CHAPTER XIII. THE ECONOMY OF MR. FYLER CLOSE AND ISHMAEL SMALL.
Recovering from the blow administered by
Mr. Leycraft, Ishmael promptly regained his
legs, and putting them into active service, he
moved down with good speed—the night-air
was sharp and pinching—upon a neighboring
shop window, and, knocking up his cap-front,
employed a minute or two in gazing through
the pane, at what lay inside.
“There's fine slices of liver in there,” said
Ishmael to himself, “and excellent chops, and
all sorts of greens. A pound or two of chops
would be very nice with carrots; and so would
a slab of liver. But I guess I'll take a small
porter-house steak, without the bone, for this
time only!”
He accordingly proceeded to invest a small
sum in the delicacy in question, skewered it,
and concealing it in an ingenious brown paper
hood, bore it exultingly away.
“Something to wet the fibres, of course,” he
resumed, as he approached a grocer's, “something
to drown the young critturs in; a pint
of fresh cider from the Newark keg; the very
choicest squeezin's of a thousand pippins!
That'll do!” This beverage was procured,
and, in a borrowed pitcher, was put in company
with the steak; and skipping along faster
than ever, bounding nimbly over any obstacle
that crossed him, he was in a very few minutes
in the hall that passed the broker's door. Lightly
as he stepped along, the ear of the old man
was too quick for him, and in answer to a summons
from within, he halted, placed his steak
and pitcher privily on a chair in the corner of
the hall, and turning a baker's measure that
stood by over them, for a screen, entered.
The lodgings of Mr. Close, were, as Ishmael
now entered them, if anything, more desolate
than ever. There was the dull, bare floor, the
naked walls, the great cold chimney, breathing,
instead of warmth and comfort, a dreary
chillness through the room; and the shivering
broker seated by the hearth, as if he would coax
himself into a belief that a cheery fire was
crackling upon it.
The only light the apartment was allowed,
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came in through the open windows in the rear,
and was contributed by the various candles and
lamps of the neighborhood. In this half-lighted
gloom, Mr. Small entered, removed his cap,
and stood by the door. He was hailed at once,
but in a very feeble voice, by Mr. Close.
“Don't stand there, Ishmael, take a chair
by the hearth; it's much pleasanter than by
the door.” Ishmael came forward and did so.
“Don't you perceive a difference?” said Mr.
Close, as soon as Ishmael was seated. “Don't
you think of the many pleasant fires that have
blazed on this very hearth, and doesn't that
make you feel cheerful?”
Ishmael confessed that it was a comforting
thought.
“Yet pleasant as it is,” pursued Mr. Fyler
Close, “as this is a Thursday, I'd like to be
out; out in the open air, hurrying through the
streets at my best pace. What do you think
of that?”
“To class-meeting, of course,” suggested
Ishmael, with the faintest possible smile on his
delightful features.
“To be sure—but my age and infirmities,
Ishmael, won't allow me, you know,” answered
Fyler, pleasantly, “to attend those delightful
social and moral gatherings, as I'd liketo.”
“Certainly not,” rejoined Mr. Small, grinning
slightly.
“Nor to be at missionary lectures, dropping
in my little mite for the heathen,” continued
Fyler, “nor at the chapel, listening to the native
African giving an account of the vices and
wild beasts that beset the aboriginal negro in
that benighted country. What a loss to an
evangelical mind!”
“Dreadful, sir,” answered Ishmael. “And
there's the privilege of subscribing to a new
cloak for the minister, and helping make up a
box of trousers and clean linen for the Tuscaroras!”
“Very true, Ishmael—very true! I'm a melancholy
old fellow, doing nothing but sit here
all day long—with people coming in and begging
me to take twenty per cent. interest, coaxing
me with tears in their eyes, to ruin 'em;
and when I have done it, coming back to break
my furnitur' up like old crockery—just to get
me into temper, and make me mar my Christian
deportment. That's what I call ingratitude,
Ishmael.”
“The very basest sort, sir,” said Mr. Small,
“caught in the wild state, caged, and marked
on the peak of the den, `This here's the monster!”
'
“Providence is a wonderful thing, Ishmael,”
continued Fyler Close.
“Very much so,” answered Mr. Small, lifting
his knavish gray eyes to a great spider on
the wall, sitting in the middle of his web, where
the light of a bright lamp shone from without,
in waiting for a gold-spotted fly, caught by the
legs in a mesh.
“Now I suppose you followed old Hobbleshank
providentially, down to his den—eh, Ish
mael?” said Fyler, leering on Mr. Small. Ishmael
replied in the affirmative.
“And no doubt you happened to put your
head through the window and overhear what
the old gentleman said. He wasn't very noisy,
I hope.”
“Not more thanthe Hen and Chickens, in a
storm!” answered Ishmael. “Why, sir, he
made a speech that 'ud have done honor to
a United States senator; and the two old
women whimpered like a couple of water-spouts.
A delightful speech, sir, and all about
that boy again.”
“Ha! ha! and didn't he tell 'em how like a
father I had been to him; and how I advised
him not to bother his head about what was past
and gone for good—and the old women, hadn't
they something to say, too, Ishmael?”
“Not much; the old story,” answered Mr.
Small, “about the old house, and the nurse,
and all that sort o' thing.”
“All in the dark as much as ever?” asked
Fyler, pulling his whiskers with all his might,
in order to throw an expression of great suffering
into his countenance.
“I guess so; and old lunatic's wits are
breaking under him, and won't carry him
through the winter. That's better yet—don't
you think it is?”
“Oh no, by no means,” responded Mr. Close.
“We should always hope for the best. It
would be a very painful thing—a very painful
thing, indeed, Ishmael, to have the worthy old
gentleman go mad, out of mere ugliness and
spite—because he can't find a boy that he
thinks he's the father of. Don't you see that?”
“Very melancholy indeed,” said Ishmael,
who began to think remorsefully of the neglected
cheer in the hall, “so much so that I
don't feel equal to a conversation on the subject.
Won't you be good enough to excuse
me?”
“Certainly—I have too much respect for
your feelings. Go, by all means, Ishmael, and
the sooner you're abed, reflecting on the wilfulness
of man, and the mysterious ways and
goings-on of Providence, the better for you!
Good night; you'll be in bed at once, I hope.
Keep yourself nice and warm, Ishmael.”
“I'll try, sir,” answered Mr. Small, artlessly,
“although it's a piercer out o' doors,” and
partly aside, “what a precious old man—a perfect
martyr to his feelings.”
The door was closed; the old man leapt up,
and dancing about the room, running forward
every now and then to the window and staring
into the open casements that furnished the free
light to his chamber, rubbed his hands together
with very glee.
Ishmael paused for a moment without, to
look through a private crevice in the wall and
enjoy the spectacle; then uncovered his steaks
and pitcher, and taking them in his hand, bore
them up stairs, and entered the apartment immediately
over Mr. Close. This was scarcely
more than a loft at the very top of the house;
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with beams and rafters cutting it crosswise and
lengthwise in every direction; which beams
were garnished with a great number of suspended
market-baskets; coils of ancient iron
hoops; great pieces of tarred cable; and here
and there, bunches of rusty keys of all possible
sizes—some perfect giants, suited for great
warehouses, and others scarcely large enough
for ladies' writing-desks. The room, poor and
parti-furnished as it was, had an air of comfort,
from the circumstance of the walls being
lined on every side with coats, trowsers, vests,
roundabouts, and cloaks, hung upon pins about,
in great abundance and variety; and when
Ishmael, stepping gently about the room, gathered
together from corners and hiding-places,
fragments of wood and shaving, heaped them
in the chimney and lighted a fire that blazed
and crackled up the flue, throwing out a wavering
flame into the gloom of the apartment,
it seemed as if the room swarmed with visiters,
who stood shrouded in their various apparel
against the wall, and only waited an invitation
from Ishmael to come forward and make themselves
merry over his fire.
When Ishmael saw how cheerily the fire
sparkled on the hearth, he could not hold from
laughing gently, and thinking of the old gentleman
below stairs. Then he took down from
the wall an old rusted gridirion, planted it upon
the coals, and spreading his steak upon the
bars, watched the process that followed with
an eager eye. In a few minutes it was finished
to a turn, and while a pleasant savor steamed
up and filled the garret with a grateful smell,
Ishmael arrayed his cheer on a blue plate on a
little mantel or shelf that overhung the hearth;
placed a small loaf (a perquisite from the baker)
with a knife and fork at its side; and
drawing a well-worn countinghouse-stool from
a corner, vaulted upon it with an easy leap,
and first perching his heels upon a round near
the top, and placing the blue plate on his knee,
entered with steady glee upon the business before
him.
The meal was despatched, as all meals are
that are relished hugely; and when it was
fairly at an end, Ishmael jumped up, and standing
for a minute on the very top of the stool,
and raising his hand above him, he brought
down from a beam a long clay pipe and a handful
of well-dried tobacco; bent down and lighted
it with a coal; and, balancing his seat upon
its hind legs, fell back against the wall, and
watched the smoke complacently, as it was lost
among the rafters.
All this process seemed to operate with a
kindly influence on Mr. Small, and as, from
time to time, he removed the pipe from his lips,
he discovered that he was in a fine narrative
humor, and having no one to talk to, was driven,
from the sheer necessity of the case, to talking
to himself.
“That's not so bad,” said Ishmael, glancing
about at the various distenanted garments that
filled the room, “fourpence a day for trowsers,
and sixpence for the use o' respectable men's
coats with skirts; all for honest voters that
goes to the polls in other people's clothes out
o' respect to their memory. Nick Finch is a
capital 'lectioneerer, and dresses up his voters
as pretty and natural as any man ever did;
but if Nick's friends only knew what dignified
gentleman had wore their coats and trowsers
before 'em, they'd carry their heads more like
lords and commodores than franchise citizens.
Here's this nice suit of crow-black,” pursued
Mr. Small, turning about and fixing his eye upon
the garments in question. There wasn't a
nicer person in the whole hundred and forty
pulpits, than that gentleman afore he took to
private drinks, and began to borry money of
Uncle Close on his gilt-edged prayer-books and
great bibles out o' the pulpit. He used to look
quite spruce and fine, I can tell you, when he
first come here; then his beard began to stubble
out; then his boots was foxy; and then
he'd come with his hat knocked in, and his
pockets full of small stones, which he tried to
pass off on the old 'un for change. When he
got to that Uncle Close had him took up by the
police for a deranged wagrant; and that was
the last of you, old fellow!”
“Volunteer firemen is queer chaps!” continued
Ishmael, casting his eyes upon a shaggy
white overcoat with enormous pearl buttons.
“Bully Simmons was one of the primest, and 'ud
play a whole orchestra on a fire-trumpet, on
the way to a one-story conflagration. But fires
was too much for him—they come on too thick
and shiny on wet nights! First, Bully lost his appetite,
and then he sold out all his red shirts;
then he lost the use o' his legs, and couldn't
travel a ladder, with a pipe in his hand; and
that made him part with his best figured hoists,
every one of 'em; and, one night, Bully tried
his voice agin a nor'wester that was howling
among the flames of a big factory, and when
he found himself beaten out, he stood at the
back of old Forty and shed tears into an engin'bucket
like rain; stopped at the old gentleman's
on his way home, and sold out his fire-hat,
his belts, his boots, and that great rough jack
et, for a song; borrowed a coal-heaver's shirt
to go home in, and turned agin engines for life.
Bully's a very moral man, they say, now, and
takes in the tracts by handfuls every time they
come round, for shavin' paper.”
As Ishmael sat perched upon his stool, framing,
in this way, a memoir of each boot, vest,
and overcoat, or meditating the course of the
next day's business, an humble tap was given at
the door, the door slowly opened, and a forlorn-looking
personage, in a shabby hat, covered
with dust, as was also his whole person,
from crown to boot, and having under his arm
a small parcel, came in. Advancing timidly,
removing his hat, and standing before Ishmael—
while he looked piteously in his face, he accosted
him.
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“Please, sir,” said the stranger, “is there
no corner of a bed a poor traveller might have,
with a morsel to keep down the famine of a
long day's march?”
To this appeal Mr. Small made no answer,
but reclining against the wall, assumed to fall
into a profound slumber.
“Do, for Heaven's sake, hear me!” continued
the stranger. “Wake and hear me! I have
come from burying an only child in the country,
and have neither crust nor couch to keep off
the cold and hunger this night.”
“Hallo! what's all this?” cried Ishmael,
feigning at that moment to waken from his
sleep. “Who's here? Thieves! thieves! Do
you mean to murder us in cold blood?”
The poor stranger stood shivering before
him, with his hat crushed in his hand.
“There are no thieves here,” said the stranger,
as soon as he could be heard. “No man's
life to be taken but mine, from sheer lack of
food.”
“Oh, you're a beggar, are you?” said Ishmael,
rubbing his eyes with his knuckles.
“Why didn't you stop below, at the old man's?
He would have helped you, I'm quite sure.”
“So he would—so he would, sir,” said the
traveller, “but he's poor too—poorer than I.
His health was broken, he told me; he's cut
off from all his religious comforts, and sits
watching there, in that cold room, the pleasure
of Providence. He's a nice, a worthy old man;
that I judged by what he said. He referred
me to you; there was a benevolent young gentleman
up stairs, he said, that would do anything
I asked.”
“He did, eh? And so you come to me,” said
Ishmael, smiling mildly upon the stranger.
“Lodgin' in a garret and old clothes cem-e-tery;
as if I had a scrap to spare. You're a wag—
I know you are; but you shouldn't play off
your humor on poor lads that lives in the roof.
Oh, no—it won't do—and just, by way of apology
for your rudeness, be good enough to give
my compliments to the first watchman—you
know what watchmans are, I guess—you meet
at the door. Tell him to lend you his overcoat—
he's sure to do it—borry his rattle for a cane—
rattles make first-rate walking-sticks, and
waddle home as fast as you can. Good night,
turnip patch!”
The poor stranger dropped his head, and,
without murmur or answer, went away.
Mr. Small now felt that he was wrought to
as comfortable a state, intellectually and physically,
as was attainable by such a gentleman
as himself, and turned his eye bedward. Casting
his coat off, and dexterously jerking a boot
from either leg, as he stood, into a remote corner,
he pulled down from their pegs, every one
of them, all the coats, vests, and other garments
in the apartment, into a heap upon his truckle-bed,
and creeping under the same, his knavish
gray eyes, alone, peering out from under the
mass, he fell into a tranquil sleep.
There could be no doubt—apart from what
had occurred to Mr. Small—that a general election
was close at hand; and that the city was
rapidly falling into a relapse of its annual fever.
The walls and stable-doors broke out all
over with great placards and huge blotches of
declamation; an erysipelas of liberty, temples,
and muscular fists, clenched upon hammers,
appeared upon the foreheads of the pumps; the
air swarmed, as with forerunners of a plague,
with ominous flags, streaked from end to end
with a red and white and spotted inflammation;
journeyman patriots and self-sacrificing office-seekers
began to shout and vociferate as in a
delirium; in a word, unless the customary
blood-letting incident to a charter contest afforded
relief, the patient was in a fair way of
going stark mad, and losing the humble share
of sense with which it looks after its washing
and ironing, and provides for its butcher's and
baker's dues during the rest of the year. It
could scarcely be expected that Puffer Hopkins
should escape the general endemic; on the
contrary, it being his first season, the symptoms
were in him extremely violent and furious.
From morning till night he sat at his
desk like one spell-bound, fabricating resolutions,
preambles, and reports of retiring committees,
by the gross; or starting up every now
and then and stalking the room vehemently,
and then returning and committing the emphatic
thoughts that had occurred to him in
his hurried travel, to the record before him;
varying this employment with speeches without
number, delivered in all possible attitudes,
to imaginary audiences of every temper, complexion,
and constitution.
Sometimes he had very distinctly before him,
in his mind's eye, an assemblage where the
carting interest prevailed, and where the reduction
of corporation cartmen's wages, for
instance, might be undergoing an examination.
“Gentlemen,” said Puffer to the prospective
audience, “gentlemen, I put it to you whether
twenty cents a load will pay a cartman and a
cartman's horse? Gentlemen, I see a prospect
before me for any man that undertakes to work
for such prices. In six months he is a pauper,
his children's paupers, his horse's a pauper,
and what's better, walks up and down the avenue,
where he's turned out to die, like the apparition
of a respectable dirtman's horse that
had been; meeting the aldermen as they ride
out in their jaunts, and rebuking 'em to the
face for their niggardly parsimony. Hasn't
a cartman, a dirt-cartman, rights, I'd like to
know? Hasn't he a soul; and why should he
submit to this inhuman system; why should the
sweat of the poor man's brow be wrung out to
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fertilize the soil of the rich man's field?” (Imaginary
cheers, beginning in a gentle “G' up,”
and ending in an earthquake hurrah!)
Then his audience consisted of a great number
of individuals, who, from their being clad
in nice broadcloth coats, and always having
their beards closely trimmed, are supposed to
be gentlemen and Christians.
“Fellow-citizens!” cried Mr. Hopkins, “we
all see what they're driving at;” alluding to
the other party, of course; “they're at work
undermining the pillars of society—that's what
they would have. Not a man of 'em but would
plant a keg of powder under every pulpit, on
Sunday morning, and blow all our respected
clergy to heaven in a twinkling. They're infidels
and agrarians, fellow-citizens, and when
they'd done that, they'd let the pews out for
apple stands, and fall straightway to eating
soup out of the contribution-plates. If you
don't beat 'em at the next election, if you don't
rouse yourselves in your strength and overwhelm
these monsters and jacobins, I despair
of my country—I despair of mankind; and
you'll have a herd of vipers saddled on you
next year for a corporation!”
Abandoning this disagreeable region, Puffer
relieved himself by the fiction of a room full of
stout, rosy, comfortable-looking gentlemen, who
groaned in spirit under a great burden of city
charges, and whose constant saying it was,
that they, figuratively only, were eaten up with
taxes.
“The city aldermen, the common council of
this mighty metropolis,” said Puffer, “is nothing
but a corporation of boa-constrictors—a
board of greedy anacondas—that swallow lot
after lot, house upon house, of the freeholders,
as if they were so many brick-and-mortar sand-wiches.
Commissioners of street-opening run
the plough through a man's sleeping-room of
a morning before he's out of bed; and clap a
set of rollers under his dwelling and tumble it
into the river, as if it were so much old lumber.
Will you submit to this? Never! The
spirits of your forefathers protest against it;
your posterity implore you to snatch their
bread, their very subsistence from the maw of
these gigantic wolves in pacific apparel! The
little children in their cradles raise their hands
and ask you to save them from ruin!”
It is impossible to conjecture to what regions
of rhetoric and simile-land the imagination of
Puffer Hopkins might have conveyed him, now
that he was fairly on the wing; for at this
moment, and in the very midst of these pleasant
fables and suppositions, Puffer received by
the hand of a messenger, a notice from the chief
or executive committee, directing him to proceed
forthwith to the house of Mr. Nicholas
Finch, an electioneering agent, and secure his
services. Now, Puffer had heard of Nick Finch,
as he was familiarly entitled, before; believed
him to be as thorough-going, limber tongued,
and supple-jointed a fellow as could be found in
the county; and therefore relished not a little the
honor of effecting a negotiation for his distinguished
talent. Without delay he hurried forth,
rousing by the way the messenger, who being
a fellow besotted by drink and stupefied with
much political talk, in taprooms and elsewhere,
had halted in one of the landings, and there,
retiring penitentially to a corner, had gone off
into a profound and melodious slumber. Performing
this agreeable duty, and lending the
gentleman an arm to the street, Puffer proceeded
to the quarters where he understood Mr.
Finch held his lair. He soon approached the
precinct, but not knowing it by number, he put
the question to one of a group of lads playing
at toys against a fence side. A dozen started
up at once to answer.
“Nick Finch—Nick Finch, sir—over here,
sir, this way, through the alley!” And word
having passed along that a gentleman was in
quest of Mr. Finch, Puffer was telegraphed
along from window to window, area to area,
until he was left at the foot of an alley, by an
old woman who had gallopped at his side for
several rods, who shouted in his ear, “Up
there, sir, up there!” and hobbled away again.
Left to himself, Puffer entered by a gate, and
making cautious progress along a boarded lane,
arrived in front of a row of common houses,
to which access was obtained by aid of outside
steps, fastened against the buildings. Ascending
the first that offered, he rapped inquiringly
at the door, was hailed from within by a decisive
voice, and marched in. The apartment
he had invaded was an oblong room, with a
sanded floor, a desk on a raised platform at the
farthest extremity, a full length George Washington
in perfect white, standing in one corner,
and a full length Hamilton, bronzed, in
the opposite. Against the wall, and over a
fireplace in which a pile of wood was crackling
and blazing, was fastened the declaration
of Independence, with all those interesting
specimens of handwriting of the fifty-two signers,
done in lithograph; and across a single
window that lighted the room, where he had
entered, was stretched a half American flag,
cut athwart, directly through all the stars, and
suspended by a tape.
The owner of the voice, a short, thick-set
man, with a half-mown beard, a hard, firm
countenance, and apparelled in a cart-frock,
stood in the middle of the apartment; and before
him, ranged on a bench, sat a dozen or so
ill-dressed fellows, whose countenances were
fixed steadily on his.
“Come in, sir, come in,” said the thick-set
man. “Don't hesitate—these are only a few
friends that are spending a little time with me;
paying me a sociable visit of a day or two, that's
all.” It occurred to Puffer that if these fellows
were actually visiters of the gentleman in
the cart-frock, that he had decidedly the most
select circle of acquaintance of any one he
could mention.
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“I'm glad you've come, sir,” continued the
electioneerer. “I've been expecting you some
days.”
“Then you know me?” said Puffer.
“Of course I do,” answered the other. “Allow
me to introduce you to my friends. Gentlemen”
(turning to the line of ragged gentry on
the bench), “Puffer Hopkins, Esq., of the Opposition
committee. Rise, if you please, and
give him a bow.”
The ragged gentry did as they were bid, and
straightway sat down again, as if the unusual
exertion of a salute had entirely exhausted
them.
“I am afraid I interrupt business,” said
Puffer. “You seemed engaged when I came
in.”
“I was,” answered the electioneerer, “and
you entered just in the nick of time to aid me.
You must act as an inspector of election; you
have a good person, a clear, full voice, and will
judge my voters tenderly. Take this chair, if
you please!” Saying this, he at once inducted
Puffer into a seat behind the desk on the
raised platform, placed before him a green box,
and proceeded to distribute among the gentlemen
on the bench, a number of small papers
curiously folded, which they received with a
knowing smile.
“Now, gentlemen, go up as I give the signal,”
said Mr. Finch. “Mr. Peter Foil, will
you have the goodness to deposite your ballot?”
At this one of the company who had found
his way, by some mysterious dispensation,
into a faded suit of black—it was the broken-down
parson's—but whose hair was, nevertheless,
uncombed, and his hat in very reduced
circumstances, shambled across the floor
and made a show of inserting a vote in the
green box before Puffer Hopkins.
“That will never do, sir,” said the electioneerer,
rather sternly, as he was crossing back
again. “You shuffled up to the counter as if
you were shoaling through the market, according
to your well-known habits, stealing pigs'
feet of the butchers to make broth of; and when
you attempted to give the inspector your ticket,
any one could have sworn you had been a fishvender's
secretary, thrusting your hand in a
basket to pull out a flounder or a bunch of eels;
try it again!”
Mr. Foil renewed the attempt—this time,
with greater success.
“That's better,” said Mr. Finch, encouragingly,
“worthier the respectable man whose
clothes you've got on; more of the air of a civilized
being. Now, Mr. Runlet.”
At this a heavy-built personage proceeded
to perform his duty as a franchise citizen, but
in so cumbrous a gait and with so weak an eye
to the keeping and symmetry of his part, as to
call down a severe rebuke from Mr. Finch.
“You pitch about as if you were on your
own ploughed land at Croton, and not down
here, earning handsome wages on the pavement
for doing freeman's service. You must
walk more level, and not up and down like
a scart buffalo. Carry your arms at your
side, and don't swing them akimbo, like a
pair of crooked scythe-sneaths. You'll do better
with your dinner to steady you!”
After Mr. Runlet, a third was summoned,
who wore the garments of the volunteer fireman;
but was condemned as failing most lamentably
in his swagger, and missing to speak
out of a corner of his mouth, as if he carried a
segar in the other. After several trials he
amended his performance, and succeded at last
in bullying the inspector with a grace, and geting
his vote in by sheer force of impudence.
Another was called, who, springing up with
great alacrity, endued, in a pair of stout corduroys,
with a shirt of red flannel, rolled back
upon his arms over one of white, a great
brawny fellow, pitched about from one quarter
of the room to another, putting it into imaginary
antagonists with all his might; at one
time knocking one on the head with his broad
hand, then teasing another's shins with a sideway
motion of the leg, and discomfiting a third
with a recoil of a bony elbow, to the unqualified
satisfaction and delight of Mr. Finch and
all lookers-on, and then retiring to his seat, apparently
exhausted and worn out with his savage
sport.
About half the company had been drilled and
exercised in this manner, when a door was suddenly
thrown open at the lower end of the
apartment, a shrewish face thrust in, and a shrill
voice appertaining thereto called out that dinner
was ready, and had better be eaten while
it was hot. Puffer Hopkins caught sight of a
table, spread in a room that was entered by a
descending step or two. The voters in rehearsal
started to their feet, and cast longing eyes
toward the paradise thus opened to their view,
and before Mr. Finch could give order one way
or the other, they had broken all bounds, and
rushed down, like so many harpies, on the banquet
spread below.
“If my eyes are not glandered,” cried Mr.
Finch, as soon as they were gone, “this is capital
sport. Dang me, Mr. Hopkins, if I wouldn't
rather drive a tandem through a china-shop
than manage these fellows. I've polished 'em
a little, you see; but they're too thick on the
wall yet, they daub and plaster and don't hardfinish
up. You'd like to have 'em for a day or
two, wouldn't you!”
Puffer, descending from the inspector's seat,
which he had filled during the rehearsal with
all the gravity he could command, and, complimenting
Mr. Finch upon the show of his men,
admitted that he would, and that he was there
on that very business.
“There isn't a better troop in town, though I
say it,” pursued the agent, “a little rough, but
there's capital stuff there. I don't flatter when
I assert that Nick Finch gets up finer and sturdier
rioters than any man in town. Only look
at that chap in the red shirt—he's a giant, a
perfect Nilghau with horns, in a crowd!”
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Puffer answered that he thought that proposition
couldn't be safely denied.
“Perhaps my sailors an't got the salt water
roll exactly; but they'll pass pretty well I reckon
for East river boatmen and Hellgate pilots,
and that's full as good; you want twelve men
for three days' work, in how many wards?”
“The whole seventeen if you please;” answered
Puffer. “I'm afraid to try 'em in so
many,” continued Mr. Finch. “You might
have 'em for five river wards, and one out o'
town; and the volunteer fireman (he's first
rate when he's warmed with a toddy), for any
number. Terms, twenty-five dollars per diem,
as they say in Congress.”
“It's a bargain, sir,” said Puffer, seizing the
virtuous gentleman by the hand. “You'll
bring them up yourself?”
“I will, you may depend on it; you're a lucky
man—the other side offered me twenty, and as
much oats as my horse could eat in a week, but
it wouldn't do.”
With this understanding Puffer left; the agent
crying after him to call in on Monday week,
when they would be finally broken in—“You
make a capital inspector; all you want is age
and silver spectacles to make you as respectable
a rogue as ever sat behind a green box!”
Breathing the word “mum” in an under
tone, and shaking his head in reproof at the
hardihood of the agent, Puffer descended into
the yard.
He had reached the ground, and was turning
to leave the place, when he discovered moving
across the extremity of the yard and passing
into a house many degrees poorer than the
agent's, a figure bent with years; he walked
with a slow shuffling gait, and pausing often,
wrung his hands and looked keenly into the
earth, as if all his hopes lay buried there. Puffer
knew not whether to advance and greet the
old man as his heart prompted, or to withdraw;
when he raised his head as if he knew the footstep
that was near, and, discovering Puffer Hopkins,
started from the dotage of his walk and
manner, hastened across the ground, and while
his face brightened at every pace he hailed him
from the distance.
“God bless you,—God bless you, my boy!”
cried Hobbleshank. “Where have you tarried
so long? You have not forgotten the old man
so soon, eh? If you knew how often I had
thought of you, you would have paid me but
fair interest on my thoughts to have called at
the old man's lodgings, and asked how the
world, a very wilful and wicked one, had gone
with him? Am I right?”
“You are, you are,” answered Puffer, who
could not fail to be touched by the kindly eagerness
of the old man. “I have abused your
goodness, and was repenting of my folly but
this morning—I meant to call.”
“You did!” said the old man quickly. “Well
never mind that, but come with me.”
With this they entered a low building, the
roof of which was moss-grown and hung over
like a great eyebrow, and the door sustained
by a single hinge, stood ever askew, allowing
snow, tempest, and hail, to beat in and keep a
perpetual Lapland through the hall. Opening
the first door they entered a square room, cold,
bare, and desolate-looking, with no soul apparently
present.
“How is this?” said Hobbleshank. “
thought Peter Hibbard dwelt here.”
“So he does,” answered a broken voice from
the corner of the apartment, “Peter Hibbard's
body lodges here. Heaven save his soul—that
may be wandering in some other world.”
“Are you Peter Hibbard?” asked Hobbleshank,
approaching the bed-side where the
speaker lay.
“Peter Hibbard am I,” he answered, “as far
as I can know, though I sometimes think Peter—
one Peter—died better than a score of years
ago. When a man's soul is killed and his
heart frost-stricken, then he's dead, isn't he?”
“He should be!” answered Hobbleshank,
“but Heaven isn't always so kind. Sometimes
the body's dead and the soul all alive, like a
fire, driving the poor shattered body to and fro,
on thankless tasks and errands that end in despair:
that's worse.”
“There's no despair for me,” pursued Peter,
disclosing a lean haggard face, and leering at
Hobbleshank from under the blanket. “There's
nothing troubles me; I've got no soul.”
“Where's your wife, Peter?” asked the old
man.
“I've got none,” answered the other. “No
wife, nor child, nor grand-child, boy nor girl,
nor uncle, aunt, sister, brother, or neighbor; I
and these four walls keep house here.
“But where are your old friends?” continued
Hobbleshank.
“Ah! my old friends, there you are, are
you? oh, ho! There was Phil Sherrod, he
died in his bed of an inflamed liver; Phil died
finely they say, singing Old Hundred. Don't
believe it; he yielded the ghost choking the
parson with his bands. Parker Lent, at sea;
Bill Green, in jail for a stolen horse, it was St.
John's pale horse they say; Charlotte Slocum,
she married a Long island milkman and was
drowned. There was another,” continued the
bed-ridden man, rising in his couch and pressing
his hand upon his brow, and peering from
under it toward Hobbleshank, and Puffer, “another.”
“Yes—what of her?” asked Hobbleshank
quickly.
“What of her?” he replied, “are you sure
it was a woman? Yes, by Heaven it was, it
was; a rosy buxom girl, but never Peter Hibbard's
wife, why not?”
With this question he fell back and lay with
his eyes wide open and glaring; but still and
motionless as a stone.
“Why not?” said the bed-ridden man waking
suddenly from his trance of silence. “Why
should Sim Lettuce win where I lost? That
was a flaming carbuncle on Sim's nose, and
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many's the laugh Hetty and I have had thinking
of it; and yet she married him spite of it.”
“And Sim died—what then?” asked Hobbleshank,
watching the countenance of him he
questioned with painful earnestness. “What
then, my good sir, what then?”
“Let me see—Sim died; the carbuncle struck
in and turned to a St. Anthony's fire, and carried
him off; Hetty turned nurse. Did you
know that? Nurse to a lovely lady; she died
too one day. Hetty went off—I followed her.”
“Yes, yes, you followed her,” repeated
Hobbleshank, anxious to keep the wandering
wits of the sick man to the subject. “Go on.”
“I followed her—didn't I say so! On my
honor, red-nosed Sim's widow would not have
me, eh! eh! not she. Off she slipped to keep
a garden in an out-of-the-way place, I can tell
you. Peter Hibbard watched her many a year,
but she never would be Mrs. Hibbard, and here
I lie this day without a wife, or child; child,
nor grandchild, boy nor girl, nor uncle, aunt,
sister, brother, or neighbor. We have a merry
time, these four walls and I.”
It was in vain that Hobbleshank attempted
again and again, and by various devices, to
bring back his mind to a narrative humor; he
kept reciting the incidents of his hopelessness
and desolation, and after a while fell into a wild
jumble, where everything pointless and trivial
was huddled together, and then he declined
into a senseless torpor, where he lay dumb to
every speech and entreaty of the old man.
Leaving him in this mood, Hobbleshank and
Puffer turned away from his bed-side and sending
in a neighbor that had stood watching at
the door, for on such chance aid the bed-ridden
man trusted solely for life—to minister to his
wants, they escaped swiftly from the place. In
perfect silence they walked through street after
street together, until they reached a corner
where their way separated.
“All is lost, all is lost!” said Hobbleshank
grasping Puffer Hopkins by the hand, as tears
flowed into his eyes; and, parting without a
further word, in gloom and silence, each took
his way.
Mathews, Cornelius, 1817-1889 [1843], The various writings (Harper & Brothers, New York) [word count] [eaf265].
