CHAPTER II.
Like a web woven of gold by the lightning, the
sun's rays ran in swift threads from summit to summit
of the dark green mountains, and the soft mist
that slept on the breast of the river began to lift like
the slumberous lid from the eye of woman, when her
dream is broken at dawn. Not so poetically were
these daily glories regarded, however, by the morning
watch of the Half-Moon, who, between the desire to
drop asleep with their heads on the capstan, and the
necessity of keeping sharper watch lest the Indians
should come off through the rising mist, bore the
double pains of Tantalus and Sysiphus—ungratified
desire at their lips and threatening ruin over their heads.
After dividing the watch at the break of day, Hudson,
with the relieved part of his crew, had gone below,
and might have been asleep an hour, when Fleming
suddenly entered the cabin and laid his hand upon
his shoulder. The skipper sprang from his berth
with the habitual readiness of a seaman, and followed
his mate upon deck, where he found his men standing
to their arms, and watching an object that, to his first
glance, seemed like a canoe sailing down upon them
through the air. The rash homicide drew close to
Hendrick as he regarded it, and the chatter of his
teeth betrayed that, during the long and anxious
watches of the night, his conscience had not justified
him for the hasty death he had awarded to a fellow-creature.
“She but looms through the mist!” said the skipper,
after regarding the advancing object for a moment.
“It is a single canoe, and can scarce harm us. Let
her come alongside!”
The natural explanation of the phenomenon at once
satisfied the crew, who had taken their superstitious
fears rather from Fleming's evident alarm than from
their own want of reflection; but the guilty man himself
still gazed on the advancing phantom, and when
a slight stir of the breeze raised the mist like the corner
of a curtain, and dropped the canoe plain upon
the surface of the river, he turned gloomily on his
heel, and muttered in an undertone to Hudson, “It
brings no good, Skipper Hendrick!”
Meanwhile the canoe advanced slowly. The single
paddle which propelled her paused before every turn,
and as the mist lifted quite up and showed a long
green line of shore between its shadowy fringe and
the water, an Indian, highly-painted, and more ornamented
than any they had hitherto seen, appeared
gazing earnestly at the vessel, and evidently approaching
with fear and caution.
The Half-Moon was heading up the river with
the rising tide, and Hudson walked forward to the
bows to look at the savage more closely. By the
eagle and bear, so richly embroidered in the gay-colored
quills of the porcupine on his belt of wampum,
he presumed him to be a chief; and glancing
his eye into the canoe, he saw the pillow which had
occasioned the death of the plunderer the night before,
and on it lay two ears of corn, and two broken arrows.
Pausing a moment as he drew near, the Indian pointed
to these signs of peace, and Hudson, in reply, spread
out his open hands and beckoned him to come on
board. In an instant the slight canoe shot under the
starboard bow, and with a noble confidence which the
skipper remarked upon with admiration, the tall savage
sprang upon the deck and laid the hand of the commander
to his breast.
The noon arrived, hot and sultry, and there was no
likelihood of a wind till sunset. The chief had been
feasted on board, and had shown, in his delight, the
most unequivocal evidence of good feeling; and even
Fleming, at last, who had drank more freely than usual
during the morning, abandoned his suspicion, and
joined in amusing the superb savage who was their
guest. In the course of the forenoon, another canoe
came off, paddled by a single young woman, whom
Fleming, recognised as having accompanied the plunderers
the night before, but in his half-intoxicated
state, it seemed to recall none of his previous bodings,
and to his own surprise, and that of the crew, she
evidently regarded him with particular favor, and by
pertinacious and ingenious signs, endeavored to induce
him to go ashore with her in the canoe. The
particular character of her face and form would have
given the mate a clue to her probable motives, had he
been less reckless from his excitement. She was
taller than is common for females of the savage tribes,
and her polished limbs, as gracefully moulded in their
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dark hues as those of the mercury of the fountain,
combined, with their slightness, a nerve and steadiness
of action which betrayed strength and resolution
of heart and frame. Her face was highly beautiful,
but the voluptuous fulness of the lips was contradicted
by a fierce fire in her night-dark eyes, and a quickness
of the brow to descend, which told of angry passions
habitually on the alert. It was remarked by Hans
Christaern, one of the crew, that when Fleming left
her for an instant, she abstracted herself from the
other joyous groups, and, with folded arms and looks
of brooding thoughtfulness, stood looking over the
stern; but immediately on his reappearance, her
snowy teeth became visible between her relaxing lips,
and she resumed her patient gaze upon his countenance,
and her occasional efforts to draw him into the
canoe.
Quite regardless of the presence of the woman, the
chief sat apart with Hudson, communicating his ideas
by intelligent signs, and after a while, the skipper
called his mate, and informed him that, as far as he
could understand, the chief wished to give them a
feast on shore. “Arm yourselves well,” said he,
“though I look for no treachery from this noble pagan;
and if chance should put us in danger, we shall be
more than a match for the whole tribe. Come with
me, Fleming,” he continued, after a pause, “you are
too rash with your firearms to be left in command.
Man the watch, four of you, and the rest get into the
long-boat. We'll while away these sluggish hours,
though danger is in it.”
The men sprang gayly below for their arms, and
were soon equipped and ready, and the chief, with an
expression of delight, put off in his canoe, followed
more slowly by the heavy long-boat, into which Hudson,
having given particular orders to the watch to let
no savages on board during his absence, was the last
to embark. The woman, whom the chief had called
to him before his departure by the name of Kihyalee,
sped off before in her swift canoe to another point of
the shore, and when Fleming cried out from the bow
of the boat, impatiently motioning her to follow, she
smiled in a manner that sent a momentary shudder
through the veins of the skipper who chanced to observe
the action, and by a circular movement of her
arm conveyed to him that she should meet him from
the other side of the hill. As they followed the chief,
they discovered the wigwams of an Indian village behind
the rocky point for which she was making, and
understood that the chief had sent her thither on some
errand connected with his proposed hospitality.
A large square rock, which had the look of having
been hurled with some avalanche from the mountain,
lay in the curve of a small beach of sand, surrounded
by the shallow water, and, on the left of this, the chief
pointed out to the skipper a deeper channel, hollowed
by the entrance of a mountain-torrent into the river,
through which he might bring his boat to land. At
the edge of this torrent's bed, the scene of the first act
of hospitality to our race upon the Hudson, stands at
this day the gate to the most hospitable mansion on
the river, as if the spirit of the spot had consecrated it
to its first association with the white man.
The chief led the way when the crew had disembarked,
by a path skirting the deep-worn bed of the
torrent, and after an ascent of a few minutes, through
a grove of tall firs, a short turn to the left brought
them upon an open table of land, a hundred and fifty
feet above the river, shut in by a circle of forest-trees,
and frowned over on the east by a tall and bald cliff,
which shot up in a perpendicular line to the height
of three hundred feet. From a cleft in the face of
this precipice a natural spring oozed forth, drawing
a darker line down the sun-parched rock, and feeding
a small stream that found its way to the river on the
northern side of the platform just mentioned, creating
between itself and the deeper torrent to the south, a
sort of highland peninsula, now constituting the estate
of the hospitable gentleman above alluded to.
Hudson looked around him with delight and surprise
when he stood on the highest part of the broad
natural table selected by the chief for his entertainment.
The view north showed a cleft through the
hills, with the river coiled like a lake in its widening
bed, while a blue and wavy line of mountains formed
the far horizon at its back; south, the bold eminences,
between which he had found his adventurous
way, closed in like the hollowed sides of a brightgreen
vase, with glimpses of the river lying in its
bottom like crystal; below him descended a sharp
and wooded bank, with the river at its foot, and
directly opposite rose a hill in a magnificent cone to
the very sky, sending its shadow down through the
mirrored water, as if it entered to some inner world.
The excessive lavishness of the foliage clothed these
bold natural features with a grace and richness altogether
captivating to the senses, and Hudson long
stood, gazing around him, believing that the tales of
brighter and happier lands were truer than he had
deemed, and that it was his lucky destiny to have been
the discoverer of a future Utopia.
A little later, several groups of Indians were seen
advancing from the village, bearing the materials for
a feast, which they deposited under a large tree, indicated
by the chief. It was soon arranged, and Hudson
with his men surrounded the dishes of shell and
wood, one of which, placed in the centre, contained a
roasted dog, half buried in Indian-corn. While the
chief and several of his warriors sat down in company
with the whites, the young men danced the calumetdance
to the sound of a rude drum, formed by drawing
a skin tightly over a wooden bowl, and near them, in
groups, stood the women and children of the village,
glancing with looks of curiosity from the feats of the
young men to the unaccustomed faces of the strangers.
Among the women stood Kihyalee, who kept her
large bright eyes fixed almost fiercely upon Fleming,
yet when he looked toward her, she smiled and turned
as if she would beckon him away—a bidding which he
tried in vain to obey, under the vigilant watch of his
master.
The feast went on, and the Indians having produced
gourds, filled with a slight intoxicating liquor made
from the corn, Hudson offered to the chief, some
spirits from a bottle which he had intrusted to one
of the men to wash down the expected roughness of
the savage viands. The bottle passed in turn to the
mate, who was observed to drink freely, and, a few
minutes after, Hudson rising to see more nearly a trial
of skill with the bow and arrow, Fleming found the
desired opportunity, and followed the tempting Kihyalee
into the forest.
The sun began to throw the shadows of the tall
pines in gigantic pinnacles along the ground, and the
youths of the friendly tribe, who had entertained the
great navigator, ceased from their dances and feats
of skill, and clustered around the feast-tree. Intending
to get under weigh with the evening breeze and
proceed still farther up the river, Hudson rose to collect
his men, and bid the chief farewell. Taking the
hand of the majestic savage and putting it to his
breast, to express in his own manner the kind feelings
he entertained for him, he turned toward the path
by which he came, and was glancing round at his men,
when Hans Christaern inquired if he had sent the
mate back to the vessel.
“Der teufel, no!” answered the skipper, missing
him for the first time; “has he been long gone?”
“A full hour!” said one of the men.
Hudson put his hand to his head, and remembered
the deep wrong Fleming had done to the tribe.
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Retribution, he feared, had over-taken him—but how was
it done so silently? How had the guilty man been
induced to leave his comrades, and accelerate his
doom by his own voluntary act?
The next instant resolved the question. A distant
and prolonged scream, as of a man in mortal agony,
drew all eyes to the summit of the beetling cliff, which
overhung them. On its extremest verge, outlined
distinctly against the sky, stood the tall figure of Kihyalee,
holding from her, yet poised over the precipice,
the writhing form of her victim, while in the other
hand, flashing in the rays of the sun, glittered the
bright hatchet she had plucked from his girdle. Infuriated
at the sight, and suspecting collision on the
part of the chief, Hudson drew his cutlass and gave
the order to stand to arms, but as he turned, the gigantic
savage had drawn an arrow to its head with incredible
force, and though it fell far short of its mark, there
was that in the action and in his look which, in the
passing of a thought, changed the mind of the skipper.
In another instant, the hesitating arm of the widowed
Kihyalee descended, and loosening her hold upon the
relaxed body of her victim, the doomed mate fell
heavily down the face of the precipice.
The chief turned to Hudson, who stood trembling
and aghast at the awful scene, and plucked the remaining
arrows from his quiver, he broke them and
threw himself on the ground. The tribe gathered
around their chief, Hudson moved his hand to them
in token of forgiveness, and in a melancholy silence
the crew took their way after him to the shore.
The nature of the strange incident I have to relate
forbids me to record either place or time.
On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever
been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a
snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in
the western country. The host turned out unwillingly
at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door,
and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which
was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he
assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and
bestowing them safely for the night.
The “bar-room” fire burnt brightly, and never was
fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four
or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a
keen comprehension of “pleasure after pain,” I took
off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold contracted
limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes
after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a
corn cake and a mug of “flip” hissing from the poker,
it certainly would have been hard to convince me that
I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to
have ridden a mile to paradise.
The faces of my new companions, which I had not
found time to inspect very closely while my supper
lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine
knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their
grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first
time since I had entered the room, of my errand in
that quarter of the country.
The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers
of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every
description, a resource from want and (in their own
opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at
least who are willing to labor. The owners of the extensive
forests, destined to become so valuable, are
mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who,
satisfied with the constant advance in the price of
lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing
but the laws of nature, and leave them unfenced and
unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land
beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural
enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighborhood
of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should
think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the
opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the
land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and
they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite
teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of
these tracts collect a number of the stragglers through
the country, and forming what is called a “bee,” go
into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work
laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and
straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they
have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes
sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily
till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then
drawn to the water sides, rafts are formed, and the
valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their
labor is run to the cities for their common advantage.
The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to defect
them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and
in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this
as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods.
They soon brightened and grew talkative when they
discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and
burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk
of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries,
that all the “men people” in the country were busy
“lumbering for themselves,” unless it were —
the “Picker and Piler.”
As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh
outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer.
“Talk of the devil”—said the man in a lower tone,
and without finishing the proverb he rose with a
respect which he had not accorded to me, to make
room for the Picker and Piler.
A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to
drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in.
I observed that the animal had neither saddle nor bridle.
Shutting the door upon him without violence, he exchanged
nods with one or two of the men, and giving
the landlord a small keg which he had brought, he
pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood
silent by the fire. His features were blackened with
smoke, but I could see that they were small and regular,
and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate
accents an indefinable resolution, was almost femininely
soft and winning.
“That stranger yonder has got a job for you,” said
the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received
the money.
Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very
eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was
thrown too much off my guard to address him.
“Is it you, sir?” he asked, after waiting a moment.
“Yes,—I have some work to be done hereabouts,
but—you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to-morrow.”
“I may not be here again in a week.”
“Do you live far from here?” He smiled.
“I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a
piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you
would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give
you—”
That personage decided the question for me by
telling me in so many words that I had better go.
His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be
taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence
had interrupted something, probably the formation of
a “bee,” and more willingly than I would have believed
possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and
wrappers, and declared that I was ready. The Picker
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and Piler had inspired me, and I knew not why, with
an involuntary respect and liking.
“It is a rough night, sir,” said he, as he shouldered
a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a
leather strap over the neck of his horse, “but I will
soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on!”
“And you?” I said inquisitively, as he held his
horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Canadian
pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog.
“I am more used to the road, sir, and will walk.
Come?”
It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it
had been possible to resist the strange tone of authority
with which he spoke. So without more ado, I
sprang upon the animal's back, and holding on by the
long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to
plunge through the drift after his master.
Wondering at the readiness with which I had entered
upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an
instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes
to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as
well as I could to the bare back and scrambling paces
of the Canadian. The Picker and Piler strode on
before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels,
and after a half hour's tramp, during which I had
merely observed that we were rounding the base of a
considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and
were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the
moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a considerable
valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid
cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and
far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black
smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and
rolling away on every side into the darkness.
We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire
to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and
its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the lamprey,
burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I
had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw
rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand,
but master and horse kept on. This burning tree,
however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony
turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass between
it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing
labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped
from his back and hailed the Picker and Piler, with a
halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crackling
branches. My voice did not evidently reach his
ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped
to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoccupied
hand of his master.
He turned back immediately. “I beg pardon,” he
said, “I have that to think of just now which makes
me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation,
but mount again and trust the pony.”
The animal turned rather unwilingly at his master's
bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown
fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on
his back.
“If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face.”
And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler
turned on his heel, and once more strode away before
us.
Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the
corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned
myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a
shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the
ground as he could carry it without stumbling, followed
closely at his heels. I observed, by the green
logs lying immediately along our path, that we were
following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been
felled before the wood was fired; but descending
presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep
bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait
of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I
found that the hollow through which it ran, contained
a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains
of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents
above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along
the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the
relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I
raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse
perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself
from my protectives against the cold.
I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker
and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory
movements that he was near the end of his journey,
when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood suddenly
upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the
brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and
after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, resumed
its onward course in the same direction as before.
This curve of the brook and the platform it
enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest,
and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was
as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one
side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof
of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, forming
a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the moment
of my appearance, stood a woman and a showilydressed
young man, both evidently confused at the
sudden apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes
had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing
at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat
the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his stooping
and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and
came forward to give me his hand.
“My daughter!” he said, more in the way of explanation
than introduction, and without taking further
notice of the young man whose presence seemed
so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg
he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at
my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the
ground.
The face and general appearance of the young man,
now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation
for more than a single glance, and my whole attention
was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular
host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut,
divided her attention between a haunch of venison
roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the arrangement
of a few most primitive implements for our
coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in
form, and as far as I had been able to distinguish his
blackened features, resembled him in the general outline.
But in the place of his thin and determined
mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and
though her eye looked as if it might wake, it expressed,
even in the presence of her moody father, a
drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the
Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Her dress was
coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every
possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not,
evidently soon to become a mother.
The venison was placed before us on the rock, and
the young man, uninvited, and with rather an air of
bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and
broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept
as near him as her attention to her father's wants would
permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged
my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Piler
ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, and
finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg
which had been the means of our acquaintance, he
sprang upon his feet and disappeared.
“The wind has changed,” said the daughter, looking
up at the smoke, “and he has gone to the western
edge to start a new fire. It's a full half mile, and he'll
be gone an hour.”
This was said with a look at me which was anything
but equivocal. I was de trop. I took up the
rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there was
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probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and remarking
that I would have a look for a deer, jumped
up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by
the rocks.
I had no conception of the scene that lay around
me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the
hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of perhaps
an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the
wood before it was set on fire. The forest encircled
it with blazing columns, whose capitals were apparently
lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and
flame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirlwind.
The grandeur, the violence, the intense brightness
of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The
pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows,
seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration
of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets abandoned
to the devouring element. At the next moment,
the wind, changing its direction, swept out every
vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of
flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless ignition,
standing parallel in thousands, resembled some
blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of
miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the
day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles
of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the
next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with serpents
of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it,
and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had
been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a
minute, again, all would be still except the crackling
of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the
wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals
rained down through the forest, and for a moment the
earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were
alive with one bright ignition.
With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the
variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my
eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool
below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small
clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome
with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the
rivulet's bank, and dipped my head and bathed my
eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there
was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceedingly
refreshed with its temperate coolness, I lay for sometime
in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the
winter that howled without. Frost and cold were
never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though
within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would
freeze to death in an hour.
“I have a better bed for you in the shanty,” said the
Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard in the
noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over me.
He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a
prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent
to the hut.
“I am little inclined for sleep,” I answered, “and
perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here.
The scene is new to me”—
“I have another guest to dispose of,” he answered,
“and we shall be more out of the smoke near the
shanty.”
I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform,
to find him angrily separating his daughter and the
stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a decisive
gesture, he pointed the young man to a “shakedown”
of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky
enclosure.
“With your leave, old gentleman,” said the intruder,
after glancing at his intended place of repose,
“I'll find a crib for myself.” And springing up the
craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gathered
a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow
left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown
and green, had been borne to the earth and partly
uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and
gigantic pine. The earth and stones had followed the
uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which,
like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to
the ground from which they had parted, a few rent
and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel
will show why I am so particular in this description.
“When peace was declared between England and
this country,” said the Picker and Piler (after an
hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to his
own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not
choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise,
I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open
mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was
left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter, whose
mother died in giving her birth.
“Having left a sufficient sum for her education in
the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof
she had passed the first years of her life, I determined
to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should
be made acquainted with my disaster.
“Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer
and a beggar.
“I determined to see my child, and came back,
like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He had
forgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter,
then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the
drudge in the family of a stranger—ignorant and friendless.
My heart turned against mankind with this last
drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I looked
around for some channel of desperate adventure.
But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What
to do with her? She had neither the manners nor
the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was
impossible. I started with her for the west, with the
vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and
chance and want have thrown me into the only mode
of life on earth that could now be palatable to me.”
“Is it not lonely,” I asked, “after your stirring adventures?”
“Lonely! If you knew the delight with which I
live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out
the world! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it,
to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I
could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been
contented, too. We live a month together in one
place—the centre like this of a burning wood. I can
bear hardship, but I love a high temperature—the
climate of the tropics—and I have it here. For weeks
I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living
on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or
a brook—a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the
cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can
put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion—but such
as I bring upon myself.”
The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the
sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause
unnecessary. He thought not of me.
“Some months since,” continued the Picker and
Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, “I
met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I
met you. He is the owner of this land. After
engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I
did yourself, from a momentary fever for company
which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with
me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the
neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and
twice on my return from the village, I found that my
daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the
wrong he inflicted on me.
The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a
whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and,
rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he
paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in
silence.
The reader must fill up from his own imagination
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the drama of which this is but the outline, for the
Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and
I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration
of his story he seemed but recapitulating the prominent
events for his own self-converse, rather than attempting
to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over
as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. I sat in
a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed
to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his
lips were closed with stern compression.
“You forget,” he said, after pacing awhile, “that I
offered you a place to sleep. The night wears late.
Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over
you. Good night!”
I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling
heavily into the sky till I slept.
I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me
from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the
hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the
morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke.
I looked around for a place to warm myself. The
hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire had been
kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart
was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch.
I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my
knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a
merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk.
Turning my back to the increasing heat, I started,
for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for
which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and
Piler.
“Twice doomed!” he muttered between his teeth,
“but not by me!”
He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid
his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of
hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the
fire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was
divided.
I began to think him insane, for I could get no
answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was
half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly.
I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing
remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his
matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was behind
us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as
I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the water-fall,
and was absorbed in memories of my own, when
I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one
bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. I
laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed
after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occasionally
to the hut, where she evidently thought her
father slept, she crept round toward her lover.
“He dies!” cried the infuriated man; but as he
jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched
out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake
the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for
I heard no footstep.
“Stand clear!” shouted a voice of almost supernatural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker
and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burning
tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flashed
on me.
Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy
flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the
trunk slowly bent upward from the fire.
The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne
ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in
my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper.
One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth,
and the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole
age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with
the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily away, the
vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his
feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to
the earth—a struggle—a contortion and the leafless
and waving top of the recovered and upright tree
rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone
out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt
my brain reel.
Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about
in the sickly daylight, when I recovered; but the
Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet
seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants
of the pine.
I found myself looking with some interest at the
back of a lady's head. The theatre was crowded, and
I had come in late, and the object of my curiosity,
whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to
the play.—She did not move. I had time to build a
life-time romance about her before I had seen a feature
of her face. But her ears were small and of an exquisite
oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman—
the hair arched and joined to the white neck with
the same finish as on the temples. Nature often
slights this part of her masterpiece.
The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly forward
to catch a glimse of the profile.—But no! she
sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head
leaned against it, remained immovable.
I left the box, and with some difficulty made my
way into the crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing,
persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I
could see my incognita at the most advantage. I
turned—pshaw!—how was it possible I had not recognised
her?
Kate Crediford!
There was no getting out again, for a while at least,
without giving offence to the crowd I had jostled so
unceremoniously. I sat down—vexed—and commenced
a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on
the drop-curtain.
Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford's,
or I could not have turned with indifference from the
handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very
beautiful—there was no disputing. But we love women
a little for what we do know of them, and a great
deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate
Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a
reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library,
in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume,
and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no
property even in the marks I had made in her perusal.
A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of
the book, and both of us studiously avoided a reconciliation.
As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole
on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the
simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that
distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immoveable
against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it
struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this peculiar
expression upon her countenance, was certainly
inexpressibly sweet—the turned-down corners ending
in dimples, which in that particular place, I have always
observed, are like wells of unfathomable melancholy.
Poor Kate! what was the matter with her?
As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain, a
little pettish with myself for the interest with which I
had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh
under my white waistcoat; but instantly persuading
myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and
began to hum “suoni la tromba.” The curtain rose
and the play went on.
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It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor
before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate
Crediford sad! Why, she was the most volatile, lighthearted,
care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up
her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really
annoyed you, my poor Kate! thought I. Could I,
by chance, be of any service to you—for, after all, I
owe you something! I looked at her again.
Strange that I had ever looked at that face without
emotion! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passionate,
yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set,
and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids.
And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and
semblance of the character that I had all my life been
vainly seeking! This was the creature I had sighed
for when turning away from the too mirthful tenderness
of Kate Crediford! There was something new,
or something for the moment miswritten, in that
familiar countenance.
I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty,
and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a
gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant
on the other side of the pilaster against which she
leaned. I went around while the orchestra were playing
a loud march, and, without being observed by the
thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place.
Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked
upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned
barrier between us! I knew every vein of it, like the
strings of my own heart.—I had held it spread out in
my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with
a rose-stem, for hours and hours, while imploring, and
reproaching, and reasoning over love's lights and
shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those exquisite
fingers—those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails
like pieces cut from the lip of a shell! Oh, the
promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chefd'oeuvre
of nature's tinted alabaster! the psalms and
sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father's pew!
the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a
bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward!
And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew
me better than its own other hand (for we had been
more together), lie there, so unconscious of my presence?
How could she—Kate Crediford—sit next to
me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition between
us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster,
and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise,
nor be at all aware of my neighborhood? She was
not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew
those little relaxed fingers too well! Sadness, indolent
and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her countenance,
and her abstraction was unfeigned and contemplative.
Could she have so utterly forgotten me—
magnetically, that is to say?—Could the atmosphere
about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly
at my approach, like the fanning of an angel's invisible
wing, have lost the sense of my presence?
I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on
that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could
summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I reproached
the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and
forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of
old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a
stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible.
But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I
watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could
not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman
who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so
unconsciously—but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse
had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I
well know would have trembled responsively. Had
she forgotten me altogether? Is that possible? Can
a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved
and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel's
track—like the air over the division of a bird's flight?
I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford,
but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt
no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger
who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for
fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the
folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And,
while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party
who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose
and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken
to, and unconscious altogether of having been near
any one whom she knew.
I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was
no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my
heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts
from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied
them more coolly in a letter:—
“You will think, when you look at the signature,
that this is to be the old story. And you will be as
much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever
your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love
to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and
wretched without you; I have thought of you, dreamed
of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to
you all and more than you exacted, of time and outward
service and adoration; but I love you now for
the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to
make you comprehend this startling contradiction?
“There are many chambers in the heart, Kate; and
the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secretly,
in the chamber of tears—avowedly, however, in the
outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the
sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we
select and smile upon, and follow with adulation in
the common walks of life, never passes. We admire
the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by contrast,
when we retire within ourselves. We pursue
them. We take them to our hearts—to the outer
vestibules of our hearts—and if they are gay only, they
are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we
pay them there. But the chamber within is, meantime,
lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo
of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its
mournful silence.—It longs for love, but love toned
with its own sadness—love that can penetrate deeper
than smiles ever came—love that, having once entered,
can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and
brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But
that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart
may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit
becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the
fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete
loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay
or tearful, lives mechanically on.
“Do you guess at my meaning, Kate?—Do you
remember the merriment of our first meeting? Do
you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you
first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless
fingers? Do you remember the mock condescension,
the merry haughtiness, the rallying and feigned incredulity,
with which you first received my successive
steps of vowing and love-making—the arch look when
it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring
follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future
planned and sworn to? That you were in earnest, as
much as you were capable of being, I fully believe.
You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet
bestowings of a maiden's tenderness. But how often
have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I
had passed with you, my spirit had been alone! How
often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart,
which love can never reach! How often mourned
that in the procession of love there was no place allotted
for its sweetest and dearest followers—tears and
silence! Oh, Kate! sweet as was that sun-gleam of
early passion, I did not love you! I tired of your
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smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness. I left you,
and thought of you no more?
“But now (and you will be surprised to know that
I have been so near to you unperceived)—I have drank
an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which
throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues
to your control every nerve and feeling of my existence.
Last night, I sat an hour, tracing again the
transparent and well-remembered veins upon your
hand, and oh! how the language written in those
branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning
and power.—You were sad. I saw you from a distance,
and, with amazement at an expression upon
your face which I had never before seen. I came and
sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when
I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was
the look I had searched the world for, combined with
such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and
passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an unsuspected
chamber in your heart—a chamber of tears.
Ah, why were you never sad before? Why have we
lost—why have I lost the eternity's worth of sweet
hours when you love me with that concealed treasure
in your bosom?—Alas! that angels must walk the
world, unrecognised, till too late! Alas, that I have
held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed
again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom
it was my life's errand, the thirst and passionate longing
of my nature, to find and worship!
“Oh, Heaven! with what new value do I now
number over your adorable graces of person! How
spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplorably
misappreciated!—How compulsive of respectful
adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial lightness,
that swan-like motion, which I once dared to
praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a
flower or the chance beauty of a bird! And those
bright lips! How did I ever look on them, and not
know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for
a while, the controlling spell of my destiny—the tearful
spirit followed and called in my dreams, with perpetual
longing? Strange value given to features and
outward loveliness by qualities within! Strange
witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in
mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love's breathing,
still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to consecrate
and heighten beauty of person.
“What can I say else, except implore to be permitted
to approach you—to offer my life to you—to
begin, thus late, after being known so long, the worship
which till death is your due? Pardon me if I
have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your
answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly
breathe till I see you—till I weep at your feet over my
blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu! but let it not be
for long I pray you!”
I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to
embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting
for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning,
with a death-pang in every step—so fearful was I—so
prophetically fearful—that I had forfeited for ever the
heart I had once flung from me.
It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a hand-writing
new to me. But it was on the subject which
possessed my existence, and it was of final import.
It follows:—
“Dear Sir: My wife wishes me to write to you,
and inform you of her marriage, which took place a
week or two since, and of which she presumes you
are not aware. She remarked to me, that you thought
her looking unhappy last evening, when you chanced
to see her at the play. As she seemed to regret not
being able to answer your note herself, I may perhaps
convey the proper apology by taking upon myself to
mention to you, that, in consequence of eating an imprudent
quantity of unripe fruit, she felt ill before going
to the theatre, and was obliged to leave early.
To day she seems seriously indisposed. I trust she
will be well enough to see you in a day or two—and
remain,
“Yours, truly,
“Samuel Smithers.”
But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers.
“The only heart that I have known of late, has been an easy,
excitable sort of gentleman, quickly roused and quickly calmed—
sensitive enough to confer a great deal of pleasure, and not sensitive
enough to give a moment's pain. The heart of other days was
a very different person indeed.”
—Bulwer.
I was moping one day in solitary confinement in
quarantine at Malta, when, in a turn between my stone
window and the back wall I saw the yards of a vessel
suddently cross the light, and heard the next moment
the rattle of a chain let go, and all the bustle of a
merchantman coming to anchor. I had the privilege
of promenading between two ring-bolts on the wharf
below the lazaretto, and with the attraction of a newcomer
to the sleepy company of vessels under the
yellow flag, I lost no time in descending the stone
stairs, and was immediately joined by my vigilant sentinel,
the guardiano, whose business it was to prevent
my contact with the other visiters to the wharf. The
tricolor flew at the peak of the stranger, and we easily
made out that she was a merchantman from Marseilles,
subject therefore to a week's quarantine on account
of the cholera. I had myself come from a
plague port, Smyrna, and was subjected to twenty
days' quarantine, six of which had passed; so that the
Frenchman, though but beginning his imprisonment,
was in a position comparatively enviable.
I had watched for an hour the getting of the vessel
into mooring trim, and was beginning to conclude
that she had come without passengers, when a gentleman
made his appearance on deck, and the jolly-boat
was immediately lowered and manned. A traveller's
baggage was handed over the side, the gentleman took
leave of the captain, and, in obedience to directions
from the quarantine officer on the quarterdeck, the
boat was pulled directly to the wharf on which I stood.
The guardiano gave me a caution to retire a little, as
the stranger was coming to take possession of the next
apartment to my own, and must land at the stairs near
by; but, before I had taken two steps backward, I
began to recognise features familiar to me, and with a
turn of the head as he sprang on the wharf the identity
was established completely. Tom Berryman, by all
that was wonderful! I had not seen him since we
were suspended from college together ten years before.
Forgetting lazaretto and guardiano, and all the salt
water between New Haven and Malta, I rushed up to
Tom with the cordiality of other days (a little sharpened
by abstinence from society), and we still had hold
of hands with a firm grip, when the quarantine master
gravely accosted us, and informed my friend that he
had incurred an additional week by touching me—in
short, that he must partake of the remainder of my
quarantine.
Aghast and chap-fallen as Berryman was at the consequences
of our rencontre (for he had fully calculated
on getting into Malta in time for the carnival), he was
somewhat reconciled to his lot by being permitted to
share my room and table instead of living his week in
solitude; and, by enriching our supplies a little from
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town, sleeping much, and chatting through the day in
the rich sunshine of that climate of Paradise, we contrived
to shove off the fortnight without any very intolerable
tedium.
My friend and I had begun our travels differently—
he taken England first, which I proposed visiting last.
It is of course the bonne bouche of travel to everybody,
and I was very curious to know Tom's experiences;
and, as I was soon bound thitherward, anxious to pick
out of his descriptions some chart of the rocks and
shoals in the “British channel” of society.
I should say, before quoting my friend, that he was
a Kentuckian, with the manner (to ladies) of mingled
devotion and nonchalance so popular with the sex,
and a chivalric quality of man altogether. His father's
political influence had obtained for him personal letters
of introduction from the president, and, with this advantage,
and his natural air of fashion, he had found
no obstacle to choosing his society in England;
choosing the first, of course, like a true republican!
We were sitting on the water-steps with our feet
immersed up to the ankles (in January too), and in
reply to some question of mine as to the approachability
of noble ladies by such plebeian lovers as himself,
Tom told me the story which follows. I take the
names at random, of course, but, in all else, I shall try
to “tell the tale as 'twas told to me.”
Why, circumstances, as you know, sometimes put
people in the attitude of lovers whether they will or no;
and it is but civil in such a case, to do what fate expects
of you. I knew too much of the difference between
crockery and porcelain to enter English society
with the remotest idea of making love within the red
book of the peerage, and though I've a story to tell, I
swear I never put a foot forward till I thought it was
knightly devoir; inevitable, though ever so ridiculous.
Still, I must say, with a beautiful and unreserved
woman beside one, very much like other beautiful and
unreserved woman, a republican might be pardoned for
forgetting the invisible wall. “Right honorable” loveliness
has as much attraction about it, let me tell you,
and is quite as difficult to resist, as loveliness that is
honored, right or wrong, and a man must be brought
up to it, as Englishmen are, to see the heraldric dragons
and griffins in the air when a charming girl is talking
to him.
“Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like (her) grandsire cut in alabaster?”
Eh? But to begin with the “Tityre tu patulæ.”
I had been passing a fortnight at the hunting lodge
of that wild devil, Lord—, in the Scotch Highlands,
and what with being freely wet outside every day, and
freely wet inside every night, I had given my principle
of life rather a disgust to its lodgings, and there were
some symptoms of preparation for leave-taking. Unwilling
to be ill in a bachelor's den, with no solace
tenderer than a dandy lord's tiger. I made a twilight
flit to the nearest post-town, and tightening my lifescrews
a little with the aid of the village apothecary,
started southward the next morning with four posters.
I expected to be obliged to pull up at Edinboro', but
the doctor's opiates, and abstinence, and quiet did
more for me than I had hoped, and I went on very
comfortably to Carlisle. I arrived at this place after
nightfall, and found the taverns overflowing with the
crowds of a fair, and no bed to be had unless I could
make one in a quartette of snoring graziers. At the
same time there was a great political meeting at
Edinboro', and every leg of a poster had gone north—
those I had brought with me having been transhitched
to a return chaise, and gone off while I was
looking for accommodations.
Regularly stranded, I sat down by the tap-room
fire, and was mourning my disaster, when the horn
of the night-coach reached my ear, and in the minute
of its rattling up to the door, I hastily resolved that it
was the least of two evils, and booked myself accordingly.
There was but one vacant place, an outsider!
With hardly time enough to resolve, and none to repent,
I was presently rolling over the dark road, chilled
to the bone in the first five minutes, and wet through
with a “Scotch mist” in the next half hour. Somewhere
about daybreak we rolled into the little town
of—, five miles from the seat of the earl of Tresethen,
to whose hospitalities I stood invited, and I went
to bed in a most comfortable inn and slept till noon.
Before going to bed I had written a note to be despatched
to Tresethen castle, and the earl's carriage
was waiting for me when I awoke. I found myself
better than I had expected, and dressing at once for
dinner, managed to reach the castle just in time to
hand in Lady Tresethen. Of that dinner I but remember
that I was the only guest, and that the earl
regretted his daughter's absence from table, Lady
Caroline having been thrown that morning from her
horse. I fainted somewhere about the second remove,
and recovered my wits some days after, on the safe side
of the crisis of a fever.
I shall never forget that first half hour of conscious
curiosity. An exquisite sense of bodily repose mingled
with a vague notion of recent relief from pain, made
me afraid to speak lest I should awake from a dream,
yet, if not a dream, what a delicious reality! A lady
of most noble presence, in a half-mourning dress, sat
by the side of a cheerful fire, turning her large dark eyes
on me, in the pauses of a conversation with a gray-headed
servant. My bed was of the most sumptuous
luxury; the chamber was hung with pictures and
draped with spotless white; the table covered with
the costliest elegancies of the toilet; and in the gentle
and deferential manner of the old liveried menial, and
the subdued tones of inquiry by the lady, there was a
refinement and tenderness which, with the keen susceptibility
of my senses, “lapt me in Elysium.” I was
long in remembering where I was. The lady glided
from the room, the old servant resumed his seat by
my bedside, other servants in the same livery came
softly in on errands of service, and, at the striking of
the half hour by a clock on the mantelpiece, the lady
returned, and I was raised to receive something from
her hand. As she came nearer, I remembered the
Countess Tresethen.
Three days after this I was permitted to take the
air of a conservatory which opened from the countess's
boudoir. My old attendant assisted me to dress, and,
with another servant, took me down in a fauteuil. I
was in slippers and robe-de-chambre, and presumed
that I should see no one except the kind and noble
Lady Tresethen, but I had scarce taken one turn up
the long alley of flowering plants, when the countess
came toward me from the glass door beyond, and on
her arm a girl leaned for support, whose beauty—
(Here Tom dabbled his feet for some minutes in
the water in silence.)
God bless me! I can never give you an idea of it!
It was a new revelation of woman to me; the opening
of an eighth seal. In the minute occupied by her
approach, my imagination (accelerated, as that faculty
always is, by the clairvoyance of sickness), had gone
through a whole drama of love—fear, adoration, desperation,
and rejection—and so complete was it, that
in after moments when these phases of passion came
round in the proper lapse of days and weeks, it seemed
to me that I had been through with them before; that
it was all familiar; that I had met and loved in some
other world, this same glorious creature, with the
same looks, words, and heart-ache; in the same conservatory
of bright flowers, and faith, myself in the
same pattern of a brocade dressing-gown!
Heavens! what a beautiful girl was that Lady Caroline!
Her eyes were of a light gray, the rim of the
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lids perfectly inky with the darkness of the long sweeping
lashes, and in her brown hair there was a gold
lustre that seemed somehow to illuminate the curves
of her small head like a halo. Her mouth had too
much character for a perfectly agreeable first impression.
It was nobility and sweetness educated over
native high spirit and scornfulness—the nature shining
through the transparent blood, like a flaw through
enamel. She would have been, in other circumstances,
a maid of Saragossa or a Gertrude Von Wart;
a heroine; perhaps a devil. But her fascination was
resistless!
“My daughter,” said Lady Tresethen (and in that
beginning was all the introduction she thought necessary),
“is, like yourself, an invalid just escaped from
the doctor; you must congratulate each other. Are
you strong enough to lend her an arm, Mr. Berryman?”
The countess left us, and with the composure of a
sister who had seen me every day of my life, Lady
Caroline took my arm and strolled slowly to and fro,
questioning me of my shooting at the lodge, and talking
to me of her late accident, her eyes sometimes
fixed upon her little embroidered slippers, as they
peeped from her snowy morning dress, and sometimes
indolently raised and brought to bear on my flushed
cheek and trembling lips; her singular serenity operating
on me as anything but a sedative! I was taken
up stairs again, after an hour's conversation, in a fair
way for a relapse, and the doctor put me under embargo
again for another week, which, spite of all the
renewed care and tenderness of Lady Tresethen,
seemed to me an eternity! I'll not bother you with
what I felt and thought all that time!
It was a brilliant autumnal day when I got leave to
make my second exodus, and with the doctor's permission
I prepared for a short walk in the park. I
declined the convoy of the old servant, for I had heard
Lady Caroline's horse gallop away down the avenue,
and I wished to watch her return unobserved. I had
just lost sight of the castle in the first bend of the path,
when I saw her quietly walking her horse under the
trees at a short distance, and the moment after she
observed and came toward me at an easy canter. I
had schooled myself to a little more self-possession,
but I was not prepared for such an apparition of splendid
beauty as that woman on horseback. She rode an
Arabian bay of the finest blood; a lofty, fiery, matchless
creature, with an expression of eye and nostril
which I could not but think a proper pendant to her
own, limbed as I had seldom seen a horse, and his
arched neck, and forehead, altogether, proud as a steed
for Lucifer. She sat on him as if it were a throne
she was born to, and the flow of her riding-dress
seemed as much a part of him as his mane. He appeared
ready to bound into the air, like Pegasus, but
one hand calmly stroked his mane, and her face was
as tranquil as marble.
“Well met!” she said; “I was just wishing for a
cavalier. What sort of a horse would you like, Mr.
Berryman? Ellis!” (speaking to her groom), “is old
Curtal taken up from grass?”
“Yes, miladi!”
“Curtal is our invalid horse, and as you are not
very strong, perhaps his easy pace will be best for you.
Bring him out directly, Ellis. We'll just walk along
the road a little way; for I must show you my Arabian;
and we'll not go back to ask mamma's permission,
for we shouldn't get it! You won't mind riding
a little way, will you?”
Of course I would have bestrided a hippogriff at
her bidding, and when the groom came out, leading
a thorough-bred hunter, with apparently a very elastic
and gentle action, I forgot the doctor and mounted
with great alacrity. We walked our horses slowly
down the avenue and out at the castle gate, followed
by the groom, and after trying a little quicker pace on
the public road, I pronounced old Curtal worthy of
her ladyship's eulogium, and her own Saladin worthy,
if horse could be worthy, of his burthen.
We had ridden perhaps a mile, and Lady Caroline
was giving me a slight history of the wonderful feats
of the old veteran under me, when the sound of a horn
made both horses prick up their ears, and on rising
a little acclivity, we caught sight of a pack of hounds
coming across the fields directly toward us, followed
by some twenty red-coated horsemen. Old Curtal
trembled and showed a disposition to fret, and I observed
that Lady Caroline dexterously lengthened
her own stirrup and loosened the belt of her riding-dress,
and the next minute the hounds were over the
hedge, and the horsemen, leap after leap, after them,
and with every successive jump, my own steed reared
and plunged unmanageably.
“Indeed, I can not stand this!” cried Lady Caroline,
gathering up her reins, “Ellis! see Mr. Berryman
home!” and away went the flying Arabian over
the hedge with a vault that left me breathless with
astonishment. One minute I made the vain effort to
control my own horse and turn his head in the other
direction, but my strength was gone. I had never
leaped a fence in my life on horseback, though a
tolerable rider on the road; but before I could think
how it was to be done, or gather myself together for
the leap, Curtal was over the hedge with me, and
flying across a ploughed field like the wind—Saladin
not far before him. With a glance ahead I saw the
red coats rising into the air and disappearing over
another green hedge, and though the field was crossed
in twenty leaps, I had time to feel my blood run cold
with the prospect of describing another parabola in
the air, and to speculate on the best attitude for a
projectile on horseback. Over went Saladin like a
greyhound, but his mistress's riding-cap caught the
wind at the highest point of the curve, and flew back
into my face as Curtal rose on his haunches, and over
I went again, blinded and giddy, and, with the cap
held flat against my bosom by the pressure of the air,
flew once more at a tremendous pace onward. My
feet were now plunged to the instep in the stirrups,
and my back, too weak to support me erect, let me
down to my horse's mane, and one by one, along the
skirt of a rising woodland, I could see the red coats
dropping slowly behind. Right before me like a
meteor, however, streamed back the loosened tresses
of Lady Caroline, and Curtal kept close on the track
of Saladin, neither losing nor gaining an inch apparently,
and nearer and nearer sounded the baying of the
hounds, and clearer became my view of the steady and
slight waist riding so fearlessly onward. Of my horse
I had neither guidance nor control. He needed none.
The hounds had crossed a morass, and we were rounding
a half-circle on an acclivity to come up with them,
and Curtal went at it too confidently to be in error.
Evenly as a hand-gallop on a green sward his tremendous
pace told off, and if his was the ease of muscular
power, the graceful speed of the beautiful creature
moving before me seemed the aerial buoyancy of a
bird. Obstructions seemed nothing. That flowing
dress and streaming hair sailed over rocks and ditches,
and over them, like their inseparable shadow, glided
I, and, except one horseman who still kept his distance
ahead, we seemed alone in the field. The
clatter of hoofs, and the exclamations of excitement
had ceased behind me, and though I was capable of
no exertion beyond that of keeping my seat, I no
longer feared the leap nor the pace, and began to anticipate
a safe termination to my perilous adventure.
A slight exclamation from Lady Caroline reached my
ear and I looked forward. A small river was before
us, and, from the opposite bank, of steep clay, the
rider who had preceded us was falling back, his horse's
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forefeet high in the air, and his arms already in the
water. I tried to pull my reins. I shouted to my
horse in desperation. And with the exertion, my
heart seemed to give way within me. Giddy and faint
I abandoned myself to my fate. I just saw the flying
heels of Saladin planted on the opposite bank and the
streaming hair still flying onward, when, with a bound
that, it seemed to me, must rend every fibre of the
creature beneath me, I saw the water gleam under
my feet, and still I kept on. We flew over a fence
into a stubble field, the hounds just before us, and over
a gate into the public highway, which we followed for
a dozen bounds, and then, with a pace slightly moderated,
we successively cleared a low wall and brought
up, on our horses' haunches, in the midst of an uproar
of dogs, cows, and scattering poultry—the fox having
been run down at last in the enclosure of a barn. I
had just strength to extricate my feet from the stirrups,
take Lady Caroline's cap, which had kept its place
between my elbows and knees, and present it to her
as she sat in her saddle, and my legs gave way under
me. I was taken into the farmhouse, and, at the close
of a temporary ellipse, I was sent back to Tresethen
Castle in a post-chaise, and once more handed over to
the doctor!
Well, my third siege of illness was more tolerable,
for I received daily, now, some message of inquiry or
some token of interest from Lady Caroline, though I
learned from the countess that she was in sad disgrace
for her inveiglement of my trusting innocence. I also
received the cards of the members of the hunt, with
many inquiries complimentary to what they were
pleased to consider American horsemanship, and I
found that my seizure of the flying cap of Lady Caroline
and presentation of it to her ladyship at “the
death,” was thought to be worthy, in chivalry of
Bayard, and in dexterity of Ducrow. Indeed, when
let out again to the convalescent walk in the conservatory,
I found that I was counted a hero even by the
stately earl. There slipped a compliment, too, here
and there, through the matronly disapprobation of
Lady Tresethen—and all this was too pleasant to put
aside with a disclaimer—so I bid truth and modesty
hold their peace, and took the honor the gods chose
to provide!
But now came dangers more perilous than my ride
on Curtal. Lady Caroline was called upon to be kind
to me! Daily as the old servant left me in the alley
of japonicas, she appeared from the glass door of her
mother's boudoir and devoted herself to my comfort—
walking with me, while I could walk, in those fragrant
and balmy avenues of flowers, and then bringing me
into her mother's luxurious apartment, where books,
and music, and conversation as frank and untrammelled
as man in love could ask, wiled away the day. Wiled
it away?—winged it—shod it with velvet and silence,
for I never knew how it passed! Lady Caroline had
a mind of the superiority stamped so consciously on
her lip. She anticipated no consequences from her
kindness, therefore she was playful and unembarrassed.
She sang to me, and I read to her. Her rides were
given up, and Saladin daily went past the window to
his exercise, and with my most zealous scrutiny I
could detect in her face neither impatience of confinement
nor regret at the loss of weather fitter for
pleasures out of doors. Spite of every caution with
which hope could be chained down, I was flattered.
You smile—(Tom said, though he was looking
straight into the water, and had not seen my face for
half an hour)—but, without the remotest hope of
taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming
English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Tresethen,
I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover's
attitude—impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms,
encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of amatory
anxiety. I was in love—and who reasons in love?
One morning, after I had become an honorary
patient—an invalid only by sufferance—and was slowly
admitting the unwelcome conviction that it was
time for me to be shaping my adieux—the conversation
took rather a philosophical turn. The starting
point was a quotation in a magazine from Richter:
“Is not a man's universe within his head, whether a
king's diadem or a torn scullcap be without?”—and I
had insisted rather strenuously on the levelling privilege
we enjoyed in the existence of a second world around
us—the world of revery and dream—wherein the tyranny,
and check, and the arbitrary distinctions of the
world of fact, were never felt—and where he, though
he might be a peasant, who had the consciousness in
his soul that he was a worthy object of love to a princess,
could fancy himself beloved and revel in imaginary
possession.
“Why,” said I, turning with a sudden flush of selfconfidence
to Lady Caroline, “Why should not the
passions of such a world, the loving and returning of
love in fancy, have the privilege of language? Why
should not matches be made, love confessed, vows exchanged,
and fidelity sworn, valid within the realm of
dream-land only? Why should I not say to you, for
example, I adore you, dear lady, and in my world of
thought you shall, if you so condescend, by my bride
and mistress; and why, if you responded to this and
listened to my vows of fancy, should your bridegroom
of the world of fact feel his rights invaded?”
“In fancy let it be then!” said,Lady Caroline, with
a blush and a covert smile, and she rang the bell for
luncheon.
Well, I still lingered a couple of days, and on the
last day of my stay at Tresethen, I became sufficiently
emboldened to take Lady Caroline's hand behind the
fountain of the conservatory, and to press it to my lips
with a daring wish that its warm pulses belonged to
the world of fancy.
She withdrew it very kindly, and (I thought) sadly,
and begged me to go to the boudoir and bring her a
volume of Byron that lay on her work-table.
I brought it, and she turned over the leaves a moment,
and, with her pencil, marked two lines and gave
me the book, bidding me an abrupt good morning.
I stood a few minutes with my heart beating and my
brain faint, but finally summoned courage to read:—
“I can not lose a world for thee—
But would not lose thee for the world!”
I left Tresethen the next morning, and —
“Hold on, Tom!” cried I—“there comes the boat
with our dinner from Valletta, and we'll have your
sorrows over our Burgundy.”
“Sorrows!” exclaimed Tom, “I was going to tell
you of the fun I had at her wedding!”
“Lord preserve us!”
“Bigamy—wasn't it?—after our little nuptials in
dream-land! She told her husband all about it at the
wedding breakfast, and his lordship (she married the
Marquis of —) begged to know the extent of my
prerogatives. I was sorry to confess that they did not
interfere very particularly with his!”
The moon shone like glorified and floating dew on
the bosom of the tranquil Pei-ho, and the heart of the
young poet Le-pih was like a cup running over with
wine. It was no abatement of his exulting fulness
that he was as yet the sole possessor of the secret of
his own genius. Conscious of exquisite susceptibility
to beauty, fragrance and music (the three graces of
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the Chinese), he was more intent upon enjoying his
gifts than upon the awakening of envy for their possession—
the latter being the second leaf in the book of
genius, and only turned over by the finger of satiety.
Thoughtless of the acquisition of fame as the youthful
poet may be, however, he is always ready to anticipate
its fruits, and Le-pih committed but the poet's
error, when, having the gem in his bosom which
could buy the favor of the world, he took the favor
for granted without producing the gem.
Kwonfootse had returned a conqueror, from the wars
with the Hwong-kin, and this night, on which the
moon shone so gloriously, was the hour of his triumph,
for the Emperor Tang had condescended to honor
with his presence, a gala given by the victorious general
at his gardens on the Pei-ho. Softened by his
exulting feelings (for though a brave soldier, he was
as haughty as Luykong the thunder-god, or Hwuyloo
the monarch of fire), the warlike mandarin threw open
his gardens on this joyful night, not only to those who
wore in their caps the gold ball significant of patrician
birth, but to all whose dress and mien warranted their
appearance in the presence of the emperor.
Like the realms of the blest shone the gardens of
Kwonfootse. Occupying the whole valley of the
Pei-ho, at a spot where it curved like the twisted
cavity of a shell, the sky seemed to shut in the grounds
like the cover of a vase, and the stars seemed but the
garden-lights overhead. From one edge of the vase
to the other—from hill-top to hill-top—extended a
broad avenue, a pagoda at either extremity glittering
with gold and scarlet, the sides flaming with colored
lamps and flaunting with gay streamers of barbarian
stuffs, and the moonlit river cutting it in the centre, the
whole vista, at the first glance, resembling a girdle of
precious stones with a fastening of opal. Off from
this central division radiated in all directions alleys of
camphor and cinnamon trees, lighted with amorous
dimness, and leading away to bowers upon the hill-side,
and from every quarter resounded music, and in
every nook was seen feasting and merriment.
In disguise, the emperor and imperial family mingled
in the crowd, and no one save the host and his daughters
knew what part of the gardens was honored with
their presence. There was, however, a retreat in the
grounds, sacred to the privileged few, and here, when
fatigued or desirous of refreshment, the royal personages
laid aside disguise and were surrounded with
the deferential honors of the court. It was so contrived
that the access was unobserved by the people,
and there was, therefore, no feeling of exclusion to
qualify the hilarity of the entertainment, Kwonfootse,
with all his pride, looking carefully to his popularity.
At the foot of each descent, upon the matted banks
of the river, floated gilded boats with lamps burning in
their prows, and gayly-dressed boatmen offering conveyance
across to all who required it; but there were
also, unobserved by the crowd, boats unlighted and
undecorated holding off from the shore, which, at a
sign given by the initiated, silently approached a marble
stair without the line of the blazing avenue, and taking
their freight on board, swiftly pulled up the moonlit
river, to a landing concealed by the shoulder of the hill.
No path led from the gardens hither, and from no point
of view could be overlooked the more brilliant scene
of imperial revel.
It was verging toward midnight when the unknown
poet, with brain floating in a celestial giddiness of delight,
stood on the brink of the gleaming river. The boats
plied to and fro with their freights of fair damsels and
gayly-dressed youths, the many-colored lamps throwing
a rainbow profusion of tints on the water, and
many a voice addressed him with merry invitation, for
Le-pih's beauty, so famous now in history, was of no
forbidding stateliness, and his motions, like his countenance,
were as frankly joyous as the gambols of a
young leopard. Not inclined to boisterous gayety at
the moment, Le-pih stepped between the lamp-bearing
trees of the avenue, and folding his arms in his silken
vest, stood gazing in revery on the dancing waters.
After a few moments, one of the dark boats on which
he had unconsciously fixed his gaze drew silently
toward him, and as the cushioned stern was brought
round to the bank, the boatman made a reverence to
his knees and sat waiting the poet's pleasure.
Like all men born to good fortune, Le-pih was
prompt to follow the first beckonings of adventure, and
asking no questions, he quietly embarked, and with a
quick dip of the oars the boat shot from the shore and
took the descending current. Almost in the next instant
she neared again to the curving and willow-fringed
margin of the stream, and lights glimmered through
the branches, and sweet, low music became audible,
and by rapid degrees, a scene burst on his eye, which
the first glimpse into the gate of paradise (a subsequent
agreeable surprise, let us presume) could scarcely have
exceeded.
Without an exchange of a syllable between the
boatman and his freight, the stern was set against a
carpeted stair at the edge of the river, and Le-pih disembarked
with a bound, and stood upon a spacious
area lying in a lap of the hill, the entire surface carpeted
smoothly with Persian stuffs, and dotted here and there
with striped tents piched with poles of silver. Garlands
of flowers hung in festoons against the brilliantcolored
cloths, and in the centre of each tent stood a
low tablet surrounded with couches and laden with
meats and wine. The guests, for whom this portion
of the entertainment was provided, were apparently
assembled at a spot farther on, from which proceeded
the delicious music heard by the poet in approaching;
and, first entering one of the abandoned tents for a
goblet of wine, Le-pih followed to the scene of attraction.
Under a canopy of gold cloth held by six bearers,
stood the imperial chair upon a raised platform—not
occupied, however, the august Tang reclining more at
his ease, a little out of the circle, upon cushions
canopied by the moonlight. Around upon the steps
of the platform and near by, were grouped the noble
ladies of the court and the royal princesses (Tang
living much in the female apartments and his daughters
numbering several score), and all, at the moment
of Le-pih's joining the assemblage, turning to observe
a damsel with a lute, to whose performance the low
sweet music of the band had been a prelude. The
first touch of the strings betrayed a trembling hand,
and the poet's sympathies were stirred, though from
her bent posture and her distant position he had not
yet seen the features of the player. As the tremulous
notes grew firmer, and the lute began to give out a
flowing harmony, Le-pih approached, and at the same
time, the listening groups of ladies began to whisper
and move away, and of those who remained, none
seemed to listen with pleasure except Kwonfootse and
the emperor. The latter, indeed, rivalled the intruding
bard in his interest, rolling over upon the cushions
and resting on the other imperial elbow in close attention.
Gaining confidence evidently from the neglect of
her auditory, or, as is natural to women, less afraid of
the judgment of the other sex, who were her only
listeners, the fair Taya (the youngest daughter of
Kwonfootse), now joined her voice to her instrument,
and sang with a sweetness that dropped like a plummet
to the soul of Le-pih. He fell to his knee upon
a heap of cushions and leaned eagerly forward. As
she became afterward one of his most passionate
themes, we are enabled to reconjure the features that
were presented to his admiring wonder. The envy
of the princesses was sufficient proof that Taya was of
rare beauty; she had that wonderful perfection of
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feature to which envy pays its bitterest tribute, which
is apologized for if not found in the poet's ideal, which
we thirst after in pictures and marble, of which loveliness
and expression are but lesser degrees—fainter
shadowings. She was adorably beautiful. The outer
corners of her long almond-shaped eyes, the dipping
crescent of her forehead, the pencil of her eyebrow
and the indented corners of her mouth—all these
turned downward; and this peculiarity which, in faces
of a less elevated character, indicates a temper morose
and repulsive, in Taya's expressed the very soul of
gentle and lofty melancholy. There was something
infantine about her mouth, the teeth were so small
and regular, and their dazzling whiteness, shining between
lips of the brilliant color of a cherry freshly
torn apart, was in startling contrast with the dark
lustre of her eyes. Le-pih's poetry makes constant
allusion to those small and snowy teeth, and the turned-down
corners of the lips and eyes of his incomparable
mistress.
Taya's song was a fragment of that celebrated
Chinese romance from which Moore has borrowed so
largely in his loves of the angels, and it chanced to
be particularly appropriate to her deserted position
(she was alone now with her three listeners), dwelling as
it did upon the loneliness of a disguised Peri, wandering
in exile upon earth. The lute fell from her hands
when she ceased, and while the emperor applauded,
and Kwonfootse looked on her with paternal pride,
Le-pih modestly advanced to the fallen instrument,
and with a low obeisance to the emperor and a hesitating
apology to Taya, struck a prelude in the same
air, and broke forth into an impulsive expression of
his feelings in verse. It would be quite impossible to
give a translation of this famous effusion with its
oriental load of imagery, but in modifying it to the
spirit of our language (giving little more than its thread
of thought), the reader may see glimpses of the material
from which the great Irish lyrist spun his woof
of sweet fable. Fixing his keen eyes upon the bright
lips just closed, Le-pih sang:—
“When first from heaven's immortal throngs
The earth-doomed angels downward came,
And mourning their enraptured songs,
Walked sadly in our mortal frame;
To those, whose lyres of loftier string
Had taught the myriad lips of heaven,
The song that they for ever sing,
A wondrous lyre, 'tis said, was given.
`And go,' the seraph warder said,
As from the diamond gates they flew,
`And wake the songs ye here have led
In earthly numbers, pure and new!
And yours shall be the hallowed power
To win the lost to heaven again,
And when earth's clouds shall darkest lower
Your lyre shall breathe its holiest strain!
Yet, chastened by this inward fire,
Your lot shall be to walk alone,
Save when, perchance, with echoing lyre,
You touch a spirit like your own;
And whatsoe'er the guise your wear,
To him, 'tis given to know you there.”'
The song over, Le-pih sat with his hands folded
across the instrument and his eyes cast down, and
Taya gazed on him with wondering looks, yet slowly,
and as if unconsciously, she took from her breast a
rose, and with a half-stolen glance at her father, threw
it upon the lute. But frowningly Kwonfootse rose
from his seat and approached the poet.
“Who are you?” he demanded angrily, as the bard
placed the rose reverently in his bosom.
“Le-pih!”
With another obeisance to the emperor, and a deeper
one to the fair Taya, he turned, after this concise answer,
upon his heel, lifting his cap to his head, which,
to the rage of Kwonfootse, bore not even the gold ball
of aristocracy.
“Bind him for the bastinado!” cried the infuriated
mandarin to the bearers of the canopy.
The six soldiers dropped their poles to the ground,
but the emperor's voice arrested them.
“He shall have no violence but from you, fair
Taya,” said the softened monarch; “call to him by
the name he has just pronounced, for I would hear
that lute again!”
“Le-pih! Le-pih!” cried instantly the musical
voice of the fair girl.
The poet turned and listened, incredulous of his
own ears.
“Le-pih! Le-pih!” she repeated, in a soft tone.
Half-hesitating, half-bounding, as if still scarce believing
he had heard aright, Le-pih flew to her feet,
and dropped to one knee upon the cushion before her,
his breast heaving and his eyes flashing with eager
wonder. Taya's courage was at an end, and she sat
with her eyes upon the ground.
“Give him the lute, Kwonfootse!” said the emperor,
swinging himself on the raised chair with an
abandonment of the imperial avoirdupois, which set
ringing violently the hundred bells suspended in the
golden fringes.
“Let not the crow venture again into the nest of
the eagle,” muttered the mandarin between his teeth
as he handed the instrument to the poet.
The sound of the bells brought in the women and
courtiers from every quarter of the privileged area,
and, preluding upon the strings to gather his scattered
scuses, while they were seating themselves around
him, Le-pih at last fixed his gaze upon the lips of
Taya, and commenced his song to an irregular harmony
well adapted to extempore verse. We have tried
in vain to put this celebrated song of compliment into
English stanzas. It commenced with a description
of Taya's beauty, and an enumeration of things she
resembled, dwelling most upon the blue lily, which
seems to have been Le-pih's favorite flower. The
burthen of the conclusion, however, is the new value
everything assumed in her presence. “Of the light
in this garden,” he says, “there is one beam worth all
the glory of the moon, for it sleeps on the eye of Taya.
Of the air about me there is one breath which my soul
drinks like wine—it is from the lips of Taya. Taya
looks on a flower, and that flower seems to me, with
its pure eye, to gaze after her for ever. Taya's jacket
of blue silk is my passion. If angels visit me in my
dreams, let them be dressed like Taya. I love the
broken spangle in her slipper better than the first star
of evening. Bring me, till I die, inner leaves from
the water-lily, since white and fragrant like them are
the teeth of Taya. Call me, should I sleep, when
rises the crescent moon, for the blue sky in its bend
curves like the drooped eye of Taya,” &c., &c.
“By the immortal Fo!” cried the emperor, raising
himself bolt upright in his chair, as the poet ceased,
“you shall be the bard of Tang! Those are my sentiments
better expressed! The lute, in your hands,
is my heart turned inside out! Lend me your gold
chain, Kwonfootse, and, Taya! come hither and put
it on his neck!”
Taya glided to the emperor, but Le-pih rose to his
feet, with a slight flush on his forehead, and stood
erect and motionless.
“Let it please your imperial majesty,” he said,
after a moment's pause, “to bestow upon me some
gift less binding than a chain.”
“Carbuncle of Budha! What would the youth have!”
exclaimed Tang in astonishment. “Is not the gold
chain of a mandarin good enough for his acceptance?”
“My poor song,” replied Le-pih, modestly casting
down his eyes, “is sufficiently repaid by your majesty's
praises. The chain of the mandarin would gall the
neck of the poet. Yet—if I might have a reward
more valuable—”
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“In Fo's name what is it?” said the embarrassed
emperor.
Kwonfootse laid his hand on his cimeter, and his
daughter blushed and trembled.
“The broken spangle on the slipper of Taya!” said
Le-pih, turning half indifferently away.
Loud laughed the ladies of the court, and Kwonfootse
walked from the bard with a look of contempt,
but the emperor read more truly the proud and delicate
spirit that dictated the reply; and in that moment
probably commenced the friendship with which, to the
end of his peaceful reign, Tang distinguished the most
gifted poet of his time.
The lovely daughter of the mandarin was not behind
the emperor in her interpretation of the character of
Le-pih, and as she stepped forward to put the detached
spangle into his hand, she bent on him a look full
of earnest curiosity and admiration.
“What others give me,” he murmured in a low
voice, pressing the worthless trifle to his lips, “makes
me their slave; but what Taya gives me is a link that
draws her to my bosom.”
Kwonfootse probably thought that Le-pih's audience
had lasted long enough, for at this moment the
sky seemed bursting into flame with a sudden tumult
of fireworks, and in the confusion that immediately
succeeded, the poet made his way unquestioned to
the bank of the river, and was reconveyed to the spot
of his first embarkation, in the same silent manner with
which he had approached the privileged area.
During the following month, Le-pih seemed much
in request at the imperial palace, but, to the surprise
of his friends, the keeping of “worshipful society”
was not followed by any change in his merry manners,
nor apparently by any improvement in his worldly
condition. His mother still sold mats in the public
market, and Le-pih still rode, every few days, to the
marsh, for his panniers of rushes, and to all comers,
among his old acquaintances, his lute and song were
as ready and gratuitous as ever.
All this time, however, the fair Taya was consuming
with a passionate melancholy which made startling
ravages in her health, and the proud mandarin, whose
affection for his children was equal to his pride, in vain
shut his eyes to the cause, and eat up his heart with
mortification. When the full moon came round again,
reminding him of the scenes the last moon had shone
upon, Kwonfootse seemed suddenly lightened of his
care, and his superb gardens on the Pei-ho were suddenly
alive with preparations for another festival. Kept
in close confinement, poor Taya fed on her sorrow,
indifferent to the rumors of marriage which could
concern only her sisters; and the other demoiselles
Kwonfootse tried in vain, with fluttering hearts, to pry
into their father's secret. A marriage it certainly was
to be, for the lanterns were painted of the color of
peach-blossoms—but whose marriage?
It was an intoxicating summer's morning, and the
sun was busy calling the dew back to heaven, and the
birds wild with entreating it to stay (so Le-pih describes
it), when down the narrow street in which the
poet's mother piled her vocation, there came a gay
procession of mounted servants with a led horse richly
caparisoned, in the centre. The one who rode before
held on his pommel a velvet cushion, and upon it lay
the cap of a noble, with its gold ball shining in the sun.
Out flew the neighbors as the clattering hoofs came
on, and roused by the cries and the barking of dogs,
forth came the mother of Le-pih, followed by the
poet himself, but leading his horse by the bridle, for
he had just thrown on his panniers, and was bound
out of the city to cut his bundle of rushes. The poet
gazed on the pageant with the amused curiosity of
others, wondering what it could mean, abroad at so
early an hour; but, holding back his sorry beast to
let the prancing horsemen have all the room they re
quired, he was startled by a reverential salute from
the bearer of the velvet cushion, who, drawing up his
followers in front of the poet's house, dismounted and
requested to speak with him in private.
Tying his horse to the door-post, Le-pih led the
way into the small room, where sat his mother braiding
her mats to a cheerful song of her son's making,
and here the messenger informed the bard, with much
circumstance and ceremony, that in consequence of
the pressing suit of Kwonfootse, the emperor had been
pleased to grant to the gifted Le-pih, the rank expressed
by the cap borne upon the velvet cushion, and
that as a noble of the celestial empire, he was now a
match for the incomparable Taya. Futhermore the
condescending Kwonfootse had secretly arranged the
ceremonial for the bridal, and Le-pih was commanded
to mount the led horse and come up with his cap and
gold ball to be made forthwith supremely happy.
An indefinable expression stole over the features of
the poet as he took up the cap, and placing it on his
head, stood gayly before his mother. The old dame
looked at him a moment, and the tears started to her
eyes. Instantly Le-pih plucked it off and flung it on
the waste heap at her side, throwing himself on his
knees before her in the same breath, and begging her
forgiveness for his silly jest.
“Take back your bauble to Kwonfootse!” he said,
rising proudly to his feet, “and tell him that the emperor,
to whom I know how to excuse myself, can
easily make a poet into a noble, but he can not make
a noble into a poet. The male bird does not borrow
its brighter plumage from its mate, and she who marries
Le-pih will braid rushes for his mother!”
Astonished, indeed, were the neighbors, who had
learned the errand of the messenger from his attendants
without, to see the crest-fallen man come forth again
with his cap and cushion. Astonished much more
were they, ere the gay cavalcade were well out of sight,
to see Le-pih appear with his merry countenance and
plebeian cap, and, mounting his old horse, trot briskly
away, sickle in hand, to the marshes. The day passed
in wondering and gossip, interrupted by the entrance
of one person to the house while the old dame was
gone with her mats to the market, but she returned
duly before sunset, and went in as usual to prepare
supper for her son.
The last beams of day were on the tops of the
pagodas when Le-pih returned, walking beside his
heavy-laden beast, and singing a merry song. He
threw off his rushes at the door and entered, but his
song was abruptly checked, for a female sat on a low
seat by his mother, stooping over a half-braided mat,
and the next moment, the blushing Taya lifted up her
brimming eyes and gazed at him with silent but pleading
love.
Now, at last, the proud merriment and self respecting
confidence of Le-pih were overcome. His eyes
grew flushed and his lips trembled without utterance.
With both his hands pressed on his beating heart, he
stood gazing on the lovely Taya.
“Ah!” cried the old dame, who sat with folded
hands and smiling face, looking on at a scene she did
not quite understand, though it gave her pleasure,
“Ah! this is a wife for my boy, sent from heaven!
No haughty mandarin's daughter she! no proud minx,
to fall in love with the son and despise the mother!
Let them keep their smart caps and gift-horses for
those who can be bought at such prices! My son is
a noble by the gift of his Maker—better than an emperor's
gold ball! Come to your supper, Le-pib!
Come, my sweet daughter!”
Taya placed her finger on her lip, and Le-pih
agreed that the moment was not yet come to enlighten
his mother as to the quality of her guest. She was
not long in ignorance, however, for before they could
seat themselves at table, there was a loud knocking at
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the door, and before the old dame could bless herself,
an officer entered and arrested the daughter of Kwonfootse
by name, and Le-pih and his mother at the
same time, and there was no dismissing the messenger
now. Off they marched, amid the silent consternation
and pity of the neighbors—not toward the palace
of justice, however, but to the palace of the emperor,
where his majesty, to save all chances of mistake,
chose to see the poet wedded, and sit, himself, at the
bridal feast. Tang had a romantic heart, fat and
voluptuous as he was, and the end of his favor to Le-pih
and Taya was the end of his life.
Fashion is arbitrary, we all know. What it was
that originally gave Sassafras street the right to despise
Pepperidge street, the oldest inhabitant of the
village of Slimford could not positively say. The
courthouse and jail were in Sassafras street; but the
orthodox church and female seminary were in Pepperidge
street. Two directors of the Slimford bank
lived in Sassafras street—two in Pepperidge street.
The Dyaper family lived in Sassafras street—the
Dimity family in Pepperidge street; and the fathers
of the Dyaper girls and the Dimity girls were worth
about the same money, and had both made it in the
lumber line. There was no difference to speak of in
their respective mode of living—none in the education
of the girls—none in the family gravestones or
church-pews. Yet, deny it who liked, the Dyapers
were the aristocracy of Slimford.
It may be a prejudice, but I am inclined to think
there is always something in a nose. (I am about to
mention a trifle, but trifles are the beginning of most
things, and I would account for the pride paramount
of the Dyapers, if it is any way possible.) The most
stylish of the Miss Dyapers—Harriet Dyaper—had a
nose like his grace the Duke of Wellington. Neither
her father nor mother had such a feature; but
there was a foreign umbrella in the family with exactly
the same shaped nose on the ivory handle. Old
Dyaper had once kept a tavern, and he had taken this
umbrella from a stranger for a night's lodging. But
that is neither here nor there. To the nose of Harriet
Dyaper, resistlessly and instinctively, the Dimity
girls had knocked under at school. There was authority
in it; for the American eagle had such a nose,
and the Duke of Wellington had such a nose; and
when, to these two warlike instances, was added the
nose of Harriet Dyaper, the tripod stood firm. Am
I visionary in believing that the authority introduced
into that village by a foreigner's umbrella (so unaccountable
is fate) gave the dynasty to the Dyapers?
I have mentioned but two families—one in each of
the two principal streets of Slimford. Having a little
story to tell. I can not afford to distract my narrative
with unnecessary “asides;” and I must not only
omit all description of the other Sassafrasers and
Pepperidgers, but I must leave to your imagination
several Miss Dyapers and several Miss Dimitys—Harriet
Dyaper and Meena Dimity being the two exclusive
objects of my hero's Sunday and evening attentions.
For eleven months in the year, the loves of the
ladies of Slimford were presided over by indigenous
Cupids. Brown Crash and the other boys of the village
had the Dyapers and the Dimitys for that respective
period to themselves. The remaining month,
when their sun of favor was eclipsed, was during the
falling of the leaf, when the “drummers” came up to
dun. The townish clerks of the drygoods merchants
were too much for the provincials. Brown Crash
knocked under and sulked, owing, as he said, to the
melancholy depression accompanying the fall of the
deciduous vegetation. But I have not yet introduced
you to my hero.
Brown Crash was the Slimford stage-agent. He
was the son of a retired watch-maker, and had been
laughed at in his boyhood for what they called his
“airs.” He loved, even as a lad, to be at the tavern
when the stage came in, and help out the ladies.
With instinctive leisureliness he pulled off his cap
as soon after the “whoa-hup” as was necessary (and
no sooner), and asked the ladies if they would “alight
and take dinner,” with a seductive smile which began,
as the landlord said, “to pay.” Hence his promotion.
At sixteen he was nominated stage-agent, and thenceforward
was the most conspicuous man in the village;
for “man” he was, if speech and gait go for anything.
But we must minister a moment to the reader's
inner sense; for we do not write altogether for Slimford
comprehension. Brown Crash had something
in his composition “above the vulgar.” If men's
qualities were mixed like salads, and I were giving a
“recipe for Brown Crashes,” in Mrs. Glass's style, I
should say his two principal ingredients were a dictionary
and a dunghill cock—for his language was as
ornate as his style of ambulation was deliberate
and imposing. What Brown Crash would have been,
born Right Honorable, I leave (with the smaller Dyapers
and Dimitys) to the reader's fancy. My object
is to show what he was, minus patrician nurture and
valuation. Words, with Brown Crash, were susceptible
of being dirtied by use. He liked a clean towel—
he preferred an unused phrase. But here stopped
his peculiarities. Below the epidermis he was like
other men, subject to like tastes and passions. And
if he expressed his loves and hates with grandiloquent
imagery, they were the honest loves and hates of a
week-day world—no finer nor flimsier for their bedecked
plumage.
To use his own phrase, Brown frequented but two
ladies in Slimford—Miss Harriet Dyaper and Miss
Meena Dimity. The first we have described in
describing her nose, for her remainder was comparatively
inconsiderable. The latter was “a love,” and
of course had nothing peculiar about her. She was
a lamp—nothing till lighted. She was a mantle—
nothing, except as worn by the owner. She was a
mirror—blank and unconscious till something came
to be reflected. She was anything, loved—unloved,
nothing! And this (it is our opinion after half a
life) is the most delicious and adorable variety of
woman that has been spared to us from the museum
of specimen angels. (A remark of Brown Crash's,
by the way, of which he may as well have the credit.)
Now Mr. Crash had an ambitious weakness for the
best society, and he liked to appear intimate with the
Dyapers. But in Meena Dimity there was a secret
charm which made him wish she was an ever-to-behanded-out
lady-stage-passenger. He could have
given her a hand and brought in her umbrella and
bandbox, all day long. In his hours of pride he
thought of the Dyapers—in his hours of affection of
Meena Dimity. But the Dyapers looked down upon
the Dimitys; and to play his card delicately between
Harriet and Meena, took all the diplomacy of Brown
Crash. The unconscious Meena would walk up
Sassafras street when she had his arm, and the scornful
Harriet would be there with her nose over the
front gate to sneer at them. He managed as well as
he could. He went on light evenings to the Dyapers—
on dark evenings to the Dimitys. He took
town-walks with the Dyapers—country-walks with
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the Dimitys. But his acquaintance with the Dyapers
hung by the eyelids. Harriet liked him: for he was
the only beau in Slimford whose manners were not
belittled beside her nose. But her acquaintance with
him was a condescension, and he well knew that he
could not “hold her by the nose” if she were offended.
Oh no! Though their respective progenitors
were of no very unequal rank—though a horologist
and a “boss lumberman” might abstractly be equals—
the Dyapers had the power! Yes—they could lift
him to themselves, or dash him down to the Dimitys;
and all Slimford would agree in the latter case that
he was a “slab” and a “small potato!”
But a change came o'er the spirit of Brown Crash's
dream! The drummers were lording it in Slimford,
and Brown, reduced to Meena Dimity (for he was too
proud to play second fiddle to a town dandy), was
walking with her on a dark night past the Dyapers.
The Dyapers were hanging over the gate unluckily,
and their Pearl-street admirers sitting on the top rail
of the fence.
“Who is it?” said a strange voice.
The reply, sent upward from a scornfully prejecting
under lip, rebounded in echoes from the tense
nose of Miss Dyaper.
“A Mr. Crash, and a girl from the back street!”
It was enough. A hot spot on his cheek, a warm
rim round his eyes, a pimply pricking in his skin,
and it was all over! His vow was made. He coldly
bid Meena good night at her father's door, and went
home and counted his money. And from that hour,
without regard to sex, he secretly accepted shillings
from gratified travellers, and “stood treat” no more.
Saratoga was crowded with the dispersed nuclei of
the metropolises. Fashion, wealth, and beauty, were
there. Brown Crash was there, on his return from a
tour to Niagara and the lakes.
“Brown Crash, Esq.,” was one of the notabilities
of Congress Hall. Here and there a dandy “could
not quite make him out;” but there was evidently
something uncommon about him. The ladies thought
him “of the old school of politeness,” and the politicians
thought he had the air of one used to influence
in his county. His language was certainly very
choice and peculiar, and his gait was conscious dignity
itself. He must have been carefully educated;
yet his manners were popular, and he was particularly
courteous on a first introduction. The elegance and
ease with which he helped the ladies out of their
carriages were particularly remarked, and a shrewd
observer said of him, that “that point of high breeding
was only acquired by daily habit. He must have
been brought up where there were carriages and ladies.”
A member of congress, who expected to run
for governor, inquired his county, and took wine
with him. His name was mentioned by the letterwriters
from the springs. Brown Crash was in his
perihelion!
The season leaned to its close, and the following
paragraph appeared in the New York American:—
“Fashionable Intelligence.—The company at the
Springs is breaking up. We understand that the
Vice-President and Brown Crash, Esq., have already
left for their respective residences. The latter gentleman,
it is understood, has formed a matrimonial
engagement with a family of wealth and distinction
from the south. We trust that these interesting
bonds, binding together the leading families of the
far-divided extremities of our country, may tend to
strengthen the tenacity of the great American Union!”
It was not surprising that the class in Slimford who
knew everything—the milliners, to-wit—moralized
somewhat bitterly on Mr. Crash's devotion to the
Dyapers after his return, and his consequent slight to
Meena Dimity. “If that was the effect of fashion
and distinction on the heart, Mr. Crash was welcome
to his honors! Let him marry Miss Dyaper, and
they wished him much joy of her nose; but they
would never believe that he had not ruthlessly broken
the heart of Meena Dimity, and he ought to be
ashamed of himself, if there was any shame in such
a dandy.”
But the milliners, though powerful people in their
way, could little affect the momentum of Brown
Crash's glories. The paragraph from the “American”
had been copied into the “Slimford Advertiser,”
and the eyes of Sassafras street and Pepperidge street
were alike opened. They had undervalued their indigenous
“prophet.” They had misinterpreted and
misread the stamp of his superiority. He had been
obliged to go from them to be recognised. But he
was returned. He was there to have reparation
made—justice done. And now, what office would he
like, from Assessor to Pathmaster, and would he be
good enough to name it before the next town-meeting.
Brown Crash was king of Slimford!
And Harriet Dyaper! The scorn from her lip had
gone, like the blue from a radish! Notes for “B.
Crash,Esq.,” showered from Sassafras street—bouquets
from old Dyaper's front yard glided to him, per black
boy—no end to the endearing attentions, undisguised
and unequivocal. Brown Crash and Harriet Dyaper
were engaged, if having the front parlor entirely given
up to them of an evening meant anything—if his
being expected every night to tea meant anything—
if his devoted (though she thought rather cold) attentions
meant anything.
They did n't mean anything! They all did n't
mean anything! What does the orthodox minister
do, the third Sunday after Brown Crash's return, but
read the banns of matrimony between that faithless
man and Meena Dimity!
But this was not to be endured. Harriet Dyaper
had a cousin who was a “strapper.” He was boss of
a sawmill in the next county, and he must be sent for.
He was sent for.
The fight was over. Boss Dyaper had undertaken
to flog Brown Crash, but it was a drawn battle—for
the combatants had been pulled apart by their coattails.
They stepped into the barroom and stood recovering
their breath. The people of Slimford
crowded in, and wanted to have the matter talked
over. Boss Dyaper bolted out his grievance.
“Gentlemen!” said Brown Crash, with one of his
irresistible come-to-dinner smiles, “I am culpable,
perhaps, in the minutiæ of this business—justifiable,
I trust you will say, in the general scope and tendency.
You, all of you, probably, had mothers, and some of
you have wives and sisters; and your `silver cord'
naturally sympathizes with a worsted woman. But,
gentlemen, you are republicans! You, all of you,
are the rulers of a country very large indeed; and
you are not limited in your views to one woman, nor
to a thousand women—to one mile, nor to a thousand
miles. You generalize! you go for magnificent principles,
gentlemen! You scorn high-and-mightiness,
and supercilious aristocracy!”
“Hurra for Mr. Crash!” cried a stagedriver from
the outside.
“Well, gentleman! In what I have done, I have
deserved well of a republican country! True—it has
been my misfortune to roll my Juggernaut of principle
over the sensibilities of that gentleman's respectable
female relative. But, gentlemen, she offended,
remedilessly and grossly, one of the sovereign
people! She scorned one of earth's fairest daughters,
who lives in a back street! Gentlemen, you know
that pride tripped up Lucifer! Shall a tiptop angel fall
for it, and a young woman who is nothing particular
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be left scornfully standing? Shall Miss Dyaper have
more privileges than Lucifer? I appreciate your indignant
negative!
“But, gentlemen, I am free to confess, I had also
my republican private end. You know my early history.
You have witnessed my struggles to be respected
by my honorable contemporaries. If it be my
weakness to be sensitive to the finger of scorn, be it
so. You will know how to pardon me. But I will
be brief. At a particular crisis of my acquaintance
with Miss Dyaper, I found it expedient to transfer my
untrammelled tendernesses to Pepperidge street. My
heart had long been in Pepperidge street. But,
gentlemen, to have done it without removing from
before my eyes the contumelious finger of the scorn
of Sassafras street, was beyond my capabilities of endurance.
In justice to my present `future,' gentlemen,
I felt that I must remove `sour grapes' from my
escutcheon—that I must soar to a point, whence,
swooping proudly to Meena Dimity, I should pass
the Dyapers in descending!
(Cheers and murmurs.)
“Gentlemen and friends! This world is all a fleeting
show. The bell has rung, and I keep you from
your suppers. Briefly. I found the means to travel
and test the ring of my metal among unprejudiced
strangers. I wished to achieve distinction and return
to my birthplace; but for what? Do me justice,
gentlemen. Not to lord it in Sassafras street. Not
to carry off a Dyaper with triumphant elation!
Not to pounce on your aristocratic No. 1, and
link my destiny with the disdainful Dyapers! No!
But to choose where I liked, and have the credit
of liking it! To have Slimford believe that if I
preferred their No. 2, it was because I liked it better
than No. 1. Gentlemen, I am a republican! I
may find my congenial spirit among the wealthy—I
may find it among the humble. But I want the liberty
to choose. And I have achieved it, I trust you
will permit me to say. Having been honored by the
dignitaries of a metropolis—having consorted with a
candidate for gubernatorial distinction—having been
recorded in a public journal as a companion of the
Vice-President of this free and happy country—you
will believe me when I declare that I prefer Pepperidge
street to Sassafras—you will credit my sincerity,
when, having been approved by the Dyapers' betters,
I give them the go-by for the Dimitys! Gentlemen,
I have done.”
The reader will not be surprised to learn that Mr.
Brown Crash is now a prominent member of the
legislature, and an excessive aristocrat—Pepperidge
street and very democratic speeches to the contrary
notwithstanding.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 1806-1867 [1845], Dashes at life with a free pencil (Burgess, Stringer & Co., New York) [word count] [eaf417].
