PATCHES AND PERSEVERANCE.
“There goes Patches!”
“Hallo, Patches!”
Sitting in the porch, in the twilight of a June afternoon, Kate overhears those cruel taunts. “Oh-h-h!” she exclaims in smothered indignation, the hot flush mounting up her forehead.
“What is it, sister?” asks the Lieutenant.
“Oh, Walter, there are some boys down there in the street, calling names at a little newsboy, and making sport of his poor, patched clothes. And he looks so downhearted and discouraged—poor little fellow! Oh, it’stoobad! I wish you could say something to him to comfort him. Mrs. McAllister was telling me about them the other day. His mother is a widow and does washings, and there are other children—he the eldest; and he is so kind and thoughtful, and does everything he can to help her; goes around town, out of school-hours, running on errands and carrying newspapers. I know what I’ll do”—but her plan for a new suit of clothes is suddenly broken in upon by the boy approaching,and handing her the evening paper, damp, just from the press.
“How many more of those have you to deliver?” Walter inquires.
“Only about a dozen.”
“Well, when you get through, and if you are not otherwise engaged, I’d like to have your company for a walk. You see,” he adds, with a smile, “I haven’t any eyes, myself, to find the way with; and it’s such a fine evening I believe I’d like to go—yes, as far as the Park.”
The boy looks up into the blind man’s face, Kate thinks, as if he would be willing to go to the ends of the earth with him.
“Yes, sir, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he says, hurrying away.
In one corner of the Park there is a shady, secluded nook—a clump of trees all overgrown with vines, with rustic seats underneath. As Walter and his companion rest there after their long walk, the moonbeams shining softly down between the leaves, all at once a sob breaks the stillness, followed by another and another, and then they come thick and fast. Now the Lieutenant does not ask, “What’s the matter, little boy?” as a great many thoughtless people would; for he remembers very well that one doesn’t like to be asked such questionswhen one is crying. Besides, doesn’t he know what the matter is? He can picture to himself the wearisome life the poor child leads—ill-fed, ill-sheltered, ill-clad, half the year pinched with hunger and cold, half the year breathing the close, pent-up air of some wretched tenement—in his brave struggle to help his widowed mother, not always able to find work; knocked about by ruffian newsboys, sneered at by thoughtless schoolmates, little heeded or noticed by anybody; till he looks downhearted, as Kate says, and the very tones of his voice are grown dreary and sorrowful. Thinking of all this, the Lieutenant cannot sit there like a block of stone, and listen to those stifled sobs. So, as there is nothing to be said, he leans over, and with that one arm of his about the slight figure, draws it close to his side.
“Oh, you’re so good!” murmurs the tearful voice, as the lad rests his head against the friendly shoulder. “It’s that that makes such a baby of me. I can’t help it. Other folks ain’t like that. Other folks don’t talk to me pleasant about this and that as you did all the way. Other folks—oh!” and with that the slender form is shaken again with sobs.
“Ah, but those other folks who treat you so, you are going to make them sorry for it, some day.”
“How?” The dreary young voice is full of wonder.
“How? Let me tell you a little story. Years ago a young printer went to New York City to find work. He hadn’t any fine clothes, and scarcely any money, and I doubt if in all that great city there was a single person that he knew. After much searching he found something to do; and in the office where he was employed the other printers delighted in annoying him, playing jokes upon him, and daubing his light-colored hair with ink. I wouldn’t wonder if this sort of treatment made him feel sad and homesick, sometimes, and wish he was back again among the mountains where he came from. However, he paid little attention to it; he worked all day, faithfully, and at night he read and studied a good deal; and when he couldn’t afford to pay for a light to study by, he would take his book out by the street-lamp and study there—sometimes when it was cold, too. Wasn’t he persevering? Well, he worked, and read, and studied, and persevered, till he got to be an editor; yes, in time he became the most famous editor—or journalist, some would call it—the most famous one that ever lived. Last fall he died—this man who was once a penniless, friendless boy—and at the news of his death there was sadness all over the country; and, at his burial, thousands and thousands of people crowded those same streets where he used to read, shivering, by the lamp-light; thousandsand thousands went to get a glimpse of his dead face, and wept over it, because he had helped them and they loved him and were sorry he was gone.
“Oh, was it Horace Greeley?” the lad whispers. (He has stopped crying now.)
“You have guessed.”
“I’ve thought, sometimes,” says the boy, presently, in a hesitating way—“I never told it to anybody before—but I’ve thought I’d like to be great, too, some time, to be a lawyer—and—and go to Congress—and—oh, I never told it to anybody before, because it’s foolish, I know, and they’d laugh at me. I can’t help thinking about it, though. But of course there’s no hope forme.”
“Ah, but thereis, though! I doubt if our Vice-President thought there was much hope of his ever going to Congress when, in his youth, he was earning his livelihood in a shoemaker’s shop. But, you see, he kept pegging away; when it wasn’t at boots and shoes it was at books, at gaining knowledge, and making the most of the talents that were given him, working his way up, inch by inch, till he became congressman, surely, till now he presides over the Senate. And our President, at your age, little dreamed that he would ever be called upon to control a great army, to plan campaigns and sieges, to ‘fight it out all summer on this line,’ as you haveheard about—persevering, you see—and so to put an end to the bloody war, and be chosen once and again to the highest office in the land—like Washington, long ago. Yes, it’s perseverance that does it. Did you ever hear of Cyrus Field, the man who brought the Old World and the New nearer together by his Atlantic cable? When he first proposed to do it, to send dispatches through two thousand miles of water, that seemed to every one a very absurd idea. But when his cable was finished and ready to be laid, then people began to be interested; indeed, they were really excited over it, and it was quite the fashion to wear attached to one’s watch-chain a bit of that gutta-percha cable, set in gold. But the cable, or telegraph, was a failure, after all; it didn’t ‘work.’ So people disbelieved once more, and lost interest in the enterprise, and took the bits of gutta-percha from their watch-chains, and put them away out of sight and of mind. And it fared with the experimenter just as it fared with those trinkets. But years passed by, and lo! one day, to everybody’s surprise, the President received from Queen Victoria a polite message that had taken but a few moments to cross the wide Atlantic. And now, you know, Europe and America can talk with each other almost as easily as you and I here, sitting side by side. For what had Cyrus Field been doing all thattime that nobody took any notice of him? He had been making trial after trial, and failure after failure, and losing fortune, and, very likely, friends, but never losing hope. So he persevered—and succeeded, at last. And who does your history say discovered America?”
“Christopher Columbus.”
“Well, this Christopher Columbus of whom all the histories tell and everybody knows, he was only a sailor boy, once, roving about in the Mediterranean, with small chance of ever becoming noted. As little chance would it seem there was when, years later, he went from court to court, vainly asking aid to carry out his project. People had hardly begun, yet, to credit the notion that the world was round; and this tall, sad-eyed, white-haired, shabbily dressed stranger, with his maps and his charts, and his plans for sailing straight West to India, who was going to listen to him? Kings and queens were unwilling to see him or give him an opportunity to explain, courtiers ridiculed him, children in the street would point to their foreheads, as he passed by, and call out to each other, ‘Look at the crazy Italian!’ But often disappointed, always hoping and persevering, he stuck to his project, and finally, after eighteen long years of waiting and fruitless effort, he got the help he wanted and started on his voyage, and so found—not India, but America.”
And as the Lieutenant and his young guide walk slowly homeward through the silent, moonlit avenues, he speaks of Lincoln, of Herder, of Ferguson, of Beethoven, of Sir William Herschel, and of others who have risen from poverty and obscurity to honor and renown; many of them “self-made,” as it is called, toiling patiently and unaided up that steep hill where the laurels grow.
Kate hears the hopeful ring in the lad’s voice as he says “Good night” to his friend, and through the open window she sees the hopeful expression upon his face as he turns away, glancing down rather proudly at the jacket that is mended with pieces of many shades, and the boots that have been patched and patched again. “What can you have been saying to him, Walter?” she wonders. “Oh, if you could only have seen his face just now! He doesn’t look like the same boy.” And Walter musingly repeats those lines with which every “wide-awake” American boy and girl is familiar. For was it not Longfellow who wrote them?
“Lives of great men all remind usWe may make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time;“Footprints that perchance another,Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,Seeing, shall take heart again.”
“Lives of great men all remind usWe may make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time;“Footprints that perchance another,Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,Seeing, shall take heart again.”
“Lives of great men all remind usWe may make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time;
“Lives of great men all remind us
We may make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
“Footprints that perchance another,Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,Seeing, shall take heart again.”
“Footprints that perchance another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”
When, just before breakfast, Kate opens the door to look for the morning paper, what does she find lying there on the threshold beside it? Fresh water-lilies—the like of which are not to be found nearer than the lake—miles away. “He has been all that way and back, this morning! bless his little heart!” she exclaims, in astonishment, as she carries them to her brother, breathing a thousand sweetest “Thank-you’s,” from among their snowy petals. And you may be sure that those patched garments will soon be replaced by others nice and new.