those old East Virginia towns that had been blown ashore by the tempest of civil war and lay stranded on the beach of the briny ocean of life. And that was the sort of place that quiet was to be found in. My first night was a happy confirmation of my choice. Standing on the wharf at which lay a little steamer, the scene was beautiful. The new moon hung in the west and cast its glittering line over the water for miles and miles away. Thick in the little harbor lay the slender masts of vessels with steady lights glowing in their rigging. Across the narrow bay stood the Normal School with its three stories brightly lighted, and further away was the gigantic Soldiers' Home with a thousand lights burning. To the east was the long bridge across Hampton creek, with every few minutes a lighted omnibus or a pair of carnage lamps going leisurely across. Further yet was a railroad train lighted and flying across the trestle bridge. At the opening of the little bay were fisher boats, coming in with all sail spread, the loud laughter and chaffing of the men easily heard at this distance. Turning inland, you see a broad street, with shade trees on each side casting dark shadows. The lights twinkle its whole length and at one point there is a bright spot—a pretty, white hotel with a treble deck of verandahs. That is my home for many days to come and there I am to be at rest. The call of the bugle sounds on the night air; it is the "taps" at the Soldiers' Home; the salt water is beating with lazy monotone against the shore; the fisherman have tied up their boats; the last omnibus has crossed the bridge; the young moon is getting to her bed and I turn my face toward the long street and the bright hotel. A man of high-toned and poetic mind would here insert something about his thoughts turning to his mountain home. Alas! mine are turned with eager curiosity to what my breakfast tomorrow would be, reflecting as I do that I am now in the land, or rather water, of oysters, soft crabs and fish. After all, of what common clay we are made!
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The redeeming feature of ill-health, to me, has been that for the last few months I have been thrown with many invalids and enjoyed their confidence to the fullest, (and sometimes the most, to some extent). There seems to be a sort of free-masonry among sick people by which they at once become friendly and familiar. There is, also, if you only knew it, an aristocracy of ill-health; that is, a man with two complaints stands much higher with his fellow invalids than a man with one; and a man who has been sick for five years stands immeasurably higher than a mere cadet who has not been sick six months. Having only a two years' standing, I was forced to bear the contempt which I received from chronic cases, but I repaid it with interest on some evidently shoddy invalids, who were trying to work their way into society on an attack of only a few weeks duration. I remember one case, however, in which our whole aristocratic circle was swept into insignificance by a little lady, whom I saw after I left Hampton, and who didn't weigh ninety pounds. She had been an invalid, she said, for fifteen years, and while I do not recollect precisely her afflictions, it appears to me that she had had chronic trichnia spiralis for that length of time, with intermittent cerebro spinal meningitis tending towards hydrophobia. This imposing patient cowed the whole invalid circle. But one man showed the slightest resistance, and that was old man Smith, who had been very proud of his chronic liver complaint. He told me in confidence the next day that he believed "the whole story was a —— ——." It is due to the company, however, to say that the narration was received with polite expressions of sympathy and wonder, while there was at the same time a silent conviction that it was of this complication of diseases that Ananias died. If a lady could rout us, however, it was not permitted to a man. When another of these aristocratic invalids, one of those "four giant shows under one canvas," came along, varying in sex from the first mentioned, he was speedily brought to grief. At supper, the first evening of his arrival, one of our circle having asked him with incautious politeness "how he was?" the new arrival opened on us with a sonorous discourse filled with chronic afflictions mixed up with pious reflections. I think he would have established his claims to high rank had not a consumptive-looking boarder with a haggard face taken advantage of a pause in the speech, and without looking up from his plate, remarked in a squeaky voice, "The remainder of the service will be concluded at the grave." The interruption was a bombshell. I have said that there is a free-masonry among invalids; I might add that it almost amounts to the old co-operation plan. I have been offered advice without limit and even medicine from my fellow sufferers. I have also been furnished with a list of their own attending physicians, all of whom have performed remarkable cures. It is a full and complete list of fifty-eight physicians in good professional standing, and I will dispose of it at a moderate compensation to any apothecary or undertaker who desires to purchase.
Where was I? Oh, speaking of invalids! Sickness is to be dreaded with many because of death, but from the high moral plane from which I regard it, it is chiefly objectionable on account of the lying it gives rise to. Directly a man gets well on the way down hill, the good natured world gets this lie photographed, and each man presents him a copy—"Why, I never saw you looking better in my life!" For the first few copies that are presented him the poor devil is grateful; of the next few he is suspicious, and thereafter he is worried, vexed and profane. If you remonstrate against the truth of the assurance and call attention to the prominent skeleton which you are presenting to the public eye, the good natured liar looks you unflinchingly in the eye while he presents you with another lithograph bearing this inscription: "Oh, I didn't mean that you were fatter, I meant that your skin is clearer and your eyes are brighter." Not having a sample of your former skin, nor another pair of eyes handy to confute him with, this well-meaning liar walks off triumphantly. I, myself, however, am no better than the rest of them, though my presenting the lithograph cost me dearly one day. In one of the towns where I stopped, a young girl came to the hotel the shadow of what she had been. I suppose one evening I must have felt unusually chipper and kindly myself, for, coming up on the porch where she was sitting, I dashed off the old lithograph, "Why you are looking so much better." Her eyes—I never saw eyes that had so much of the other world and so little of this in them—turned on me with a half kind, half reproachful look, and at once filled with tears. She merely said gently, "Thank you," and got up and walked away. God forgive me, that I should have interrupted a soul so near to setting sail, to pay a lithographed and lying compliment. Three weeks later, in another town, I was told that she had gone on the last long voyage. I have burned my lithographs.
At Afton in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There now, sit still, I am not going to commence about "lifting their eternal heads;" indeed I am not. Did it ever strike you, though, how different a man talks when he gets a pen in his hand; how impossible it is for a man to keep his feet on the ground and use a reasonably plain English without absurd adjectives, when he is writing descriptions of scenery. It is a miserable piece of affectation, you know; and they know you know, but they do it all the same. It comes, I presume, from a desire to assert the possession of imagination. The vulgar name for it is "flowery" and I am not certain that it is not a good name, for the chief business of flowers is to please the senses. You will find it popular with three classes of orators—commencement orators, political orators, and pulpit orators. The first use it because they know no better; the second, from the belief that it will catch those who know no better; and third because they find that a bright coat of paint to a religious sign post is particularly attractive to the female members of the congregation. With the first class, it is ignorance; with the second, business, and with the third, a mild, but well defined form of insincerity. You will find, too, that, with few exceptions, flowery ministers are—little else. I do not mean a forcibly drawn picture; that is a wholly different thing; I mean gaudy, flowery word painting. I remember at Trinity church in Staunton once, a description by a minister named Tucker, of a sacrifice made by the Jews at Jerusalem. Do you know, though that was years ago, I can see to-day the scene the man drew standing out in memory. It was powerful, but there was not a particle of prismatic coloring about it. It was a bas-relief cut on granite—full of power, enduring, and with a touch of eternity about it. Such picture-drawing is not flowery and does not wither.
I know that the popular subjects of interest in the mountains are sunrise and sunset, but for something really worth writing about, and much more rare, give me a fog spread out at the feet like a white carpet. Ah! that is something worth seeing. The valley, a mile below, is hidden in the gauzy sea, and the tops of mountain spurs here and there peep out like little islands. The white, silent sea is spread for miles and miles. Underneath it is life, an invisible wagon rumbles, a horse neighs, a man calls to his neighbor, but the surface is calm, still, level. You would not be surprised to see a steamer come puffing from behind one of the islands. The wind presses the sea into billows which shift to and fro as water would. Away down on a wagon road you hear the tinkling of bells and a Hock of sheep emerge from a rift in the mist and turning disappear in another cloud of it. The fog parts again and a white top wagon, with four horses, is seen toiling slowly along. The driver cracks his whip and the sea of mist slowly rolls over him again. Another shifting, and a little farmhouse appears, with a man riding from under the trees. He rides into the mist and the farmhouse disappears. A railroad train rushes out of a bank of white wool and into another, in complete silence. The white sea gets uneasy under the wind, and the sun begins to brighten up the clouds above. Then the woolen surface begins to move. A mountain spur makes its appearance clear against the sky; the farm houses silently glide from under the sea; a flock of sheep, whose shepherd dog's bark you have heard from under the mist, is revealed. The sea is fast being blown away. The sun comes out. The whole landscape is changed and the great billows of mist that have covered it are now thin strips of white cloud driven across the blue sky. Once more you see spread out at your feet the valley, checkered with farms and orchards, and dotted with farmhouses shining in the sun. The miracle of nature is over. Let the enthusiasts have their sunrise and sunset; lovers their moonlight; but as for me, give me a mountain fog.
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I suppose you don't know Maria? You ought to. She was a great comfort to me while I was at Hampton. Did I love her? Ah, most truly! I have sat on the hotel porch and watched Maria in her front yard by the hour. I suppose if I were to meet her to-day she would hardly recollect my name, so inconsistent is her sex, but I left my heart with her. It is true that she was not conventional, that her skirts hardly came to her knees; that she could not write, and that her general air was not that of a society woman, but to a sick man she was an inexpressible comfort. I have written her name Maria, but she was also called Mar-i-a, Mari-a-a-a, Mari-uh, and oh-h-h, M-a-r-i-a. These names she was called from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. I don't think I have ever known a more versatile genius than Maria. At times she was a steamboat, with loud blowing of the whistle; at other times she was a bear and devoured other children with grunts and growls of great ferocity; at other times, she was a horse of such high mettle and spirit as could only find vent in chewing up the front gate and pawing her mother's geraniums into the earth. But it was in her great and realistic combat with dogs that I admired Maria most. Every day about noon two setter dogs would come lounging about the yard with the most innocent air in the world. It was Maria's lunch time and the little thing would toddle in and bring out her lunch. No sooner would she appear than the dogs would rush on her and roll her in the dirt. There was a brief scuffle, an agonizing scream, the dirt flew, the dogs rushed off, and Maria sat up in tears, dirt and hunger. The lunch was gone. By the time quiet was restored, the dogs would come to see if they had left any in their hurry, and the forgiving little one would start in to play with them as if nothing had happened. I was there two months, and if Maria got a whole lunch in that time, I didn't see it. Sometimes the dogs had forgotten to look at their watches and would be a couple of minutes behind time, but all the same they rushed on her and took what there was. Often the screams would bring her mother out, and Maria would go into a little explanation which, as she couldn't talk, didn't make things very clear, consisting chiefly of "a-h-s" and "o-h-s." Little as she was, she had a spice of shrewdness which unfortunately didn't work well. She would commence her scream directly she brought her lunch out, but as soon as she found it only served to make the dogs more promptly on time, she gave it up. I have had a good deal of amusement, one way or another, but Maria stands at the head of the list in my memory.
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I made the acquaintance of a married couple at Afton. I do not often hold up the private life of my acquaintances to illustrate moral reason, but I must make this an exception. I believe the gentleman was brought to Afton for the protection of sheep, and to test the statement that a goat with a flock of sheep would keep off the dogs. When I saw him he was a moral wreck. He had become a professional lounger around the depot where he chewed up old paper, straw, and such odd crumbs of lunch as the passengers would throw out of the car windows. His hair was full of burrs and he had gotten one of his legs broken by the cars. His occupation was to wrestle with all the trifling fellows, white and black, around the depot, butt them when he could, and be ridden by them when he couldn't. He had long since lost his situation at the sheep fold, having proved rather an attraction to dogs, who are fond of low company, than a protection to sheep. Untidy, thriftless, a loafer, kicked and cuffed about by the public and half starved, he presented a pitiable contrast to his wife, neat little lady, who, after her husband had lost his situation, left him and joined a respectable circle of cows and spent her time with them, fat, sleek, eminently respectable, and as regular as clockwork in taking them out to pasture and bringing them home. The moral point that I wish to make is this—if you give a woman half a chance she will be a lady; if you give a man half a chance he will go to the dogs. It is in the sex of the animal.
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I often hear it said of a man that he has "the manners of the old school," by which is meant courteous, deferential manners. I don't know that any particular "school," old or new, will give a man good manners, but it is certainly true that age does ripen and mellow those of both men and women. As we grow older we become aware that there are a great many other people besides ourselves in the world, and that if we want to go through it smoothly we must keep to the right and not insist on keeping our elbows akimbo in a crowd. A rude young man may reform, but a rude old man may be regarded as having been illy bred early in life, and hopeless. Good manners are very like the catechism lessons our mothers teach us when children. They don't count for a great deal at the time, but the result comes up in life a long, long time afterwards. I think I can tell you of the "old school" where really good manners originated. The Teacher has long since gone, and sometimes I have fear the old school itself has changed, but He left the rule with us when He departed, and here it is: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." After the Teacher left, many new doctrines were brought about, and much chop-logic was put into the text-books by those who succeeded Him, but with all their human invention they have never approached the perfection of the motto that He left behind for the corner-stone of good manners. It is that, I think, that makes old men have better manners; they have learned that there is a good deal more in the people of the world to appeal to their affection and kindly toleration than they thought for at the beginning of their lives; that there is a great deal of good in every man and woman, and that it won't do to pick out their faults to the exclusion of their virtues; that a touch of kindly courtesy will often reveal to you a wholly different man from the surly one who stood before you a minute before; in short, our old man has learned more and more the lesson to love his neighbor as himself. That is the true "old school" founded eighteen hundred years ago.
The procession of two regiments of veterans through our streets a few days ago must have set a good many of us retired veterans who were not in the line, to thinking. It did me. It set me to thinking, not of war, not of peace, not of reunions, but of how time has changed us all in twenty years. In a neighboring city where I volunteered, the old company, with the old name and the old uniform, is still kept up by our young successors. I saw it lately on parade, and as I saw the trim looking young fellows of from nineteen to twenty-five, clad in the same bright uniform of twenty years ago, and stepping out with all the brisk and cheery step of youth, it looked as if there had been a resurrection of the old days. Could we old gray heads ever have looked like these! Could that gay young spark mounted on the leading caisson horse and furtively chaffing No. 13 be Hilleary and Hutchins come to life again? Could that serious, slender boy, all attention to the word of command, be the grave and clerical Hale Houston of this day gone back to youth again. Can that sturdy No. 4 at the gun, be old Boss Lumpkin? Could we all have looked as fresh and full of youth, and as full of engaging humor and good temper as these young fellows? I suppose we did, though it is hard to be believed, even by ourselves. I can tell you of a reunion that, if promised, would bring more of the old boys together than all the patriotism than can ever fill the American heart. Just promise them that for that day they shall be young again! Bless my heart, what a crowd you could have! Young again, mark you, both in mind and body. I don't know one of the old fellows who, if he had the option, wouldn't take back the youth he had twenty-three years ago with the war, famine and hardships that followed. What a deal of difference it does make to a man whether the world is behind or in front of him.
Do you know—of course this is confidential—that I am glad the schools have gone for the summer. Education has been a thorn in our family for some time past, indeed since the younger member got into the higher branches. Until lately it has been the impression of Mrs. Boyzy and myself that we spoke the English language with facility and much correctness, and as for facility I will put Mrs. B. against any picked nine that may be brought. But recently we have been greatly humiliated by our eldest girl, who comes back daily from school with a new pronunciation. Incredulity on our part is met by lugging the dictionary into the conflict and we are defeated at once. So victorious has the little one become that we tremble when we hear, "Mamma, how do you pronounce so and so," and prepare for another humiliation. My wife's plaintive, "It was pronounced so when I was a girl," is very touching to me, but when did the young ever have mercy on the old? The last conflict had—I hope it will be the last—was over the word "Squalor." The young one, after setting the usual trap of demanding how we pronounced it, announced that it was spoken "squaylor." At this my wife, astonished into resistance, made her last flight, and said with much dignity, that that pronunciation was silly and there must be a mistake. In a moment more she was prostrated by the well directed dictionary. In the evening after the children had gone upstairs, Mrs. B. locked up her sewing and remarked that a good deal of what is taught children in these days is nonsense. I did not reply. Had I, I should have been forced to remind her that she and I put our parents through the same mill in which the educational gods are now grinding us so sharply. I take it that pronunciation, I mean that of ordinary refinement and education, varies pretty much as bonnets do in style and, like them, is a matter that taste has a good deal to do with; and locality as well. Forty years ago in the jungles of East Virginia I spoke glahss, fahst, ahnser; I never heard of papa and mamma, but of father and mother, and I find they are teaching the children of this day to say that, too. I was taught to say g-yarden, c-yar, s-yuit, and, I suppose, that will also be resurrected after a while. Pronunciation, I take it, is a matter of provincial taste. Reading Chaucer, I have often wondered what standard of that sparsely educated day fixed the standard by which he could be read aloud. And by the bye who, of this more cultivated day, is authority for fixing the standard? Not the Dictionaries, for they differ. I dare say that after all we must fall back on taste. In the national metropolis of America, I have noticed a half-dozen different pronunciations among educated people, so distinct as to be readily noticed. But the best opportunity to be had is in an army gathered from all quarters of the country, or even from all quarters of a section, as the Confederate army was. I noticed a dozen different pronunciations, the two from North Carolina and Georgia being the most distinctly marked. I have heard it said hastily, that all educated people pronounce alike, but I think, with more deliberation and more opportunity for judging, it would be safer to say that all uneducated people pronounce alike.
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I am not one of the old men who take delight in "lecturing" the young. I hate the very word, for I shall never travel far enough from my youth to forget how I disliked both the lecture and the lecturer. But sometimes I have an indescribable yearning to go and say a word to them. I feel pretty much like one who, having found a circus to be of no account and leaving the performance, finds another man at the ticket-wagon eagerly putting down his money for a ticket. It looks like a pity and I want to tell him so. I saw a lot of nice-looking young fellows the other day—I was told they were boys from one of the Universities,—standing on a corner badly flushed with liquor and swearing at a high rate. They were evidently out for "a time." I should have liked to say something like this: "Now, boys, just let this thing drop there. Really, there is nothing in it. No young man with a sound body can need liquor, and no one with a sound reason can need the excitement of cards. We old fellows have been all along there, and there is nothing in it. I am the chief secretary of the Ancient Order of Old Boys, and my opportunities of acquiring knowledge have been exceptional. I don't wish to hold up any raw head and bloody bones of premature death and disgrace, and all that sort of thing, but I would like to say this much to you: If you want to take a drink, take it and go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting for drunkards—heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief, disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,—"associating together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights, the early morning drinks, taken more frequently later on, and lastly the appetite. It is the associating together for the purpose of drinking that causes that selvage of bad company to adhere to the good company you started out with earlier in the evening, and it is the selvage of low company that will give every self-respecting man a good deal of disagreeable reflection when he comes to look back at it. Don't buy that sort of a ticket, my boy; the show won't pay you."
Speaking of veterans reminds me of something I would like to say right here. Do you know there is nothing more awkward to a man—that is nothing more awkward to me, and like all egotists I judge all by myself—than meeting a familiar friend whom I have not seen for twenty years. We expect each other to be the old heart-to-heart friends of long ago, but how to go about re-establishing the relation is the puzzle. We have all had new friends, new histories, new lives since twenty years ago, and while we make an unsatisfactory attempt to be the same "old boys" to each other, each feels the dismal failure. Memory is faithful, but while we remember with affection that we were Tom and Dick to each other then (twenty years ago) we cannot, out of that slender material, build up a hearty fraternal conversation of to-day. And with advancing years we find that the old subjects that we spent hours of mirth over, a life-time ago, are not amusing to-day, if indeed our defective memories can recall them. Ah! how little it took to furnish youth with mirth, that common standing ground upon which all so easily form acquaintance and friendship. I trust I may be forgiven, seeing that I meant well, but I declare to you that I have practiced outrageous deceit in affecting to remember incidents that some of these old boys recall, and in trying to be agreeable by so doing. But doubtless you have also. Perhaps we all have. After all I take it that separation, like time, tries everything—love, friendship, even acquaintance, and those of the three which survive the test are like the ruins of ancient cities, of great value as curiosities, but worth little for aught else. Mrs. Boyzy remarks that this is a heartless view of it. But I silence that estimable woman by the observation that philosophers do not take the heart into account; the heart is the field of young lovers, physicians' fees and patent medicines. This observation which she does not understand, and, I may admit to you I am not so clear about myself, convinces her that I am not only a philosopher, but a profound one. Ah! to a man of profound observation, how many better ways of securing the respect of the female sex there are than the primitive one of clubbing them.
I do not reverence ministers of the gospel simply because they hold that office, any more than I esteem a man as a gentleman simply because he has the manners and dress of one. The bare fact that at some period in his life, oftenest the period of youth, when the mind teems with odd fancies and ambitions, a man has concluded that he is called to the ministry, has successfully gotten through theology and been ordained, forms too uncertain a foundation on which to base reverence, which is one of the most solemn emotions of the mind. But I do respect and reverence the credentials of an earnest, God-fearing and self-sacrificing life which are found with these men, and I am obliged in excusing this weakness, to say that in a long and varied experience with them, these traits have been characteristic of those I have met. But it is not my lack of reverence that I intended to write about, it is the contradictory way in which those who are under their charge view this matter. The practical, effective and active irreverence of professing Christians astonishes as much as it puzzles me. They believe, or assume to believe, in the sacredness of the ministry and in the reverence due ministers as such; how do they show it? It seems to me that the architectural custom of elevating the pulpit above the heads of the people arose out of the congregational custom of shooting at the preacher. You may tell me what you please about the world's people, but it is the well-directed volley from the communicants' pews, generally fired from ambush, that does the business for the preacher's influence. Did you ever think of the marked absurdity in the contrast? The subject of calling a preacher is prefaced by prayer; the Almighty is invoked to send a man of His choice; the man is installed with impressive ceremony and much prayer; he is introduced by other ministers at the installation with allusions to him as the under shepherd to whom is to be rendered obedience and reverence. The new man then goes heartily to work for God, and the congregation goes heartily to work on him. They criticise his style, peck at every imperfection, intellectual and social, and soon put him in a state of siege. If the Almighty, who it was at first claimed sent him, delivers him, he is in luck; but the usual end is that the congregation itself effects his deliverance by giving him the same warm experience that the terrapin undergoes when it is desired to see him walk. After a persistent ham-stringing of the ministerial horse, the congregation are astonished that he cannot pull his load. I am a business man, and in many years have had many men in my employment, but nothing would have more astonished me at any time in my business life than to be told that I was systematically impairing and obstructing the usefulness of the men that I was paying to work for me and from whose labor I expected some profit. It is the most inexplicable inconsistency to me in congregations, which generally include a large percentage of business men. I have used the word systematically, because it seems to me that it is a system which pervades to a greater or less extent all congregations of all denominations, and is confined exclusively to no one. Nor is it the worst element in a congregation that is guilty of it; I am sorry to say that it is prevalent among even the best members. Even that excellent woman, Mrs. Boyzy, whose mind is often tortured by the apprehension that absence from church service will seriously affect my future prospers, often regales me after church with keen criticism of the sermon and the weak points of our preacher. And yet that estimable woman, on hearing our eldest daughter indulge last Sunday in a similar strain, warned her against the wickedness of her irreverence. I beg you to understand that I am not taking the part of pastors against congregations any more than I would take the part of our little girl against her pious mother, but what I write is merely to blaze the way, as it were, to a settlement of the question: Whether a pastor is a shepherd set over a congregation by the Almighty, or whether he is a man whom an angry God has delivered into their hands that he may suffer for his sins.
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Have I said anywhere in this paper that Spring has come? Well, I say it now. It is a sad, gloomy time to man, however woman may look at it. It is now that the family man sees looming ahead the Easter bonnet trimmed with deadly $ marks, and the Spring outfits embroidered with the same costly material. Why is this? Now, I have known X., my next door neighbor, for eleven years, and in that time I have never known him to have an Easter hat or an Easter coat or an Easter pair of pants. I saw him at the Opera lately and his wife had on a seal skin sacque, and plain X. himself had on no gloves. Why should X. be compelled to carry through life a bird of paradise, while he appears in the sombre and often shiny costume of the more humble crow? And now that I have asked that audacious question, let me ask another: Why is it that as soon as the frost of age touches a man he commences to tone down his dress, and as soon as it touches a woman she commences to tone hers up with all the hot house appliances to imitate the spring time of life. I don't ask this in a snarly spirit; but as a psychological riddle. Why is it that in November, with all her brown foliage and scarlet leaves and wind reddened sky, cannot be content with being handsome and natural, but should resort to the buds and flowers and bird-like airs of beautiful June to make her pretty. Ah, there are no flowers, no feathers, no ribbons, no latest fashions that can hold their own against Youth. Before it the milliner, the tailor and the mantua-maker are helpless to render effective assistance to Age. Ah, Youth, careless, painless, peerless, I drink to you—and put a drop of peppermint in it. Tom, I was up a little late with the boys last evening.
Somehow the town presents to me a bereaved appearance. Since the action of the authorities clearing the sidewalks, I seem to miss some of my best friends. The tenants of the pavement had become my companions, after a fashion, so familiar were they to me. The extravagant gentleman who stood in front of the clothing store, with his change of clothes every day and the fixed stare out of his rain-washed eyes, was one of my warmest friends. He was no fair weather friend. The dusts of March, the showers of April, made no difference with him. He was there, always there, with his waterproof for the rain, his duster for the summer heat, and his sou-wester perched on his head when the Equinox set in. He had one of the most even dispositions I ever knew and always regarded me with the same mild, far-off look, whatever uniform or decoration he wore. He was the same with a blue jumper and overalls as he was with a diagonal suit with "This style $25" flying from the button-hole. There was a great gap the morning he disappeared. The deserted street looked like a Sunday or a funeral or some other occasion of unusual sadness. I went in one day to inquire about him. I didn't have far to go; he had been tumbled into a corner with empty collar boxes, a broken coal scuttle, and some fire kindling. He appeared deeply mortified. "This is a strange fix you find me in, Mr. Boyzy," he said as he struggled to sit endwise on the bottom of the coal scuttle, "and it is a strange world we find both of ourselves in, sir. Great crimes are committed in the name of progress, sir, very great, and this is one of them. I have been a public man in this city for ten years, sir. I have guided the tastes of the public—few knew how to clothe themselves until I showed them, and few would buy their clothing until they had seen me. I have had men stand and discuss my clothes for hours, making up their minds about the spring fashions. These city authorities little know what they are doing. But what do they care? Look at their clothes and tell me how many of them fit. What is it to them that a public man and benefactor lies here in a pile of collar boxes? They say that the old ideas that admitted of my standing on the sidewalk are done away with, and that this is an age of progress. What sort of progress is this, that takes a man who has been prominent before the people for years and dumps him into a dust pile? Look at me! I have never lacked backbone. Why, I am all backbone. [He had a backbone of iron]. No man ever knew me to get out of the way of a crowd or go with it. I have been a consistent public man with a backbone for ten years and here I am in a dust-pile!" Here the coal scuttle slipped and my old friend tumbled into the collar boxes with a groan. As I left him I could not help thinking how many public men all consistency and backbone have made similar reputations with my dummy friend by never going with or getting out of the way of the crowd, and ended by being tumbled into the dust-bin just for the lack of a little wisdom. Alas, how like my dethroned friend we all are, in the respect of clamoring about our opinions and wrongs long after the public has forgotten both them and us.
* * * * *
"This is a pretty condition for me to be in now, isn't it?" asked another old friend of mine that I went to look after. "Why, don't you remember me? I'm the fish that always used to be at the door as you went by." It was true, I could hardly remember him. He used to lie in state on a board on the sidewalk on hot days, half covered with ice, and his scales looking as bright as silver. Some mornings, I am afraid I used to catch a faint whiff of his breath, but of course this was not to be remembered against him in his great trouble now. His troubles had greatly changed him. From the aristocratic exclusiveness of the ice-board he had been reduced to being strung up by a string through his gills to a nail in the wall. The brightness of his scales was gone, and as far as rank went, he looked as ordinary as the bunch of humble hickory shad that hung near him. "What do you think of this way of treating a fish that has come three hundred miles from the coast to help you out in Lent? What sort of infidel authorities has this city got, to string up the friend of repentance and reform in this sort of way? Why, such a town as this ought to have nothing but herrings to keep Lent with, and they ought to be salt." It was no use trying to comfort my noble friend, but I could not help thinking that, fish that he was, he was human in finding his great trouble not so much in being strung up now, as in having seen better days and more distinction. And very human he was, too, in taking the ill-treatment of himself as an offence against Lent. We are so prone to take a grievance directed against ourselves as an affront to our politics, our church, or something else to which we bear about the same relation that a fish does to Lent.
* * * * *
The mature young woman who stood in front of the millinery store, and whom I have seen wear six different overcoats of various styles in one day, was among the victims of the new law. Her figure was one of the few that may correctly be termed wiry, but it was perfect. I may say that I have never seen a waist so slender, or a bust more perfect. But all of us have our defects; she had hers. In a fearful wind one day I made the discovery by her being blown over. She had no feet! I don't think she was the same woman after that terrible day, nor do I remember that the nose, that was turned awry by the fall, was ever straightened. When I spoke to her of the new law and her removal to a stand near the counter, she said it was a good thing. "No woman of proper feeling," she said with some asperity, "would have borne it as long as I did. I never wanted to stand there and be gazed at by men, it looked so bold. As for those women of brass that like it, it is all very well, but I couldn't stand it. Admiration can never compensate a right-minded woman for the staring of men. A woman must be very bold indeed to enjoy it. I like this retired corner much better than out on the walk. It has a home feeling about it, and the domestic sphere is always a true woman's choice." It was borne in upon me somehow, as I listened to her, that a woman with a broken nose and no feet will always think the woman with a pretty nose and two feet bold. There is a good deal in this saying if you will only ponder over it. Ponder it.
* * * * *
Ignominiously stowed away in a back yard I saw an old friend that always brought many reflections to my mind when exhibited on the sidewalk—a coop of chickens. The most humiliated of all my old acquaintances—a dominiquer rooster—had his head up through the slats to explain the situation. "Here's a pretty howdy do!" he remarked. "What sort of treatment is this? I can't see anything here except old whiskey barrels and clothes lines and dry goods boxes. I can hardly tell when it is daybreak in this miserable old yard. Why, this morning I commenced crowing two hours too soon, and a Chinaman over there raised the window and fired a tin can at my head. I can't attend to my business in a place like this; there is another rooster around the corner been crowing all day and I can't get at him. Look you, I'm no common rooster; I'm no chicken just raised for the Town Authorities to eat; I'm a warrior. Just look at these legs and these spurs—." And just as my friend was struggling to get his foot up through the slats, a washwoman in the second story emptied her soapsuds over the coop. He disappeared under the shower, amid the wild screaming of the hens. A moment later a bedraggled head, with one eye closed by suds, looked out through the side bars and remarked in a saddened voice—"I suppose the city authorities would be satisfied now—if they could see this." The sudden change in my old friend from a warrior to a bundle of wet feathers shocked me into graver thoughts.
Somehow, I have never seen a coop of chickens in all its glory on the sidewalk, that I did not think of the French Revolution and the Bastile. You have seen the picture—I cannot think of the painter's name now—of the members of the old regime in the prison amusing themselves, not knowing whose name was to be called next for the guillotine? To me there is a miniature human world in a chicken coop. All under sentence of death, and all eating and drinking, and clucking and crowing as if they were going to last forever. All scrambling and fighting over the grains of daily corn, even though the hand of the fatal purchaser is already descending into the mouth of the coop. Like their human brethren who do not wear feathers, the tallest and the strongest gets his head up through the slats and gets wider views of the world. He often mistakes the single street he can see for the Universe and crows out his discovery until he is picked out of the coop and hurried off to lose his head, an operation which teaches him that in fact he has discovered nothing. How like his brother, man!
All his speculations, all his telescopic philosophies, all his discoveries, find plausible support until he stumbles on an open grave. There, man and chickens are dumb. Somehow, those who write and talk about the future never impress me so much with how much they know, as with how little. How absolutely nothing they can tell. How echoless is the Awful Silence into which they toss their petty pebbles of theories and hopes and speculations. It seems to me that if it were not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the 'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable. It is unbroken even by the second great event of Life—Death. It must be a strange sight viewed from elsewhere—this terrestrial chicken coop of ours, so small that if each of its inhabitants were to touch hands they would make a ring around it, sailing through the unbroken silence of Space. A thin crust over a molten centre whirling at a thousand miles an hour. A collision, a jar, just enough to move it out of its orbit would wreck it—its surface covered with ignorant human chickens, knowing neither where they came from nor where they are going to, scratching, fighting, crowing, clucking, smoothing their feathers in vanity, and cocking their telescopes at the firmament in hungry curiosity! It is a sight that must make the Angels weep.
Ah, here you are again! What; you don't remember me? Why, I remember you. It was last Christmas, don't you know, in this store? You were buying a mustache-cup—there now, don't blush; perhaps it was slippers, or a smoking-cap. Anyhow, it was for him. Ah; so you do remember me. But why do you call him Mr. Smith, now? It was Jack, then. You never regarded him as anything but a friend? Of course not; but, my dear, when young people begin to look upon each other as friends—you see I accent it right—it is very apt to be the overture to a very difficult opera which is as likely to end with the curtain descending to the strains of slow music as any other way. I like to see the young interchanging gifts at holiday times, but I might be allowed to suggest, as the result of the observation of an old man, be careful of what you write in sending them. You have seen pictures of Cupid—so healthful, so chubby and rosy, and such promise of long life. It is a mistake; I know of no greater invalid—none of the gods whose health is so frail. I have known a cold word to give him a fatal chill. I have seen him fly, never to return, from a mere scent—a cigarette breath. I have known him taken incurably ill at the bad fit of a Jersey or the set of an overcoat. And I have seen him lie down and die without a word and nobody ever knew the reason why; even if he knew it himself, which I very much doubt. So, you see, it will be a very wise precaution in dealing with such an uncertain god to be prepared for everything. And one preparation is to be careful of what you put on paper. Many a young girl and many a young man, in an effort to write their little notes, sending or receiving holiday presents, often overstep the mark in trying to strike the proper elevated key. Don't abound in literary gush, no matter what are your sentiments in giving or receiving; if you write at all, write a plain, brief, dignified note which you can read five years after with perfect satisfaction. Notes are often misunderstood, sometimes we don't exactly understand ourselves when we write them, and so it is always safer to be on the conservative side. It will often save a good deal of vain regret and many wishes to goodness that you had taken this advice.
* * * * *
And you here too! Going to surprise your husband with a present again? A copy of the Revised Version this time? Ah, that will give him a chance to give you a surprise next Christmas—by reading it. Ah, you should know Mrs. Boyzy, if you wish to know how to please your husband at Christmas. For now thirty years that estimable woman has opened her annual Christmas campaign on me as early as the month of October. With affectionate strategy I am lured into book stores, and variety stores, and china stores—last year she tolled me into a drug store—to discover by artful references to this thing and that, what I fancy. Now, as a matter of fact, having her, I fancy nothing else (I take it that the newest married man could get off nothing prettier than that), but I have become so used to the campaign, and also so unprincipled in my advices to shorten it, that I profess the liveliest admiration over about the second thing we come to. The result is that I often get presents of a novel character. Last year I got a hand-painted coal scuttle, and but a couple of Christmases before that, I had gotten a gaudily framed picture of some retired saint, who had been martyred and for all I know deservedly so. But the fashion of drug stores keeping holiday presents, once came near exposing my whole plan of self defence. My intense admiration of a handsomely ornamented cut glass bottle of Unfailing Lotion for Neuralgia, which I thought she was pointing out—when in fact she was trying to make me see a gorgeous dressing case—excited a suspicion even in her unsuspecting mind. But if I jest about this matter, it is not that I underestimate the sweetness of the practice of married people remembering each other at Christmas. I am not so sure that of all other gifts—not even excepting those to children—these are not the most disinterested and spring from the truest affection. It is no easy feat to have lived with a man for ten, fifteen, twenty years; to know his weakness thoroughly; to measure the wide distance from the heroic stature for which we took him, and the size into which thorough knowledge shrinks him; to have borne with all his eccentricities, his fault finding, his natural selfishness; to have discovered and to have known for years that he is after all like the rest of us only human, and yet at every recurring Christmas to send our affections back to the beginning and with a fresh and unimpaired love give him the mystic password of our hearts in a gift. If I sometimes laugh at the devices of my wife to find out what it is I want, I do not have the faintest smile at the patient and loving heart that inspires them. I do not know that I ever saw an angel, but, though her hair is tinged with gray, and youth has long since left her face, I never hear my wife, with her bright smile on Christmas morning, asking the old, girlish question, "What do you think I've got for you," that I don't see in it that sort of absolution for the past and benediction for the future which it is said only angels bring.
* * * * *
Ah, I expected to see you here! I knew you would come! Why? Ah, my boy, every veteran knows well what comes after picket firing. Let me see: at church with her, concerts, soirees—where else could you be to-day but in here buying a present? Why, you bought her that last Christmas! Oh, I see, this Christmas it is for another girl! Come now, don't look conscious over it. The girls can't help it; they will change now and then, It is not their fault, but still it will happen. My boy, the business you are now in has by no means been reduced to a fixed science. No calculation yet made has reduced to a certainty any way of holding a girl after you think you have her. There is a good deal of money in store for the man that makes it—when he does. But she seemed—. There now, I know all about it; but you musn't hold a girl rigidly to what you think she seems. When you get to be as old as I am, you will know that girls have a hard, hard time of it. Custom won't allow them to do anything but seem. It doesn't allow them to tell a man that they like him, and, still worse, it doesn't allow them to tell him that they don't like him. You did go there, you know, pretty nearly all last year, didn't you? What could she do? Set the dogs on you? That would have been unmistakable, but in her set that isn't allowable. Be rude to you? She is a lady, how could she be rude? She shouldn't have accepted—. There now, be fair about this thing. How could she help accepting your attentions, your bonbons, your sleigh rides, your—well, your boring generally, if you will have it—without being rude? There isn't, under our social rules, a more defenceless creature on earth than an attractive girl in society, from attentions that are wearisome and unwelcome. Nor, if she maintains the self-respecting rules that society has laid down for her, is there a more helpless creature in obtaining what she wants. You often hear it flippantly said, that if a girl loves a man she can always let him know it. There never was a greater mistake. On the contrary, the poor young things, when they find it out, so far from being able to let the young fellow know it, commence a fearful struggle to keep him from knowing it. I suppose it is, so to speak, constitutional with them, and they can't help it. I have seen a gentle, well-bred young girl in such agonized fear of discovery that she rudely repulsed the common advances of politeness on the part of the object. Women lose their heads on the subject of love, as often, I sometimes think, as their hearts.
* * * * *
Why, you are only buying one little wagon this year; I thought I saw you buying two last Christmas; one of the little ones has outgrown it, I reckon? What, dead! I beg your pardon. It was thoughtless of me. Dead! Then he has outgrown it. Outgrown it all—sickness, pain, disappointments, a long, weary life—all at a single leap. But this does not comfort you. Ah, no; nothing comforts us for those we have seen slip into the dark. It will be but human in you to miss him this Christmas, and to think of the hundred ways in which he would have had pleasure if he had only lived. I think that in the death of children there is an added grief to that we feel when men and women die. They are so little, so helpless, one cannot help feeling anxious about how they will get along in the new world they have gone to; who will take care of them, and whether they will be neglected. When the time comes for putting the children to bed in the evening, we cannot help thinking about the little one who has gone from life, and wondering as we sit by the firelight whether there is any one taking care of it. We can't help feeling sure that it wants to be with its mother; it always used to when night came on. It always climbed into her lap when dark came and it surely wants to be back to-night. It cannot be happy, for it is among strangers, and if it is unhappy, there is but one place for it, its home, and but one bosom on which to lay its head, its mother's. And so our human heart talks on in its hot grief. It is a great comfort to remember, after awhile, that there is a Father who watches over it as tenderly as he has watched over all his children, and who will guide the little one into a new and higher life, as He will us older children who come to Him later in life, like tired and weary children seeking a mother's breast.
* * * * *
And so you didn't know what a castle in Spain was? Why, you have lived in one. In one! you have lived in a hundred, and if you were older you would have lived in a thousand. Why, everybody lives in castles in Spain sometimes. Let me see how to tell you about it. You know your elder sister that young Pettengill comes to see so often, and whom you hate so because you have to go to bed early? Well, your sister lives in a castle in Spain. She has had it papered and painted, and moved to another street to be near her dearest girl friend so as to make visiting convenient, and she has had the front yard fixed with flowers, particularly those he likes, and has had a door-plate put on the castle door with a name on it, CLARENCE PETTENGILL, in large letters. I remember when your father married your mother forty years ago, that she lived in a castle in Spain, and to her eyes your father was clad in shining armor and wore long plumes in his hat, and to those same eyes was a Hero of high degree. Why, even the old gentleman who is writing this to you, has lived in those castles, and as he looks back at them now with their bare walls and broken windows and tumbled down appearance generally, he often wonders how he came to build them. Some times, more especially at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now uncertain steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles he has lived in. So beautiful when he built them, so brightly painted by Hope and Pride and Ambition and all the other celebrated artists of that day; now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know them, and some clear faded out of sight. The castle, little one, that you are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS, and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have, such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of imagining that you will never see realized. After this week is over, you will take down the big sign over the door, close the blinds, and stand watching with grieved heart while your castle fades into the air. There is nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old, that is not something like these castles in Spain, and but One Thing, that is not tainted with their evanescent life. God grant, little one, that at the end of our lives, you and I may have clung to that one thing, and that we may have so lived that the many mansions of our Father in a fairer world may not be for us—castles in Spain.
(Envoy)
(Henry C. Tinsley, Died August 21, 1902)
Not 'mid the din of battle long ago,But in the lingering clutch of later painDeath found him, whom we shall not see againLifting a fearless front to every foe.Yet shall suns somewhere shine for him, and blowThe lilies and the roses without stain,Who through the lengthened years in heart and brainKnew most of storm and winter with its snow.
For it is written in the starry sky,—In the vast spaces and the silences,—That God's eternal universe is hisWho fears not, though he live or if he die.—A soldier to the dauntless end was he,As riding with his red artillery.