In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for,diddiscover that the Federal strength was in the enemy's flanks. In other words, if the Confederate army had been finished off prematurely like a pictorial cherub, he would have had nothing to punish. It is said to be a dreadful strain upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing! In a railway car a man is apt to be flanked by somebody—a small army of observation in the rear.
Take a man who has a fine sense of feeling all over, and put two women behind him—one woman thus located is comparatively harmless, but two are a terror, for they can talk about you!—and he begins to wonder if his collar is clean behind, and how he looks just back of his ears, and whether a stray string, or something, may not be sticking up above his coat, though he cannot remember that he ever had anything there to betied. Then he tries to remember whether he brushed his hair neatly behind, in his haste this morning, lest he should be behind himself. Just at that minute there is a coincidence; a little laugh from the ladies on the next seat, and footsteps on the rim of his ear! It is mid-winter, and it cannot be a fly. If he were only sure it was a tarantula, he would be happy. They laugh again, and again that small promenader. Heknowshis head harbors nothing but ideas, and yet a trespasser may have come from foreign pastures, for all that. He wishes he knew—that he could see himself as "ithers see" him at that particular minute.
Can it possibly be of the race that Burns discovered upon the woman's Sunday bonnet? He dares not put his hand up, lest they should observe it. He feels his ears grow red and warm. He wishes they would get hot enough to scorch that creature's feet. Still those small footsteps. He has heard, in his time, the tramp of armed men. It was sublimer, but not half so terrible. Again that little laugh behind him, and rising in his desperation he goes to the rear of the car, claps his hand to the burning ear, and secures a single hair like a bit of a watch-spring, that had coiled on the rim of the human sea-shell, and counterfeited feet that his fancy built upon, as Agassiz built two-story monsters out of a rafter or a rib that somebody exhumed and sent to him. And those ladies had never seen him at all!
If a man could always have the world in his front, courage would not be much of a virtue, if iteveris. There are a great many worthless things passed about as genuine. Now, that little Spartan scamp who stole the fox, hid it under his robe, and let the creature relieve him of his liver rather than be found out and lose the plunder, is handed about with a label to him, as a sort of pocket-model of fortitude. I dug it out of Greek when I was a boy, and was taught it was worth finding. Why, he was nothing but a miserable little thief, that couldn't speak a word of English! So, if courage is a virtue, the brave little wren carries more virtue to the ounce than anything going. The writer knows a public speaker who trembles as did the king who saw something written on the wall, if he is compelled to pass through the body of the house to reach the platform, and yet always faces the audience with perfect self-possession. He has been known to flounder through an unbroken snow-drift, and climb in by a window, simply to avoid the flank movement that took all his courage out of him. When you see a man turn a cold shoulder to a chilling wind instead of squarely facing it, you may count him among the victims of rheumatism, and not among the philosophers.
The saddest train upon which the writer ever took passage was the Hospital Train, with its maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to Nashville, Tenn., just after the battle of Chickamauga. There was no lack of ventilation, for some of the cars were platforms—the kind that make Martyrs, but not Presidents. Not much finish in precious woods anywhere that you could see. It rained heavily and persistently through the twelve hour trip, and there the wounded lay strewn about on the platforms, and packed away in the box-cars. But you heard less complaint than is made any day on a palace-train because one refractory rose-leaf is crumpled. The suffering was silent, and all the more terrible because it was so. The stricken boys had started for home, and there was a strange, ghastly cheerfulness upon their faces, that was sadder than sadness. They talked about "God's country," whither they were bound, till your heart ached to think how many of them would find "God's acre" before they reached the blessed North.
The bearing of that wounded brigade was wonderfully glorified with the grace of patience. It taught you what splendid stuff human nature is made of. They tell about men of iron, and nerves of steel, and look as if they thought they had said something—as if there were anythingquiteso good to make a man of as the flesh that can quiver and the nerve that can twinge. Those cars on that Chattanooga Road were bad enough, though the reader cannot get the idea unless he amuses himself by riding upon a lively trip-hammer; but of all wheeled contrivances, the ambulance that was used in the late war is the most spiteful. You would naturally think it "an invention of the enemy"—that he had devised it for the special purpose of finishing the people he had not quite killed with gunpowder. The jolty, jerky thing, with wolf-trap springs that snap at every inequality in the road, and send waves of pain through the shattered frames of its occupants, is, for a merciful device, certainly the most cruel. Be our prayer, that neither hospital train nor ambulance will be needed evermore in all the land!
Did you ever see troops of young swallows peppering the southern slope of a broad-roofed barn, just as they are making ready to leave for a sunnier clime? What confusion of happy tongues, what half-human chatter and frolic. If you would see the same picture later in the season, after the swallows are all gone, just board a passenger train in December upon a road lined with schools for girls, like the Chicago and Milwaukee, when the flocks are let loose and bound home for the holidays. The birds are gayer and brighter, and worth a gallon of swallows every one of them, no matter whether swallows are higher than sparrows or not—half a farthing apiece—but they recall the picture on the barn-slope, till the girls and the birds seem to be twittering over the same dish of joyous expectation.
You had left Milwaukee a little dull and a trifle surly, but as the train halts along at those beautiful villages where the dove-cotes are, and the merry creatures throng aboard, and captivate you and take the train, and fill it with laughter and ribbons, and jaunty little hats about as big as the palm of your hand, and sit down three in a seat, when their flounces will let them, and talk all at once and all the time, then you, too, brighten up and grow human, and wish you were a boy or a girl again, so that you could see things rose-colored, and think it blessing enough to live, and be happy without a plan. Whoever says gravely to himself, "I am going to be happy to-day," is pretty sure to have a sober-sided time of it. I do not think anybody cantoehappiness, as the children used to toe a crack when they stood up to spell. A great deal of the commodity comes to a man when he is not looking for it, just as a side-glance sometimes reveals a star that the astronomer had been vainly seeking with the direct gaze.
The Lord has arranged things wisely for our mere physical delight. He has not planted all the violets in the world in one place, neither has He fenced in the roses between particular lines and parallels of latitude and longitude, nor fashioned them to grow up close under our noses. But we go carelessly along, and we get a whiff of the violets down there in the grass, and the lilacs over yonder in the yard, and the roses in the fence corner, and they all go to make up the fragrance and the beauty of the day, though we had not been looking for any of them. It is the indirect ray from everything, whether it be the sun or the drop of dew, that unravels and makes visible the beauty of the world.
There is a great deal said aboutspheres. A planetary stranger would think that about half the world were engaged in getting a lesson in Spherical Trigonometry—man's sphere and woman's sphere. Most of the unhappiness, uneasiness, and tendency to bolt spheres, is due to an impression many people unconsciously entertain, that the Lord did not understand His business when He made the Gardener and his wife—that he could have made a better job of it. Take an open-browed, clean-hearted girl, blessed with a fair share of beauty of some kind, and then make her believe that she is about the neatest piece of work the Lord ever made, andkeepher believing so, and you will have a woman by-and-by, if heaven doesn't want her before, who will never trouble herself much about spheres and tangents, or any other problems of Social Geometry, but will just brighten and sweeten the world all the days of her life.
The day those school-girls came into the car there was a sour-visaged man in it whom you had been watching. His features were all huddled together—he had done it himself—his eyes, nose, mouth and chin all puckered to a focus of chronic anxiety. He looked as if he had been getting those features all ready to be poured through a funnel into a vinegar-barrel. You were curious to observe the effect of the merry inroad upon him. At first not a movement. He seemed as sulphuric as ever. Some of the girls threw little smiles his way, though not at him, and some of themhithim, and he began to watch them. They were too many for him, and he concluded he wouldn't run into the vinegar-barrel just yet.
It was curious to see that small mass-meeting of features break up and distribute themselves around his face, each in its place, until his countenance got about as broad as a sun-dial, and about as bright as the dial does when the sun shines on it. He had been thinking for a long time that he needed medicine of some kind. As he would have worded it himself, "he felt a good eel out of kilter," but it was young folks he needed all the while, and nothing at all that a druggist could sell him.
The richest cargo in the world is a cargo ofTime, and the locomotive was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household goods and gods from East to West in thirty days. To be sure, the roads had three dimensions, length, breadth and—thickness;—who ever knew a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?—but he drove early and late, and tired out the family dog and took him aboard—the dog that had developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats to pieces in the Catskills. He has made that journey since in thirty hours, and his account between the old time and the new stands 1:24—a pretty formidable balance when the commodity is a thing so precious as time.
Take that piece of animated nature called the commercial traveler, who slings his little knapsack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the world is mine oyster!" He is as much a product of the locomotive as a puff of steam. He is a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trundled about the world by sample, and he girds up his loins and keeps it company. The engine has made him possible. He is about as wonderful as the Arabian Genius that came out of the little bottle and clouded all the land. Let us say he travels fifteen thousand miles a year; that he keeps upon the track ten years without breaking his neck; that he begins his commercial raids at the age of twenty-two, unships his little knapsack, buys out the wholesale house he "represented," and retires from the road at thirty-two, thus making a beginning so noble that it fairly laps over upon the ending.
Now, could you set back his almanac for him about a generation, a couple of hundred years would be little enough to accomplish the work, and he must bequeath the unfinished business to his great-grandson—a legacy from his dead and gone ancestor. Here he is now, with the work done, all the silver on his dining-table, and not a thread of it in his hair! Those witches and wizards of locomotives have drawn a cargo of more than two centuries about the world for him, upon whichhecould draw at will, and his draft was honored every time. They have made his days "long in the land," no matter what he thought of his father; made a young Methuselah of him, two hundred and fifty years old if a day, and the grasshopper not a grain heavier.
The modern cars have taken aboard what was little thought of in the early history of locomotives—breathingmaterial. Ventilation has by no means attained perfection, but remember the low, narrow boxes, almost as close as mortality's "long home," that they used to call coaches, in which people made sardines of themselves, and caught colds and influenzas and asthmas and catarrhs and other musical instruments, and you will not feel like being very querulous over the discomforts of modern locomotion. That ancient fashion—it was the best the stupid old world knew—of boxing a man up in cars full of nitrogen, was an abomination to chemistry and comfort. A stove in the center, a sort of altar for the rendering of unseemly offerings that Sir Walter Raleigh is said to be answerable for, used to form a torrid zone about eight feet broad, subdued into a pair of temperates, and eked out at the ends with a couple of frigids, and there you have the climate of the old railroads. Then, what with those who broke fast on bolognas and the blessed vegetable that used to keep the girls of Weathersfield a-crying, you had all the odors of Cologneexceptcologne.
Did you ever watch a kitten under a receiver when the air-pump began to rob her of her breathing material?—the signs of distress, the furry sides working like a busy bellows, the bewildered looking about for help? If it was a talented kitten, perhaps she discovered the fatal orifice in the brazen floor whence her life was escaping, and clapped her paw upon it, as cats have done before now, and so stopped the robbery and won respect and saved her life. This time the victim is not a cat but a king, to-wit, one of the American sovereigns, secured in an old-time car, with nothing aboard to make breath of. It is curious to see how he degenerates by a series of melancholy transitions into a miserable vegetable. You put him into the car brisk and bright as nature will let him be. The sixth hour he grows irritable; the tenth, dull. His fancy leaves him in the fifteenth. He begins to think how far it is to dinner, and how much he will eat, for he is just passing through the brute region, on his way from humanity down to vegetation, where his epitaph might be, "gone to grass." The eighteenth hour he is surly; the twentieth, dumb. The twenty-fourth "does" for him and the metamorphosis is complete, the necromantic experiment is over. He cannot remember who wrote Milton's "Paradise Lost." He forgets the name of the principal character in Hamlet. He runs up a few rounds of the multiplication table just to see if they are all there. He ceases to think at all, looks steadily out of the window and sees nothing. He ceases to count anything in the census. He is not so much as Nebuchadnezzar. He is grass.
But "all things have become new." What speed in the engine; what priceless cargoes of time and oxygen upon the train; how fast and long we live in a little while! Let us be glad. Uneasy people sometimes wish they had been born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or Methuselah, or somebody who looms up gigantically in the mists of history. It is better to live in the days of the Steam-engine. It has conquered more worlds than Alexander, traversed vaster wildernesses than the Israelite, and reclaimed them as it went; and behold, by the power of the Engine we live to be hundreds of years old, and never give it a thought!
Studying life on the railroad train and looking into a kaleidoscope are somewhat alike. You cannot exhaust the figures in the one, and almost every turn of the wheels brings up a new and curious combination in the other. And so I find myself wondering why I omitted this, forgot that, and ever thought I could possibly be content with the few chance glimpses at thirty miles an hour that are here recorded.
The Engineer has rung the bell, the Conductor has pulled the cord, the Passenger Train has gone. There is nothing now to be done except to ship by a dull freight train a little heavy
BAGGAGE
BAGGAGE
There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the jurisdiction of the State of New York, where I first began to "see stars," not meaning those early experiments upon the glare ice of Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like Mercury's, and my head went down like the flintlock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for beech-nuts—a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than a breath or two farther off.
I have heard since that it has charmed no end of poets to write verses to it that never were sent; that it is called Venus, when it deserves an honest womanly name—Mary or Rachel, Ruth or Eve. Is it not strange that we christen a great beautiful world as we would not dare name anybody's daughter, unless her mother had an extra pair of feet in daily use, or her father were content to be called "Towzer"—at least now that the turbaned "aunty," who opened her mouth like a piano and laughed clear across the plantation, has been "amended" and counted in among the souls to be saved.
If the heathen began the nomenclature of the skies, pray let it be ended by Christians. There are no Alexanders about, to be crying for new worlds. They are glittering into the field of view every night or two, and the business of naming goes on after the fashion of dead and dusty idolaters. Had Adam made such work "calling names" when the Lord bade him, he would have been sent down on his knees there in Eden to weed onions unto tears and repentance. Let our star-finders give them a hint—those keen fellows who shall, by-and-by, roll that date of theirs,Anno Domini 3,000, over and over like a school of dolphins—thatwe, at least, have abandoned Latin and Greek gods; that our poultry are quite safe for all anybody in America, be he fool or philosopher, ordering a cock served up to Æsculapius.
But if ever anything thoroughly belonged to the owner, the heavenly Dipper—that magnificent utensil knobbed at the angles and riveted along the handle with seven stars—belonged to me. I should have clutched it long ago if, like the dagger of Shakespeare's man, it had only hung "the handle toward my hand;" as much household ware as its humble cousin forty times removed, that hung by a little chain beside the well. From that celestial dipper—or so I thought—the dews were poured out gently on the summer world. It was the only thing about the house perfectly safe from thieves and rust; for was it not of a truth a treasure laid up in heaven? And how sadly right I was; for there, only last night, blazed the Dipper as if it were fire-new, while the home of my boyhood has faded out like a dream and vanished away.
There was yet another trinket of domesticated heaven, if I may say so. No matter what name the Chaldeans called it by, to me it will always be the star in the well. A gray sweep swayed up above that well like an acute accent; and in its round liquid disc, that gave me glance for glance, I used to see sometimes the double of a star straight from the top of heaven. It was plainer than any pearl that "ever lay under Oman's green water." They that drank at that well in the old days, long ago sat down by the river of crystal in the Kingdom of Life, but its dark disc, like a strange unwinking eye, still watches the zenith from its depths, and sometimes a star is let down into it till it kindles as if lighted by a thought.
That handful of household stars is a part of my heritage. No matter how dim the night, how disastered the sky, I close my eyes and they yet rise strangely beautiful and shine across the cloudy world even as they always shone since their illustrious kindred began to sing together. The prayer of the athletic savage was "for light." But our terrestrial day is only a veil thick-woven of sunbeam warp and woof. The dewy hand of Night withdraws it, and lo! the heavens are all abroad! Let Ajax mend his prayer, and let the burden be for calm unclouded night.
But there is another constellation not less precious than my sidereal possessions—a cluster of day-stars as resplendent as if they were called Arcturus every one. They shine with a warm and genial ray—undimmed, thank God! by any care or cloud. Time is not, as most men think, a natural product. It is only fragments of duration fashioned into shape. The whirling worlds of God are so much burnished machinery for making times and seasons. They ripple the everlasting current of white and dumb duration. It swells in ages, undulates in years; and all along the ceaseless solemn flow, sparkle like syllables of song the days of all our lives. The tumbling planets end their work, and man's begins. Whoever stamps the image and superscription of a worthy deed, a sterling truth, a splendid fact, upon a day, has hallowed and brightened it evermore. The day a man is born who rallies the sluggish race and puts it on its honor for all time, stands out from the rank and file of the dull almanac and halts you like a sentinel. The day a man is dead who gave someotherday a might and meaning it never had before, is strewn with immortelles and borne abreast with marching ages.
Take a twenty-fifth of January, one hundred and eleven years ago—standing there in its place as plain as yesterday, illuminated all over, like an old saint's legend, with Scottish song that comes to a man like the beat of his heart,—and tell me if you think it worth while for anybody to be born on that recurring day with any hope of wresting it from "Robert Burns, Poet"? True, the Ettrick Shepherd saw the light on a twenty-fifth, but the best we can do for him is to let his "Skylark" warble up to the top of the wintry morning if it can.
The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months, with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right on—the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of truest power.
And what more can any one do for that seventh of February than he did to be born in it, whom Dombey shall lead gently by the hand far down another age, for whom Little Nell shall plead with a forgetful world, and who left us the voice of Tiny Tim for a perpetual benediction—"God bless us, Every one!"
The old-time Fourth.
I would not give much for the American who has nowhere in the year a day domed like a tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, theFourth of Julyis one of my days with stars in it, and bells withal, that shine and ring and roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that always sets the heart pounding with the concussion of the anvil and the feet keeping step to the frolic of Yankee Doodle. It lights up the time when you could stand upright under life's Eastern eaves; when day broke in the thunder of a six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor of the village bell, and the bare and barkless spar they had raised and planted the night before, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed out with the broad field of stars.
On comes the drum-major, now with "eyes to the front all," and now facing the music with backward step, his arms swaying up and down, the horizontal baton grasped firmly in his hands, as if he were working the band with abrake, and playing streams of martial melody on mankind. Then the snarl of the snare-drums, all careened for punishment like refractory boys of the old-fashioned stripe, and the growl of the big bass brother at their heels, and the fifes warbling up and down in the grumble and roar, possessed and summoned up my soul—shall I say it and give thanks?—possess and summon up my soul to-day. Then came the flag with an eagle on it, and two spontoons beside it to pierce that eagle's enemies. Then the patriots of the Revolution, who remembered when there was no such thing as a Fourth of July with a big F; old smoky fellows, two or three, with eagles in their eyes—old fellows gnarled like the hemlock, but honored like the pine, that had smelled powder at Bennington; and the orator of the day with an eagle in his eye; and the clergyman who had prayed a short prayer and fired a long gun at Yorktown or somewhere, with an eagle inhiseye.
Then, to the tune of "Bonaparte crossing the Rhine," out stepped the white-legged infantry, with breasts and backs of blue, each with an eagle sewed upon a bright tin plate, all garnished round with stars and fastened to his hat, and that eagle's royal tail feathering out at the top the while, to plume him up like Henry of Navarre.
Then came the riflemen in green frock-coats and caps befringed, and horns slung at their sides, that once were tossed defiant upon a shaggy head that might have answered back the bulls of Bashan, and had, for anything you know, an eagle initseye; and on they went, their rifles lightly borne to the order of "Trail—ARMS!" Ah, it was "the hunters of Kentucky" all over again. It was the whole Boone family in the flesh. It was an apparition of the dark and bloody ground.
Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with eagles intheireyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood, springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified bull-thistle—and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your heart on fire together!
Then came the citizens by twos, as the pairs went into the ark, and the girls in white frocks with sashes and ribbons of blue, as if they had just torn out of heaven and brought away with them some fragments of azure for token; but there are no eagles any more in the line—only white doves and angels unfallen. Then the mouth of the orator was opened—a coop of rhetorical eagles, and they flew abroad and swooped down upon our feelings and bore them aloft triumphant, and perched upon our souls and made eyries in our lofty hearts, and we were better and braver for it all. Then came the dinner in a "bower"—have you quite forgotten the dining-hall of green branches?—with such dainty roasters as the Gentle Elia would have wept over and then devoured, and toasts that foamed over the tops of the goblets and set themselves aright in the cups; and a flight of hurrahs went up with the eagles—and the day was done.
Do you think I would exchange that dear absurd old day for "the pomp and circumstance" of any later pageant? A Fourth-of-Julyism has somehow become an object of contempt. People tell us, but not always in good English, that speeches are idle, because they have heard that silence is golden, and, like the green spectacles of Moses and the talk of the rascal in the Vicar of Wakefield, should be labeled "fudge." As if it was not anideaclothed in a snug jacket of words, and not a deed at all, that first gave the Fourth of July a meaning and a gift to mankind! As if the elder Adams' recipe to pickle the day—I write with no irreverence—to pickle the day in "villainous saltpetre" would not be sure to keep it! As if the roar of artillery—thank God for the blank cartridges of Independence!—were anything more than that eloquent whisper uttered under the shadow of King's Mountain in the old North State, "these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free," translated into the dialect of gunpowder! Shine on, starry day of my boyhood! Thy thunders, thy eagles, and thy memories, be they blessed forever!
Thanksgiving.
I am sorry for the man—especially the woman—who has nowhere a day or two touched with some tender grace; a day of which, travel fast and far as he may, he is never out of sight; that warms his heart for him, makes him gentler, purer, younger than before, more like a woman and just as much of a man. Everywhere else in Christendom the year has three hundred and sixty-five days, but in America it has a day of grace, and as much a New England product as Joel Barlow or Indian corn: for we count three hundred and sixty-five days andThanksgiving.
As everybody knows, the day was the most blessed of blunders. Those single-minded, grand old fellows—old when they were young—that drifted across the sea in the cup of a Flower like a parcel of bees, bringing, some of them, their stings with them, and from whose rude beginnings this broad continent now hums like a hive in June, had garnered their corn, and tugged up their back-logs, and kicked the light snow of "squaw winter" from their Spanish-leather boots, and hung up their tall hats on the pegs behind the door, and picked their flints for such game as red Indian and black bear, and spread open their Bibles, and made ready for a sojourn before the fire; then came one of the American savages they never shot at—to-wit: Indian Summer.
For past the yellow regiments of cornThere came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;And June returned and held her by the hand,And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.
For past the yellow regiments of cornThere came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;And June returned and held her by the hand,And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.
For past the yellow regiments of cornThere came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;And June returned and held her by the hand,And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.
For past the yellow regiments of corn
There came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;
And June returned and held her by the hand,
And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.
So they made ready for a second planting right away, and declared it a goodly land, where a very thin slice of autumn was sandwiched between two summers, and decreed a Thanksgiving, and called the neighbors together, and lifted up their voices and sang some such quaint song as—
"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,Your Maker's praises spout;Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,And wag your tails about!"
"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,Your Maker's praises spout;Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,And wag your tails about!"
"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,Your Maker's praises spout;Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,And wag your tails about!"
"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,
Your Maker's praises spout;
Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,
And wag your tails about!"
and clasped each other's hands, and feasted abundantly, and took "a cup of kindness," and grew so warm with what they had and what theywouldhave, that when Euroclydon and all the rest of them did come, and that right early, their gratitude never froze, but wintered it through; and so Thanksgiving remains even until now.
Dear Starry Day, when three generations met together and—not to betray confidences—"righteousness and peace kissed each other." What friendships were brightened in thy fire-light! what wrongs were roasted under thy fore-stick! Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Pleiades. Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked up in a coverlet of crust, and, brooded in the bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how comfortable they were! Out of the glowing cavern of the brick oven, squatted in the wall beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like dead knights in armor, "whose souls are with the saints, we trust;" what whiffs of Indian pudding! what blended breezes of abundance! Thy doughnuts of orthodox twist, and tinted like cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin pans of memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant to the angle of perfect content, and fit and fill the mouth of recollection.
Surely heart and stomach are next-door neighbors, for now, Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces smile a welcome home; thy dear old faces, every one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse the fire to a hearty roar of greeting! Wheel out the great table laden like the palm of Providence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us "ask a blessing!" Let us give thanks!
Christmas.
Methuselah died pretty well along in his years of discretion, but a world at his age would hardly have been out of its swaddling bands. There is a star, less than two thousand years old, that lights a day for us, the fairest, youngest of all the spangled multitude—the very Benjamin of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer never summoned it. Numbered in the celestial census, I am sure it will not be there when the constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It is immortal as the candle of the Lord. It is the Star in the East that lights upChristmasfor us with a wonderful radiance.
If there is ever a time in all the year when the two worlds touch, I think it is Christmas Eve. What less than a first small act of faith is that hanging a million of empty stockings by a million pins at night, and then tumbling the trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful and sleepless expectancy that they will find them all filled in the morning? Let a man play Saturn andeathis children and be done with it; but let him not set a dog on their angels—a cur of a fact, that should have been born with its nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus or Kriss Kringle, and worry him out of the children's sweet kingdom of dreams.
Whoever wants to make his children older than any wholesome grandfather ought to be, has only to strip the world stark naked before their faces; bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair of burnished interrogation-points for ever dancing in another pair of eyes, resolve the thrones and paradises and angels they see in the plighted clouds, into a heavy and delusive fog; and, by-and-by, for the quicksilverish atoms of humanity that hunt out every grain of true gold in the rubbish of life, full of marvel and fancy and poetry as any old ballad, he will have a row of little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical donkeys all draped in wet blankets.
I visited, not long ago, the house where something happened to me when I narrowly escaped being too young to be counted, but you can never guess what was the first thing I looked for. It was not, as you might think, the threshold worn smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet that have played truant forever, nor the dear home-room with its altar-place for beech and maple offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness under the stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet counsel together by night.
It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why? Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift. What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a rude unlettered monument to the dead past.
They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with whom I joined hands and hearts are—whereare they? There are fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women, full of care.Hasthe sparkle of life utterly vanished from the cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?
Oh, Comrades! oh, Sweethearts! Let me give you a touch of the time when happiness was the very cheapest thing in the round world: let me give you "a merry Christmas" out of the loneliness!
But children are not out of fashion, and so the world is not bankrupt. Herod—he deserves the compliment and he shall have it—Herod was nothing less than devilish shrewd when he fancied he could quench Christmas in the blood of the children; for if ever two things were made for each other, a merry child and a merry Christmas are the two.
What the poor creatures did that were born and grown before the clock of the Christian era struck "one" nobody can tell. We allneedsuch days—the young that they may never grow old; the old that they may always be young. I think it might be written among the beatitudes:
"Blessed are they whose sons are all boys and whose daughters are all girls."
It was when Cæsar Augustus decreed that "all the world" should be enrolled—an edict never to be repeated on the planet until the coming of the Seventh Angel—and everybody was on the move to report in his native city—for in that country the leap from a howling wilderness to a city was as easy as a panther's—if it didn'thowlit had amayor!
Among those who came to Bethlehem on this errand were a man and his wife from Nazareth, and, as the tavern was crowded, they went to the barn, and there the Chief of Children was born, and cradled in a manger.
And that was the first Christmas.
There were Angels without, who brought their glory with them, and they stood and sang, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to the men of good will!"
And that was the first Christmas Carol.
A few Shepherds watching their flocks not far away came just as they were, in their every-day clothes, and wondered and glorified, and were glad.
And that was the first Christmas Party.
Some travelers from the East—and wise, as you may know, by the cardinal point—were seeking the Christmas, but no one could tell them anything, till aStarjourneyed on before, and halted, like Gibeon's sun, over where the young child was—ah, always now as then, find Christmas and a child is not far off—and they unfolded their treasures, and gave him gold and frankincense and myrrh.
And that was the first Christmas Gift.
The shepherds are dead, the "wise men" are East, and the angels in Heaven. But the star and the child and the manger are everywhere. Come, let us have a frolic together! Even the turkey has a merry-thought in its breast; and are we not better than aflockof turkeys? Let us advertise for a good digestion and a downy pillow, and a pleasant dream and a Merry Christmas. Let us do it in these words:
Wherever the Star halts, there shall be no lack of carols. Bid the singers begin! And the same old manger chorus swells sweetly again—"On earth peace to the men of good will!" Shine on, gentle Star! Merry Christmas, Good Night!
"The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of San Francisco," so I read in my evening paper, "will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st of October. Tickets, five dollars in gold."
And then I turned to the glittering roll of fortunes. There they were, heaped up in an auriferous pyramid curiously balanced on its apex. At the bottom lay a poor little "$100 in gold," not worth minding, and up swelled the shining structure,—$1,000—$5,000—$10,000—$25,000— $50,000—until away at the top blazed clear across the column,
"$100,000 in Gold!"
All gold from the land of Gold, the unearthed Ophir of the Solomonic time. Everything had a bilious tint. It was as if I was seeing creation through an Oriental topaz. I felt for my ears, lest I had somehow swapped with Midas for his transmuting touch. No railway conductor was ever more clamorous for tickets than my heart was. Gold was 113 that day, so I counted out $5.65, turned it into a Post-office order, and transmitted it to the nearest agent. The ticket came, a strip of paper tawny as the Tiber, a faint reflection of "great heaps of gold," as Clarence said, but not to drown for, as Clarencedid. It was covered with "a strange device"—the ticket was—like the handkerchief the Alpine traveler carried in his hand, who talked Latin and cried "Excelsior!"
To think what splendid possibilities might lurk in that oblong piece of paper was enough to take one's breath away! I said not a word to Lucy—that's my wife—but folded it tenderly, as if it were a napkin with ten talents in it, and laid it away with a gold half dollar and a broken ring and a curl of hair and a stray pearl that had tumbled out of an old brooch, and a bit of ribbon and a faint suspicion of dead and gone fragrance—"all and singular" the contents of a little box that, forty years ago, would have been a "till" in the upper right-hand corner of a chest of drawers, and as nearly like an old-fashioned heart as two things can be that are made to hold the same sort of little trinkets of love and memory that everybody else foregoes and forgets.
The ticket lay there a month and I never said a word, but I began to get my money back right away. I tripped up the rounds of the golden ladder every day, and, strange to tell, I was totally unable tostopgoing up until I reached the top and stood with both feet perched upon "$100,000 in gold." I tried to steady myself a little and be persuaded that $25,000 would be comfortable. I did my best to cultivate a sentiment of respect for $50,000, but the paltry sum sank below the horizon, and like the Spaniard overwhelmed at sight of the sea, who went down upon his knees on Gilboa or somewhere, I saw nothing but the golden ocean of $100,000. And why not? Was not the one quite as easy to get as the other? To be sure, in the glow of my story the capital prize that stood upon its head as a pyramid, has been fashioned into a ladder like Jacob's, with the angels of Imagination and Fancy going up and down thereon, and at last all melted into a sea, has inundated the whole landscape; but I tell you a man with a hundred thousand dollars may defy rhetoric and mixed metaphors with impunity.
I thought I would make my will, and "give and bequeath to my well-beloved wife Lucy" fifty thousand dollars. When I had counted this out by itself, the heap of gold glittered so that it dazzled me out of my discretion, and I asked Lucy, in a quiet way, whether if I had $100,000 in gold and should will her fifty thousand free and clear, it would be enough. She laughed and said she thought it would be liberal! I then told her what I had done. Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given to dreaming. That mother of hers—she is seventy-six if she is a day—will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. She will sit down any time upon a damp bank of crimson and gold cloud that flanks the sunset, and never think of taking cold more than she did forty years ago. She is always seeing faces in the fire, and laying plans that will never be hatched, and altogether has a thousand luxuries that the tax-gatherer can not possibly get into his schedule. Lucy betrays her lineage. When I give her a "ten" sometimes, she will fold her arms, swing slowly to and fro in the rocking-chair, and pay it all out over and over, and get her money's worth in ever so many things useful and beautiful, and the green-backed decimal will be snugly lying all the while in that same box of momentous trifles. I think ten dollars go as far with Lucy as twenty-five do with most people, and by the same sign make her two and a half times as happy.
"Port"—that is the name of my boy—saw not a glimmer of gold for days and days after Lucy had her saffronian vision. He toiled on like Bunyan's fellow with the muck-rake at his calling, nor saw the angel, golden even as a sunflower, that floated overhead. It seemed a pity to wrong him out of his inheritance, and so I told him. I said, "Port, we are a rich family," and showed him the strip of paper. He ticked off the figures slowly, like a clock just running down, 1-0-4-1-6-3, and said—nothing. I thought he lacked gratitude, and so I made a plunge into the dark ages for something to punish him with, and came up with the brand-new fact that ingratitude is a crime so base the ancients never thought it worth while to make a law against it, as nobody, probably, would ever be guilty of it. "Port" went out, and I at once set about erasing the last cypher of the bequest I had made the boy, so that what had read $10,000 became $1,000, and I devised all the rest for the cultivation of gratitude in the human family.
Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, like the strings of David's harp, and October was about done, and the drawing was at hand. But what mattered it all? We had entered into possession already. We had invested one hundred thousand of the prize in the best of securities, and we were receiving eight thousand dollars a year, for you see it was $100,000 in gold, to-wit: $113,000 in greenbacks. We owed no man anything. We had traveled all over the broad domain of Columbus' magnificent "find." We had given two thousand dollars a year to objects of benevolence. We had bought exquisite works of art, and sent a dozen poor painters of good pictures abroad. We had imported rare old English books and strewn them upon our tables and given them to our neighbors. We presented an illustrated copy of "Paradise Lost" to our wood-sawyer one day, a copy reinforced like his breeches, with leather, and he was very grateful, and sat down upon it when he ate his bread and cheese and said it was "good," and we were gratified. We purchased a sober horse and a modest carriage, and propped up the line fence and shingled the kitchen. In a word, the gaunt wolf I had been trying for years to keep away from the door, had been brained at last with a golden club, and his skin lay upon the carriage floor for a foot-robe.
There was a legion of people we wanted to help—a great many of them when we first began, and I told Lucy to get a quire of paper and make a catalogue, but somehow or other they got fewer as we thought about it, until she numbered every one upon her fingers that seemed to have much hold upon our affections. Those I pensioned off in the most liberal manner, and had quite a warm and genial feeling about my heart, as if I had really been beneficent anddonesomething, when I had only been benevolent andwishedsomething. We had two or three wealthy neighbors who had gathered richness as damp logs gather moss, and that was about all there was of it—aggregating golden egg after golden egg, flattening themselves out like an incubating goose ambitious to cover the whole nest, and calling the proceeding "enterprise." I would set these mossy fellows an example that should rebuke them to the tips of their ears. And so I gave twenty thousand dollars for a public library to be free to all residents of the town forever. We had made Christmas "merry" and New Year "happy" for many a heart that would else have had neither one nor the other.
I am glad now to be able to state that there was only one man whom I had the least desire to humble when I became an hundred thousand strong, and he was an insurance agent—a retired doctor, who, growing weary of saving lives with pills, had taken to insuring lives with policies. He was always tormenting me "to insure." He looked me over like an undertaker with a measure in his eye. He kept me constantly reminded of the fact of death, as if it were inevitable. I hardly ever saw him that I did not fancy him rushing around to my widow the next day after I had won the wager, paying her the amount of insurance, and thence away to the printing office with a card flickering in his hand, inscribed with words and figures following, to-wit: