Mr. Waddy's Return

BY THEODORE WINTHROP
Author of “Cecil Dreeme,” etc.
EDITED BY BURTON E. STEVENSON
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1904
Copyright, 1904 By HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published October, 1904 THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.
The author did not live to revise the original draft of “Mr. Waddy’s Return,” and therefore, when his other novels were published, shortly after his death, this one was not included. On looking it over again, after the lapse of years, it seemed to his sister, Miss Elizabeth W. Winthrop, too good to let die; and it was placed in the hands of Mr. Stevenson to give it such revision and condensation as it may be presumed that the author, had he lived, would have given it himself.


MR. WADDY’S RETURN
NAMES must act upon character. Every preceding Waddy, save one short-lived Ira, from the first ancestor, the primal Waddy, cook of the Mayflower , had been a type of placid meekness, of mild, humble endurance. During all Boston’s material changes, from a petty colony under Winthrop to a great city under General Jackson, and all its spiritual changes from Puritanism to Unitarianism, Boston divines had pointed to the representative Waddy of their epoch as the worthy successor of Moses upon earth—Moses the meekest man, not Moses the stalwart smiter of rocks and irate iconoclast of golden calves.
Why, then, was Ira Waddy, with whom this tale is to concern itself, other than his race? Why had he revolutionised the family history? Why was he a captor, not a captive of Fate? Why was the Waddy name no longer hid from the world in the unfragrant imprisonment and musty gloom of a blind court in Boston, but known and seen and heard of all men, wherever tea-chests and clipper-ships are found, or fire-crackers do pop? Why was Ira Waddy, in all senses, the wholesale man, while every other Waddy had been retail? Brief questions—to be answered not so briefly in this history of his Return.
Yes, the Waddy fortunes had altered. To the small shop, the only patrimony of the Waddy family, went little vulgar boys in days of Salem witchcraft, in days of Dorchester sieges, and after when the Fourth of July began to noise itself abroad as a festival of the largest liberty: on all great festal days when parents and uncles rattled with candy money, and coppers were certain, and on all individual festal days when the unlooked-for copper came, then went brats, Whig and Tory, Federal and Democrat, to the Waddys’ shop and bullied largely there. Not only the representative Mr. Waddy did they bully and bargain into pecuniary bewilderment and total loss of profit, but also the representative Mrs. Waddy, a feeble, scrawny dame, whose courage died when she put the fateful question to the representative Mr. Waddy, otherwise never her spouse.