V.
On the terrace of the Capitol, while all this was occurring, a gaunt, gigantic, aged figure might have been seen, looking away into the city basking in the plain at his feet, with almost the bitterness of prophecy. He carried an old worn carpet-bag, and a railroad ticket appeared in his hat-band. It was Jabel Blake, shaking the dust of the capital city from his feet!
To him the soft and purple panorama brought no emotions, as pride of country or æsthetic associations; and even the bracing savor of the gale upon the eminence seemed laden, to his hard regard, with the corruptions and excesses of a debauched government and a rank society. The river, to him, was but the fair sewer to this sculptured sepulchre. The lambent amphitheatre of the inclosing ridges was like the wall of a jail which he longed to cross and return no more. He saw the dark granite form of the Treasury Department, and groaned like one whose heart was broken there. The bank of Ross Valley was never to be!
Jabel thought in one instant of the inquiries which should be addressed to him on his return, the prying curiosity of the hamlet, the strictures of his neighbors and laborers, the exultation of his enemies, the lost chance of his cherished village to become the mart of its locality and dispense from its exchequer enterprise and aid to farms and mines and mills.
"The good God may make it up to my children some day," he said; "but the bank is never to be in the life of old Jabel Blake!"
So Jabel went home and met with all obtuseness the flying rumors of the country. His worst enemies said that he had fallen from grace while in Washington, and "bucked" with all his bonds against a faro bank. His best friends obtained no explanation of his losses. He kept his counsel, grew even sterner and thriftier than he had ever been, and only at the Presbyterian church, where he prayed in public frequently at the evening meetings, were glimpses afforded of his recollections of Washington by the resonant appeals he made that the money-changers might be lashed out of the temples there, and desolation wrought upon them that sold doves.
There was no bank at Ross Valley, but people began to say that old Jabel Blake had particles of gold in the flinty composition of his life, and that his trip to Washington had made him gentler and wider in his charities. He was attentive to young children. He encouraged young lovers. He lifted many errant people to their feet, and started them on their way to a braver life of sacrifice. And fortune smiled upon him as never before. His mills went day and night, stopping never except on Sabbaths. The ground seemed to give forth iron and lime wherever he dug tor it. The town became the thriftiest settlement in the Allegheny valleys, and Jabel Blake was the earliest riser and the hardest delver in the State.
It happened at the end of two years that rheumatism and an overstrained old age brought Jabel Blake to bed, and a flood, passing down the valley, aroused him, despite advice, to his old indomitable leadership against its ravages. He returned to his rest never to arise; for now a fever laid hold upon the old captain, and he talked in his delirium of Judge Dunlevy and his bank, and he was attended all the while by Arthur MacNair.
One night, in a little spell of relief, Jabel Blake opened his eyes and said,
"Arty, I dreamed old Jabel Blake was in heaven, and that he had founded a bank there!"
"Jabel," said the young Congressman, "you must have some treasure laid up there, old friend. And not only in heaven, but in this world also. Look on this happy family redeemed by your sacrifice!"
Jabel Blake opened his eyes wider, and they fell upon Judge Dunlevy.
"This is a great honor," he said; "Ross Valley brings her great citizen back."
"No!" cried the Judge, "it is you, Jabel, who have brought us all to your bedside to do ourselves honor. Here are Elk MacNair and my daughter, who owe all their fortune to your fatherly kindness, and who have come to repay you the uttermost farthing. Providence has appreciated your sacrifice. They bring for your blessing, my grandson, and the name they have given him is Jabel Blake."
"Jabel," said General MacNair, "take with our full hearts this money. It has been honestly earned with the capital of your bank. We return it that you may fulfil the dream of your life!"
Jabel Blake took the money, and a smile overspread his face. His hard lineaments were soft and fatherly now, and their tears attested how well he was esteemed. He drew Elk MacNair's ear to his lips, and said feebly, and with his latest articulate breath,
"General, you owe me two years' interest!"
They laid Jabel Blake away by his fathers, and on the day of the funeral Ross Valley was crowded like a shrine.
POTOMAC RIVER.
Brave river in the mountains bred,
And broadening on thy way,
So stately that thy stretches seem
The bosom of the bay!
Thy growth is like the nation's life,
Through which thy current flows—
Already past the cataracts
And widening to repose.
Thy springs are at the Fairfax stone,
Thy great arms northward course,
They join and break the mountain bars
With ever rallying force;
But in thy nature is such peace,
The beaten mountains yield,
And lie their riven battlements
Within thy silver shield.
Through battle-fields thy runnels wind,
In fame thy ferries shine;
Thy ripples lave the ancient stones
On Freedom's boundary line;
Where every slave the border crossed,
A living host repass'd,
And of the sentries of thy fords,
John Brown shall be the last!
Yet, O Potomac! of thy peace
Somewhat let faction feel,
And Northern Pilgrims patient hear
Of Mosby and MacNeill.
The long trees bloom where Stuart cross'd,
And weep where Ashby bled,
And every echo in thy hills
Seems Stonewall Jackson's tread.
The love we bore in other days
No difference can bar,
And truce was kept at Vernon's grave
However rolled the war.
Like thee, oh river! human states
By many a rapid rage,
Before they reach the deeper tides
And glass the perfect age.
Brief is the span since Calvert's huts
Were still the Indian's sport,
And Braddock's columns stumbled on
The borderer Cresap's fort,
Till now the tinted hills grow fond
Around yon marble height,
Where Freedom calmly rules a realm
That tires her eagle's flight.
And still the wild deer sip thy springs,
The wild duck haunt thy coves,
And all the year the fisher fleets
Bask o'er thine oyster groves;
The strange new bass thy trout pursue.
And where the herring spawn,
The blue sky opens to let through
Thine own majestic swan.
Haste, Nature! Raze yon shiftless halls,
Where pride penurious bides,
The while the richness of the hills
Runs off to choke the tides;
Where every negro cabin stood
A freeman's hearthside warm,
And broad estates of bramble wood
Expunge in many a farm!
Fill and revive these fair arcades,
O race to Freedom born!
The tinkling herds that roam the glades,
The barge's mellow horn,
The lonesome sails that come and go
Repeat the wish again:
The ardent river yearns to know
Not memories, but Men!
TELL-TALE FEET.
The din of the day is quiet now, and the street is deserted. The last bacchanal reeled homeward an hour ago. The most belated cabman has passed out of hearing. The one poor wretch who comes nightly to the water-side has closed her complaint; I saw her shawl float over the parapet as she flung her lean arms against the sky and went down with a scream. Here, in the busiest spot of the mightiest city, there is no human creature abroad; but footsteps are yet ringing on the desolateness. They are heard only by me. There are two of them; the first light, timorous, musical; the other harsh and heavy, as if shod with steel. I recognize them with a thrill; for they have haunted me many years, and they are speaking to me now. The one is soothing and pleading, and it implores me to write; but the second is like the striking of a revengeful knell. "Confession and Pardon," says the one; "Horror and Remorse," echoes the other. They tinkle and toll thus every midnight, when my hour of penance arrives and I have tried to register my story. It is almost finished now. Let me read the pages softly to myself:
"My life has been a long career of suffering. The elements, whose changes and combinations contribute to the pleasure of my species, have arrayed themselves against me. I am fashioned so delicately that the every-day bustle of the world provokes exquisite and incessant pain. Embodied like my fellows, my nerves are yet sensitive beyond girlishness, and my organs of sight, smell, and hearing are marvellously acute. The inodorous elements are painfully odorous to me. I can hear the subtlest processes in nature, and the densest darkness is radiant with mysterious lights. My childhood was a protracted horror, and the noises of a great city in which I lived shattered and well-nigh crazed me. In the dead calms I shuddered at the howling of winds. I fancied that I could detect the gliding revolution of the earth, and hear the march of the moon in her attendant orbit.
"My parents loved me tenderly, and, failing to soothe or conciliate me, they removed from the busy city to a secluded villa in the suburbs. Those labors which necessitated abrupt or prolonged sound were performed outside our grounds. The domestics were enjoined to conduct their operations with the utmost quietude. Carriages never came to the threshold, but stopped at the lodge; the drives were strewn with bark to drown the rattle of wheels; familiar fowls and beasts were excluded; the pines were cut down, though they had moaned for half a century; the angles of the house were rounded, that the wind might not scream and sigh of midnight, and the flapping of a shutter would have warranted the dismissal of the servants. Thick carpets covered the floors. My apartments lay in a remote wing, and were surrounded with double walls, filled with wool, to deaden communication. Goodly books were provided, but none which could arouse fears or passions. Fiery romances were prohibited, and histories of turmoil and war, with theology and its mournful revelations, and medicine, which revived the bitter story of my organism. My library was stocked with dreamy and diverting compositions—old Walton, the pensive angler; the vagaries of ancient Burton, and the placid essayists of the Addisonian day. Of poets I had Cowper and Wordsworth, who loved quiet life and were the chroniclers of domestic men and manners. Pictures of shadowy studios and calm lakes, unfrequented coverts and sleepy wayside inns, covered my wall. The tints of tapestry, panel, and furniture were subdued, and the sunshine which mellowed a stained window was softened by an ingenious arrangement of shades and refractors. Art opposed her quaintest contrivances against the intense and violent moods of Nature, and my retirement was secure from the inroads of all except my careful guardians.
"But I was still unhappy, and the prey of vivid fancies. This privacy suggested the great world without, where men were wrestling with dangers. I imagined ships upon stormy seas, and whirlwinds around mountain-homes; the chaos of cities, the rout of armies, dim arctic solitudes, where the icebergs tumbled apart and the frozen seas split asunder. They had banished painful occurrences, but the sensitive organism could not be destroyed, and I bore up until almost insane, struggling to be cheerful when stunned and dazzled. At last, when my mother stole into my room one day—it was October, I think, for I could hear the tiniest leaves dropping to the grass far below—I laid my head wearily in her lap and covered my ears with my hands. My eyes were filled with tears.
"'My dear mother, I cannot bear this life. I suffer as of old, though there be not a mote across the sun nor a breath in the air. If my mind could be led from these consciousnesses, I might be calm.'
"'Luke,' said my mother, 'you need a companion.'
"The thought was a new one, and so thrilled me.
"'No, mother,' I replied; 'strong, healthy beings could not exist thus cloistered.'
"'For less than money,' she responded, 'they have done more.'
"'We should not agree,' I said; 'I would be peevish and he would despise me.'
"'Your companion must be a woman, my son.'
"A succession of short chills passed through every nerve, and a moment's faintness possessed me.
"'It must not be,' I pleaded; 'a restless, chatting, plotting woman would be worse than all.'
"My mother marked my rising agitation and glided away.
"'Whatever can relieve you, dear Luke,' she said, 'your father shall obtain.'
"I now fancied that they believed me mad, and that a keeper was to be introduced to me, under the guise of a companion. I formed many mental portraits of this fierce person, and they kept me awake through the long watches. I even meditated escape, and unclosed my casement with that design, but the sunlight, the bird songs, and the zephyrs rushed into my window and staggered me like so many sentinels. One day I slept fitfully, and dreamed that I was poor and orphaned, with the alternatives of death or work before me. I had wandered to a village and thrown myself beneath some elms, with a horrible despair sealing my eyelids. Suddenly the grass was stirred by some human footfalls, and two soft voices were speaking close beside me.
"'It is strange,' said the first voice; 'he is pale and delicate, but with no evidences of heavier afflictions.'
"'You do not know him,' murmured the other; 'wait and see!'
"A face bent down to mine, and the lips of a woman touched my cheek. I started in my sleep, caught my breath gaspingly, and quivered like an aspen.
"'This is indeed terrible,' said the soft voice compassionately; 'but do not despair. It cannot be nature. It must be habit, or bashfulness, or the effect of some childish and forgotten fright. Cheer up, and hope!"
"'Be kind to him, Heraine,' resumed the other; 'you are my last resort, and becoming his companion you become my child. Do not vex, do not excite him. Be yourself—always calm, gentle, and affectionate—and the kindness which you show my boy may God return to you in mercy and blessing!'
"I unclosed my eyes; the scene was resolved to my quiet library. Something glided through the door, but a form from the other side flung a shadow across my face. A premonition of the keeper thrilled me a moment, but I turned slowly at length and looked into the intruder's face.
"A woman, or rather a girl with a woman's face, serene and placid, as if never ruffled by care or passion, sat between me and the window, and the gloomy light softened her calm countenance. As I looked up her lashes fell, and her blue eyes were bent fixedly upon the floor. She seemed like one of my sedate portraits, which had come down from its case. She waited, apparently, for some sign of recognition, or until my surprise should have passed away, and did not move while I ran her over with keen curiosity. She was, probably, of my own age, though her self-possession might have stamped her as much older; but the bloom of her cheek and her bosom just ripening were indices of a girl's year's. She raised her eyes at length and bade me good afternoon in a voice which reminded me of the faintest lullaby. The quiet tone was seconded by an assuring glance, and directly we were conversing without restraint, as if friends of years rather than acquaintances of an hour.
"Heraine was the impersonation of composure. The neutral tint of dress corresponded with the smooth tresses of her brown hair. Her touch was magnetic, and petulancy vanished at her smile as at a charm. Her intelligence was, doubtless, the secret of her power. She divined my moods without inquiry, and cheered them without effort. She led me out of the unhealthy atmosphere engendered by my sensitiveness, and I sometimes forgot my disability for hours. She was as good as she was capable, and as amiable as she was resolute. We fraternized immediately, and I felt all the newness of a regenerated life. My temperament was fitful as of yore, but the gloomy spectres vanished; and my attention being weaned from the slighter occurrences of nature, I was no longer racked by their tremors and jars. The soft face of Heraine seemed to hush all chaos, and when she smiled I thought that the very earth had ceased to roll. When her large liquid eyes were fully opened upon me, I seemed to be looking into the hungry blue of the sky, and carried aloft by the look beyond the influence of matter. For the moment my nerves grew numb, the compass of my senses narrowed to her wondrous face, and the fetters which bound me to it were forged of gold.
"The months went by like the stars, which wheel eternally, but seem motionless as we watch them. Sometimes we read aloud, but our voices were low and lulling, as if quieter than silence. Then we talked of my calm paintings, shadowing deeper lonelinesses in them. But it was my highest rapture to sit in stillness for hours while Heraine, cushioned at my feet, made cunning embroideries, like some facile poet whose fingers were dropping rhymes.
"I remarked that our conversations were progressive. My companion led me gradually into forbidden themes, as if to strengthen and embolden me. We went forth, in fancy, from our shadowy chamber, through deep groves, into twilights, beneath soft skies, even into the glare of the sun, and, at last, among the storms and the seas. I may have quivered, but I was not shocked; for the wrack and roar of the universe were drowned in the quietness of her voice. Then we walked abroad a little way, and, though pained, I endured; for she did not abuse these successes. She had travelled in far countries, and often read me friendly letters which attested how well the world esteemed her. Sometimes her acquaintances came to the house, but never to my room; and once or twice she was absent a whole day, when my nervousness returned. There was one correspondent whose missives were never read to me—a fine, bold hand, which at length became familiar. Their receipt pleased her, I thought, and once I ventured to say,
"'Heraine, you have a pleasant letter there.'
"She only blushed very much, and all her quietness was gone for a moment.
"As the months expanded into years, a new feeling engendered from our intimacy. I did not comprehend it at first. It crept upon me like the unfolding of a new sense, or the gradual realizing of the earliest profound thought. An unexpected event gave it recognition.
"The boldly-indorsed letters came twice a month at first, afterward four times, and finally twice, thrice, and even five times a week. Heraine was quick and flushed. She passed but two or three hours daily in my apartment, and substituted for the embroidery a dress of such bright hues that it dazzled my eyes. One day she took her accustomed seat, with a face subdued to sadness and an irresolute manner.
"'Luke,' she said, after a long pause, 'we have passed many days pleasantly together?'
"She did not wait for me to speak, though I thrilled and turned deadly white.
"'And because so pleasantly, I contemplate my farewell with regret.'
"'Your farewell, Heraine?'
"'Yes,' she said firmly; 'to-day—this afternoon—this hour—I bid adieu to Glengoyle!'
"I fell forward in my seat, forcing down my heart, which sobbed and swelled, and the whole world rang, flared, and burst into violence. If the seas had opened their fountains and the crust of the globe crushed up, there would have been no greater chaos. But in my faintness and agony I caught the blue eye which had soothed and melted me so often, and, clasping my hands, I fell at her knees and said,
"'Heraine, I love you!'
"It was her time to tremble now, and I interpreted the pallor of her cheek as a signal of hope.
"'I know that I love you,' I said; 'if the earth and the stars were to be blotted out, and you remain, I should not miss them. You are my universe. Without you there is no creation, and the elements are at war. If you leave me, you have left only a bright space in a wretched eternity. No voice but yours can say "peace" to me. Be merciful and remain!'
"She was moved with my appeal, and tears came to her eyes.
"'I did not know that it had come to this,' she said. Then her composure returned, and she raised me with a smile.
"'If you would win any woman,' she said meaningly, 'you must first be a man. You are not a man, Luke. You are a child! You have shut the sunlight from you, and the trill of a thrush pierces you like an arrow. Would you cage your wife in the gloominess of this sepulchre? Would you hush her songs, and tremble beneath her caresses, and die in the delights of her love? Go! Open the window of this vault! Mingle with the crowds of cities! Ascend into the mountains! Cross the seas! Become worthy of my affection, and then entreat me again!'
"She had shown me the abject thing I was. Her conditions were harder than death; but the hope she had spoken was like a glimpse of Heaven, and I answered,
"'Heraine, I will do it!'
"In a month I set out for my travels. An easy coach conveyed me to London, and the third day I lay sick in Paris. Sore of body and brain, strained in nerve and stunned in sense, I persisted in my resolve, and was whirled, more dead than alive, across the Continent to Berlin. In the period of three months I had traversed all the leading kingdoms and pushed my purpose to the sandy banks of the Nile. Every moment in this journey was an infinity of torture; but in the bitterest pangs I remembered the divine consummation, and kept on. My infirmities were increased rather than diminished. In the deepest thunder I could hear the delving of the beetle; and though the whole vault blazed with electric light, I could see the twinkle of the glow-worm. But among the multitude of noises which haunted me, the most persistent were the footfalls of men. There were pauses in the lives of all other beings. The weasel and the hyena rested sometimes, and I could avoid their haunts, but men were forever alert and ubiquitous. I heard them in abysses, upon peaks, and in wildernesses. They trod upon my nerves; they crushed sleep from my soul. I closed my ears in vain; I fled without refuge; I prayed without avail. The patter of little children, the footfall of the maiden, the elastic pace of the youth, the racking limp of the cripple, the veteran hobbling upon his wooden stump, the confused tread of crowds, the steady tramp of soldiers—these tortured me by daylight, and I kept penance at midnight with the going of outcasts and vagrants.
"I learned to classify these footfalls. My sensations of them were so keen that my memory retained them. I recognized individuals, not by their faces but by their feet. A solitary tourist met me among the ruins of Luxor; I knew his tread, though months had elapsed, among the thousands on London Bridge. A gypsy family, whom I passed on the Spanish sierras, went under my window in Paris, and I missed the feet of the lad who had been hanged. Ten thieves were marched to the pillory in Kiev; I counted the paces of the four who escaped, from a closed diligence on the Simplon. I lost not one among the millions of footfalls. But there were two which I distinguished every where. When I pursued, they retreated; when I fled, they followed me. They were like two echoes in different keys; and one of them I loved, the other I hated. The first was soft, tinkling, harmonious, like a memory rather than a sound; the other was firm, vigorous, and vehement, and it kept time with the soft footstep, as if to drown it to my ears. When I was fagged and wretched, the light footfall approached me; but when, inspirited, I rose to behold its owner, it died away in the thunder of its companion tread.
"At last I embarked for America, and when the land disappeared I said to myself, 'At sea, at least, no footfalls can follow.' But one night, when the clangor of the screw drove me upon deck, I heard, far astern, through the deep fog, the sound of two haunting feet. Next morning a swifter steamer overtook us. The waves revelled between, and the winds were high, but above the bellow of our engines and the elements, those thrilling footfalls rang out. I caught a glimpse of a familiar something, as the rival craft went by, and reeled and fell upon the deck.
"I found New York the noisiest city in the world, and felt that a week's tenure would drive me mad. A fire occurred in Broadway the night of my arrival, and the din of the mobs which ran to its relief was greater than all the combined clamors of Europe. So I resorted to a beautiful village called Wyoming, in the heart of the Susquehanna mountains, and passed the month of September in comparative quiet. If any place in the world is shut in from brawls and storms, it is this historic valley. Its reminiscences were sad and painful to me, but its scenes were like soft dreams.
"During a part of my tenure in the village I missed my shadowy attendants; but when, one day, I ascended to Prospect Rock, I heard amid the hum of farms and mines and mills, those same audible repetitions floating up the sides of the mountain. The valley grew dim upon my sight, and I hastened nervously to my cottage. Thenceforward I seldom lost them. When I penetrated the wild glen of the Lackawanna, or climbed the Umbrella Tree, or ventured into the Wolf's Den, or sat upon Queen Esther's Rock, or sailed upon Harvey's Lake, they followed me, the one lulling, the other maddening—invisible but omnipresent types of the good and the evil which forever hover in the air.
"One day I ventured to Falling Waters, a reservoir which is precipitated from a cliff, called Campbell's Ridge, into a gorge of the Shawnee Mountains. The deafening roar of the cataract would be almost deathly to me; but, strengthened by the promise of Heraine, I determined to add this achievement to the long list of inflictions endured for her sake.
"I made the ascent on foot, and could see, from the base of the ridge, the skein of foam shining through the pines in its everlasting flight down the rocks. I became accustomed to the sound as I gradually approached, and mused, with gladness, of an early return to England. Heraine would acknowledge my vindication. Suffering more anguish from a sunbeam or a song than others from the knout or the rack, I had yet run the gauntlet of the intensest horrors, cheered by the certainty of her regard. She would confess her error. We should shut out the world again from our shadowy home at Glengoyle, and go down together, hand in hand, to a deeper stillness. As I mused thus I heard the haunting footfalls again, going up the mountain before me. To my delight, their attendant demon was inaudible, and I pursued them rapturously. The rush of waters grew louder. They had moaned before; they shrieked and screamed now, as if in the agony of their suicidal leap. But, clear and musical, above the hell of sound rang the tinkling feet which had led me around the globe.
"I called aloud. I quickened my pace. I could see only in glimpses through my tears; but along the steep sinuosities of the path something fluttered and vanished, and fluttered again—I recognized Heraine.
"I knew now the fidelity of her affection. She had followed my invalid wanderings, to be near me in want and prostration. I could have knelt in the aisle of the dim woods, with God's choir of waters pealing before me, to weep my gratitude. But as the figure of Heraine disappeared above, those other abhorred footfalls rang keenly below. Deep, rapid, and elastic, they were sonorously defined above the clash of the cataract. I fled, with my hands upon my ears.
"On and on! winding among boles, creeping beneath branches, climbing ledges, vaulting over fissures and chasms, I reached the open plain at last, and halted unnerved upon the brink of the abyss.
"The glory of the prospect filled me with exquisite pain. A mist, arched by a delicate rainbow, rose from the tumbling flood, and the sunny valley was visible, at intervals, beyond it, inclosed by blue mountains and intersected by the pale, ribbon-like Susquehanna. It was my fate to endure, not to enjoy; but at this moment the cataract was forgotten in a deeper torment; the boughs opened, the sky split with the shock of feet, and a man bounded from the wood.
"He was tall, handsome, and athletic, and his ruddy cheeks were flushed with exercise. He made a trumpet of his hands, and hallooed, long and clear,
"'Hera—a—a—ine!'
"Then he whistled through his fist till the rocks and water rang.
"'Where the deuce is the dear girl?' he said, and his eyes fell upon me.
"A terrible hatred rose in my heart against this man. It was the first great passion I had nurtured, and had received no other provocation than the empty sounds of his footfalls. But antipathies are not accidental merely; they are organic; and my quick sense took alarm even from his tread. One's character may be defined in his gait, but I knew from the tramp of this person that his nature was averse to mine. Why had he followed my affianced across the seas? Why had his crashing drowned the music of her steps? Why had he uttered her name with an endearment? Why had he been retained at her side, and I sent alone and wretched before? My wrists knotted nervously as these accusations took shape, and my blood became gall.
"'I beg pardon,' he said curtly; 'but are you the young man we are looking for?'
"I asked through my teeth whom he designated in the term 'we.'
"'Heraine, of course,' he replied; 'give me your hand! We have followed our little invalid—that's what we call you—over many a league, and may make his acquaintance at last. Ralph Clendenning, at your service!'
"I shrank menacingly from him, and counted the dull throbs of my heart.
"'What! timid!' he said; 'and with so old a friend? I never met you, indeed, but then I have talked of you so often that you have grown to be quite a brother.'
"I saw that he was frank and winning, and hated him the more.
"'Upon my word,' he added, 'there was none whom I had resolved in my mind to love so well, for the sake of Heraine.'
"A cry escaped me, so bitter that it seemed a howl, and I clenched my hands.
"He still followed me along the very edge of the cliff, extending his hand. A horrible impulse rushed upon me, and a thought darker than jealousy caught it up. I hurled myself against him. He staggered on the brink of the abyss, and went down with a sharp, half-stifled scream!
"My eyes followed the dead weight, as it rolled from ledge to ledge, accelerated each instant by the force of the cataract. A world, tossed out of gravity and crashing among the planets, could not have been more awfully distinct. Down—down—down—a formless mass of fibre and bone, the mist seemed to buoy it up when it reached the deepmost cascade, and as it disappeared through the tops of the pines I heard the coming of footfalls.
"Mine was a soul in torment, listening to music in heaven. I stood, stiff and numb in horror, staring into the gulf. The roar of the cataract was smothered to a babble. The rainbow vibrated tremulously to the dropping harmonies. I saw the familiar shadow as it gided to my feet. A soft hand thrilled me with its touch, and the old voice said,
"'Dear Luke, I am Heraine, come back.'
"I could not stir. My eyes were forged to the abyss.
"'Why do you glare so wildly?' she said. 'Come! you have been brave, and must not fail now. Have you no kind greeting for Heraine?'
"Down in the abyss, swaying and rocking upon the pine bough, with the frank smile as when I murdered him, I saw my victim in fancy.
"'Speak, Luke,' she repeated. 'I have a dear friend here; he has made the long pilgrimage with me, fondly anticipating this meeting. You will know him to-day, and I am sure you will love him.'
"Still surging upon mist and spray and bough, with the halo of the rainbow shimmering above it, the noble face turned upward forgivingly.
"'We have planned for your happiness, dear friend. Compared to the retreat we have fashioned for you, Glengoyle is a Babel. But you are ill, Luke; What terrible allurement lies in the waterfall? Come away from the brink! Ralph! Ralph!'
"She called in clear tones. The woods and waters answered back.
"'He is there,' I stammered; 'down—deep—dead—do you see him?—how he smiles and surges on the tufts of the pines! I—thrust him over—in rage—even as he gave me his hand—I slew him!'
"'Merciful God!' she whispered in horror; 'he was my husband!'
"The rainbow dissolved; the waterfall deluged the valley; the mountains were covered with waves; the skies grew pitchy dark; I saw nothing more.
"My sensations upon waking were those of a diver who has risen from the tranquil depths to the surface. Hubbub recommenced; horror returned. My hair was shaven close to my skull; my head ached dismally; I moved my hand with an effort, and my eyelids were so weak that I could not unseal them for a time.
"I was lying in my old chamber at Glengoyle, and Heraine was sitting at my bedside. Her garments were sable, her brown hair thin, her face placid, as of yore, but marked by deep-seated grief, and the magnetism of will and courage was gone from it. To the eye she was the same; to the mind, a weak and broken thing. Crime had changed both our natures; she had been tutor and governess before, and I the passive, submissive creature; but sin had made me bold, and sorrow worn her to a woman.
"'Luke,' she said, in the same lullaby tone, 'do you know me? do you recognize the place? are you still weak?'
"'Heraine,' said I, sternly, 'do not the wrongs we have done each other forbid this intimacy?'
"'Oh, Luke!' she replied, 'let us not uncover the past. I have buried your sin with its victim, and watched you through weary months, and prayed God to pardon you.'
"'Can God pardon your sin to me, Heraine?'
"'I trust so, Luke,' she said feebly, 'if ever in my life I treasured you a hard thought or did you any injury.'
"'Is it no injury,' I said, 'to have lured me by a false promise from my quiet home? I have endured the torture of cities, seas, suns, and storms. Your pledge was my spur and talisman through all. But you had cheated me with a lie. You were another's already. For you I have stained my hands with blood and shut heaven against my soul!'
"'As I have an account to Settle, Luke,' she pleaded, 'I meant your happiness only. To have told you that I was wedded would have pained you. I thought to familiarize you with scenes and sounds, by making my regard an incentive to adventure. It was your mother's plan. I yielded to the deception, and believed it good."
"'It was a wicked falsehood,' I said; 'you knew the weakness of my nature—that my sensitiveness was a disease—that to cross me was to kill. You have made both of us wretched forever.'
"My cruelty was murdering her; her face grew deathly in its pallor, and she pressed her hands upon her heart.
"'Let the dead man lie between us,' I proceeded; 'it is not seemly for you to be my friend; and to me you are an ever-present accusation. We must not see each other!'
"'Oh, Luke!' she cried, falling upon her knees imploringly; 'I am a bruised thing, a-weary of the world. This silence and darkness are endeared to me. Do not send me away!'
"'You agitate me,' I said; 'let us do our penance, each in loneliness. There was a time when our sorrows were mutual; it is past; we have only to say farewell.'
"I covered my face with my hands; she touched my brow with her lips, and when the door had closed upon her sobbing I heard her footfalls making mournful music on the stairs. They rang upon the lawn, then pattered down the drive; they passed desolately out of the gate, they were lost on the highway, and then the world became blank again.
"'Luke,' said my mother timidly, 'Mrs. Clendenning—Heraine—is—dead.'
"'I know it,' said I quietly.
"She seemed surprised, and interrogated me with her eyes.
"'She died at twilight yesterday,' I stated; 'as the first candles were lit in the lodge and the earliest star appeared—I heard her footsteps.'
"'At that time she passed away,' sobbed my mother. 'Oh, Luke! you were cruel to the poor girl. Her parting prayer was made for you. To the last you stood between Heraine and heaven.'
"'At that time, mother, I was sitting at my window. Tears and thrills haunted me during the afternoon, and I was frightened in the silence and darkness. And I heard Heraine's footsteps come up the road, pass the lodge, ascend the stairs, and cross my threshold. They were like echoes rather than sounds—hollow and ghostly; and mingled with them were the deeper footfalls of my other spectre, her husband.'
"I could not inhabit my chamber now. These awful sounds drove me into the open world, where I hoped to lose them in the tread of multitudes. I wandered to the old church on the day of the funeral, and looked upon the bier with dry and burning eyes. The pastor read of the holy Jerusalem, and said that her pure feet were walking the golden streets. But in the hushes of the sobbing I heard them close beside me, and while children were strewing her grave with flowers they followed me over the stile and through the village till I gained the fields and took to my heels in fright.
"I sought the resort of crowds, and lived amid turbulences. In busy hours I baffled my pursuers; but in the dark midnights, when only the miserable walked, I suffered the agonies of remorse and penance. The ever-flowing stream of life on London Bridge became my solace. My apartments are here, and I sit continually at an open window, leaning far forward, to catch the thunder of the tramp. I know the footfalls as of old. I see the suicide pace to and fro, to nerve herself for the deed. I hear her sleek betrayer, and detect their wretched offspring as he first essays to filch a handkerchief or a purse.
"Oh, the footfalls! the footfalls! Each tread marks a good or a wicked thought. A fiend or an angel starts beneath every heel. They write an eternal record as they go. Their voices float forever to witness against or for us. We people space as we cleave it. The ground that is dumb as we spurn it has a memory and a revenge. I am more sensitive than my kind; and my penance to these monitors of my sin is but a realization of the terror which all must feel at the accusation of their footfalls."
UPPER MARLB'RO'.
Through a narrow, ravelled valley, wearing down the farmer's soil,
The Patuxent flows inconstant, with a hue of clay and oil,
From the terraces of mill-dams and the temperate slopes of wheat,
To the bottoms of tobacco, watched by many a planter's seat.
There the blackened drying-houses show the hanging shocks of green,
Smoking through the lifted shutters, sunning in the nicotine;
And around old steamboat-landings loiter mules and over-seers,
With the hogsheads of tobacco rolled together on the piers.
Inland from the river stranded in a cove between the hills,
Lies old Marlb'ro' Court and village, acclimated to her chills;
And the white mists nightly rising from the swamps that trench her round,
Seem the sheeted ghosts of memories buried in that ancient ground.
Here in days when still Prince George's of the province was the queen,
Great old judges ruled the gentry, gathering to the court-house green;
When the Ogles and the Tayloes matched their Arab steeds to race,
Judge Duval adjourned the sessions, Luther Martin quit his case.
Here young Roger Taney lingered, while the horn and hounds were loud,
To behold the pompous Pinkney scattering learning to the crowd;
And old men great Wirt remembered, while their minds he strove to win,
As a little German urchin drumming at his father's inn.
When the ocean barks could moor them in the shadow of the town
Ere the channels filled and mouldered with the rich soil wafted down—
Here the Irish trader, Carroll, brought the bride of Darnell Hall,
And their Jesuit son was Bishop of the New World over all.
Here the troopers of Prince George's, with their horse-tail helmets, won
Praise from valiant Eager Howard and from General Wilkinson;
And (the village doctor seeking from the British to restore)
Key, the poet, wrote his anthem in the light of Baltimore.
One by one the homes colonial disappear in Time's decrees.
Though the apple orchards linger and the lanes of cherry-trees;
E'en the Woodyard[3] mansion kindles when the chimney-beam consumes,
And the tolerant Northern farmer ploughs around old Romish tombs.
By the high white gravelled turnpike trails the sunken, copse-grown route,
Where the troops of Ross and Cockburn marched to victory, and about,
Halting twice at Upper Marlb'ro', where 'tis still tradition's brag,
That 'twas Barney got the victory though the British got the swag.
But the Capital, rebuilded, counts 'mid towns rebellious this—
Standing in the old slave region 'twixt it and Annapolis;
And the cannons their embrasures on the Anacostia forts
Open tow'rd old ruined Marlb'ro' and the dead Patuxent ports.
Still from Washington some traveller, tempted by the easy grades,
Through the Long Old Fields continues cantering in the evening shades,
Till he hears the frogs and crickets serenading something lost,
In the aguey mists of Marlb'ro' banked before him like a frost.
Then the lights begin to twinkle, and he hears the negroes' feet
Dancing in the old storehouses on the sandy business street,
And abandoned lawyers' lodges underneath the long trees lurk,
Like the vaults around a graveyard where the court-house is the kirk.
He will see the sallow old men drinking juleps, grave and bleared—
But no more their household servants at the court-house auctioneered;
And the county clerk will prove it by the records on his shelves,
That the fathers of the province were no better than ourselves.
[3] "The Woodyard," the finest brick mansion on the western peninsula of Maryland, the seat of the Wests, twelve miles from Washington, burned down a few years ago by the unaccountable ignition of the great beam of wood over the big chimney-place, which had stood there for nearly 200 years. Either seasoned by the fire or fired by spooks, it caught in the night, and a heap of imported bricks stood next morning in place of The Woodyard.
PREACHERS' SONS IN 1849.
When I admit that these reminiscences are real, it will at once be inferred that I am a preacher's son. The general reputation of my class has been bad since the day of Eli; but I affirm and maintain that reason does not bear out this verdict, however obstinate experience may be. For why should the best parents have the worst children? and that our itinerant sires were godly and self-sacrificing men the most prodigal of their boys must confess. No flippant or errant example rises before me when I take my father's portrait in my hand and recall the humility and heroism of his life. A stern and angular face, out of whose saliences look two ruddy windows, lit by a steadfast cheerfulness, is thinly thatched by hairs of iron-gray, and around the long loose throat a bunch of frosted beard sparkles as if the painter's pencil had fastened there in reverence. I do not need to study the bent, broad shoulders and thin sinewy limbs to measure the hardness and steepness of his path; he climbed it like a bridegroom, humming quaint snatches of hymns to lull his human waywardnesses, and all the fever and errantry of our own vain career shrink abashed before his high devotion.
That I have turned out a rover is not odd; for the travelling preacher's son is cradled upon the highway. Three months after my birth we "moved" a hundred miles; by my sixteenth year we had made eleven migrations.
We children little sympathize with our weak and sickly mother on these occasions, but look forward to a change of abode as something very novel and desirable. We count the days between Christmas and April, after which the annual "Conference" assembles in the distant city, and we see our father, in his best black suit, quit the parsonage door with an anxious face, cut to the heart by his wife's farewell, "May they give you a good place, Thomas!"
Then come letters—one, two, three: "The bishops are friendly;" "The Presiding Elder has promised to do the best for us that he can;" "The influential Doctor Bim has praised our missionary sermon, and Brother Click, the Secretary, has applauded our Charge's large subscription to the Advocate;" "Our character has passed even the severe approval of the great theologian, Steep;" "Take courage, my dear, and hope for the best!"
The membership, meanwhile, are dropping in by couples to say kindly words to our mother, whom they pity, and it is rumored that they are collecting a purse to help us on our way. At last our father returns, striving to hide his solicitude in a smile, for no fate to which they could consign himself would scathe that grisly servant of his Master; but for his family, who do not altogether share the spirit of his mission, he has a little fear. He kisses us all in order, from the least to the biggest, commencing and ending with our mother, and playfully prevaricates as to our "appointment," the name of which we noisily demand, until his wife says timidly,
"Where do they send us, Thomas?"
He tries to smile and trifle, but the possibility of her discontent gives him so great pain that we children perceive it.
"How would you like to go to Greensburg?"
"Not Greensburg!" she says, with a sudden paleness.
"Isn't it a good circuit?" he says smilingly; "they paid the last preacher three hundred dollars, and his marriage fees were a hundred more. They say he saved fifty dollars a year!"
"Oh, Thomas, I thought I had fortitude, but this—"
"Is only to test your faith," he cries. "A poor preacher's wife should be willing to go anywhere—even to Greensburg; but that is not our appointment, dear; we move to Swan Neck."
Then the fun begins in earnest. The church people come to look at our contribution bedquilts, and help us pack up the blue earthenware. The legs of the prodigious box, yclept a milk chest, are summarily amputated and laid away in it, with the parental library, which, we are sorry to say, is equally doubtful in point of both ornament and use. The good gossips slyly peep into the covers of Matthew Henry, and regard their retiring pastor as a more learned man than they had suspected, while the black letter-press of Lorenzo Dow, and John Bunyan, and Fox's "Book of Martyrs" touches them like so much necromancy. The faithful old clock, whose disorders are crises in our humdrum pastoral year, is stopped and disjointed, much to our marvel, and all the spare straw in the barn is brought to protect the large gilt-edged cups and saucers, which say upon their edges, "To our pastor," and "To our pastor's wife." The thin rag carpets are folded away; the potatoes in the bin are sold to Brother Bibb, the grocer, and to a very few of the select sisters we present a can of our preserved quinces, with directions how to prepare them. Poor Em., the black domestic, drops so many tears upon the parlor stove as she carries it out to the wagon that the fresh blackening she has so industriously given it goes for nothing; for Em. is to be discharged, and the fact troubles her, though a preacher's servant has little to eat and plenty to do.
At last the old parsonage is quite bare and deserted, though our successors, box and baggage, have moved in upon us, much to the annoyance of the females, who see with jealousy that the new arrival gets the lion's share of attention, and that Brother Tipp, whose class-book we took from him, and who has backbitten us ever since, is courteous as a dancing-master with our rival. We shall talk for six years to come—that is, our mother—of Bangs's, the new-comer's, impudence in feeding his horse on our oats, and shall never speak of him as Brother Bangs, but simply call him Bangs, emphasized. We are not even sure that he will not turn his poultry loose before ours has been secured, and we boys, with great zeal, run down the roosters and ducks, giving them, if the truth must be told, longer chase than is necessary. The aged muscovy, we are sorry to say, lames himself in the retreat, and the only goose on the premises hides among Powell's, the neighbor's, so that we cannot tell which from which. However, the property is tied up at last in the several wagons; Sister Phœnix's lunch has been eaten, and our father, the itinerant, in his shirt-sleeves, stands up, with pain and perspiration on his brow, to bid his flock good-by.
"Now, brethren," he says, with a quiver at his throat, "my time is passing; I have finished the work appointed for me to do. Renew the kindnesses you have done me and my little ones upon the good steward who is to replace me. My heart weeps to cut the bonds which have held us so long together; but in this world I am a pilgrim and a stranger. Let us all pray!"
As his shrill, broken voice goes up in a mingled wail and hosanna, we children peep by stealth into the working faces of the bystanders, and our own grow tearful, till our little sister cries aloud, and our mother falls into some fond matron's arms.
Immediately our wagons are on the way. The clustering village roofs and the church spire sink down behind. We are too full of excitement to share the silence of our elders, and the passing objects while us to laughter and debate.
Swan Neck is a representative circuit. It lies, as everybody knows, somewhere upon the Eastern shore—that landmark and stronghold of Methodism. The parsonage is in Crochettown, the county-seat, and the circuit comprises half a dozen churches down the neck, among the pine forests and on the bay side. Our father tells our mother on the way of the advantages of the place, till we take it to be quite a metropolis. He says that Wiggins, whom we succeed, gives a first-rate account of it. One of the members (Judd) is a judge, and our church, in short, rules the roast thereabout, and makes the Episcopalians stand around, not to speak of the Baptists, who try as usual to edge us out.
The boys ask with glowing cheeks if there is a river at Crochettown, and are thrown into ecstasy by the reply that a large steamboat touches there twice a week, and that there is a drawbridge. We are less interested in the statement that the schools are good, but hear with delight the history of one Dumple, an innkeeper, who persecutes our church and sells quantities of "rum" to our young men. William, the son of Wiggins, our predecessor, was once seen in the bar-room and reported to his father, who fetched him home by posse comitatus, and found that he smelled strongly of soda water.
As we go along the road in this way, our furniture mean time having been shipped by water, a very compact and knotty young man rides up behind us upon a nag which we at once identify as church property. The sleekness of the flanks betokens his conversance with other people's corn-cribs, and he has a habit of shying at all the farm-house gates as if habituated to stopping whenever he liked and staying to dinner. His Perseus has a semi-gallant, semi-verdant way of lifting his hat, and his voice is hard as his knuckles.
"Woa, Sal!" he says (all preachers drive mares, it may be interpolated), "have I the pleasure of addressing Brother Ryder?"
"The same, sir."
"My name is Chough, sir; the annual Conference has done me the favor of associating my name with yours at Swan Neck."
"Oh, ho! You are my colleague; my wife, Brother Chough!"
The wife runs Brother Chough over immediately, who looks very red and awkward, and she gives her estimate of him in an undertone. It will be bad for Chough if he is at all airish or scholastic, or individual in his opinions, for between a senior pastor's wife and his young assistant there is an hereditary distrust; conceit has no show at all in a young itinerant.
But Chough wisely confines his remarks to asking questions about the bishops, and agrees with us that Doctor Bim's address on the church extension cause was sound as the Fathers, and finally gives us his own extraction, which we trace to the respectable Choughs of Caroline County, and at once fraternize with him.
Those were happy days for us children! Cornfield and barn and negro quarter rolled by us like things of fable. We watched the squirrels in the scrubwood as never again we shall take interest in human companionship, and stopped at farm-house troughs to water our nag with keener joy than that with which we have since gazed upon far blue seas or soft cis-alpine lakes and rivers.
At last we reach the place; the complement of free negro cabins lies on its outskirts; we ask the way to the Methodist preacher's residence, and learning with feigned surprise that "he has just gone an' lef town for good," cross a sandy creek and bridge, climb a hill, and stop at our future threshold.
It is an ancient edifice of brick; a pigmy stable stands beside it, with a gate intervening, and in the rear we have a lot big enough to graze one frugal horse, and a garden sufficiently large to employ us boys. Our father starts off immediately to find the keys; but in the face of a gathering of small lads in pinafores and jack-knives, who come to gaze at us, we scale the gate, enter a back shutter, and cry a welcome to our mother from the second-story front.
We hastily scan the several chambers to claim all that we find in the drawers and closets; are gratified to observe the bow-gun and shinney-sticks of the young Wigginses departed, and quite fall out among ourselves over the wooden effigy of an Indian which has tumbled down from the barn-top.
Soon the nearest neighbor of our persuasion arrives with our father, and takes our mother and the baby away to his dwelling. A fat old trustee and local preacher carries off ourself and sister, and we go bashfully and wonderingly into the heart of the town, past the church, past the market-house, past the tavern and court and public hall, until the door of our host closes upon us, and our short sandy hairs appear at the windows to scan the street and the people.
Yeasty, our host, is the only local preacher in Crochettown, where he also keeps a store, but is said to be as rich as Crœsus, and miserly as get out; and he has a pretty daughter, Margot, who sweeps into the room like a little queen, and, being older than ourselves, patronizes us till we blush. She rattles off all the town talk, the parties in the winter season, the terrible master of the academy, and the handsomest boys, including Barret, who is dissipated and writes poetry; the beauty of Marian Lee, who seems to be the terror of young gentlemen, though Margot don't see any thing in her, the proud piece!
And so we pick up the history of the village with the diligence of Froissart or Jean de Troyes, and eat last winter's apples by the ruddy grate, listening to Margot, with our very round tow head upon our sister's, filled with vague dreams of greatness and wealth, and old Yeasty's silver half dollars piled up around us, and Margot to chat at our side forever.
Oh! innocent days of itinerant urchinhood, your freshness comes no more; we "move on" as of old—waifs in the wide circuit of this nomad life—but with the hymns which lulled us in the neglected meeting-house, the prophecies they told us of toil, duty, reverence, and content, have floated into heaven whither our father has gone!
The bulk of our furniture being delayed, and our mother impatient of accepting hospitality, we move into the great, bare parsonage house on Saturday, and sit in the only furnished room. It grieves even ourselves to see how this merry moving has thinned her anxious white face, and therefore we forbear to fret her when we read the three long Bible chapters she exacts. Josh, our brother, does not purposely pronounce physician "physiken," as he is in the habit of doing, and our sister remembers for once that ewe lamb is to be called "yo," and not "e-we" in two syllables. The dinner is quite cold, but Josh, who complains, is reminded of the poor Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, who could not afford salt with his potatoes. Josh says that for his part he don't like potatoes anyhow, and will not be comforted.
In the afternoon we present ourselves at Sunday-school, and as the preacher's sons are supposed to be first-class ecclesiastical scholars, are put in the Bible-class. Here we surprise everybody by the quantity of verses we know by heart, and get many red and blue tickets for our reward. It must be confessed that we had been twice before paid for the same lesson, it being our perquisite to carry all that we know from school to school. We see Margot among the girls, swinging her feet under the seat as she hummingly commits her lesson to memory, and as her feet are very pretty, they do not perhaps move unconsciously. But Josh and we have quite a battle as to Margot, Josh saying, "She's my girl," and we averring that "we know better—she's mine," until finally our sister disposes of the matter by betraying us to the little coquette, whereat we are both ashamed, and go home hastily.
We feed and curry the horse by turns, and hunt eggs in the stable with boisterous rivalry, and have quite a contest as to who shall go down upon "the circuit" first, which is at last settled in favor of the first person.
On the appointed Sunday we rise betimes, "gear up" the nag to the sulky, and depositing a carpet-stool in the foot, sit upon it between our father's legs, and trot out of town at a respectably slow gait to clear the preacher of any suspicion of keeping a fast horse. Fairly out of town, however, we switch up somewhat, ourself watching over the dasher the clods and dust thrown from the mare's shoes, and our father humming snatches of hymns, with his grave eyes twinkling.
We say "How de do," of course, to every passer-by, as it is the pride of the profession to lead the etiquette of the country; and, passing remarks upon the badness of the fences, the staunchness of the barns, and the coziness of the dwellings, soon leave the cultivated high-road for one of the by-ways which lead down the sparsely-settled "Neck." The sombre pine forests gather about us; a squirrel or two runs across the route, and a solitary crow caws in the tree-top; we hear the loud "tap-tap-tap" of a woodpecker, and see through the sinuous aisles of firs some groups of negroes pattering to church. The men take off their hats obsequiously, and the women duck their heads, and our father says benignantly, "Going to church, boys? that's right! I like to see you honor the Great Master!" At which the younger Africans show their teeth, and the more forward patriarchs reply, "Yes, massar, bress de Lord!"
So the teams increase in number like the wayfarers, all with the same object in view, until we see the church at last, standing behind a line of whitewashed palings, flanked by less pretentious worm fences, and in the rear a long shed for horses, open in front, shadows the few tomb memorials of stone and stake.
Several lads and worldlings at the gate, slashing their boots with riding-whips, make obeisance, while two or three plain old gentlemen walk down to meet us, saying:
"Brother Ryder, we pré-sume! Welcome to Dodson's Corner, Brother Ryder!"
We tie up the nag, loosen her bridle bit, and follow into the meeting-house—a lofty building unplastered at the roof, whose open eaves and shingles give place in summer to nests of wasps, and in the winter to audacious birds, some of which swoop screaming to the pulpit, and beat the window panes in futile flight. Two uncarpeted aisles lead respectively to the men's side and the women's side—for, far be it from us, primitive Methodists, to improve upon the discipline of Wesley—and midway of each aisle, in square areas, stand two high stoves, with branching pipes which radiate from their red-hot cylinders of clay. The pulpit is a square unpainted barricade, with pedestals on each side for a pair of oil-lamps; the cushions which sustain the Bible are the gift of young unconverted ladies, and are sacredly brought to the place of worship each Sunday morning and taken away in the afternoon.
By the side of the stove the old stewards and the new minister stand awhile talking over the moral status of the country, the advances made by the Baptists, and the amount of money contributed by Dodson's Corner to the various funds of the church. The folk, meanwhile, drop in by squads, the colored element filling the unsteady gallery in the rear, until our father looks at his open-faced watch, and says:
"Bless my soul, brethren, it is time to begin the services!"
He ascends into the pulpit. We sit on what is known as the "Amen side," with our thumb in our button-hole, and watch the process of the chief steward, who is unlimbering his tuning-fork. He obtains the pitch of the tune by rapping the pew with this, or, if his teeth be sound, which is rare, touches the prongs with his incisors. Then his head—whose baldness, we imagine, arises from the people in the rear looking all the hair off—is thrown back resolutely, his jaws fly wide open, he projects a tangible stream of music to the roof, to the alarm of the birds, and comes to a dead halt at the end of the second line—for here we have congregational singing, and even those without hymn books may assist to swell the music. But very often the leader breaks down; the vanguard of old ladies cannot keep up the tune; volunteers make desperate efforts to rally the chorus, but retire discomfited, and the pastor, in addition to praying, reading, and preaching, must finally, in his worn, subdued voice, lead the forlorn hope.
The sermon on this inaugural occasion may justly be termed a work of art. It must be conclusive of the piety, learning, eloquence, and sound doctrine of the preacher, and be by turns argumentative, combative, stirring, pathetic, practical, and pictorial. The text has about the same connection at first with the discourse that a campanile has with a cathedral. A solid eulogium upon the book from which it is taken gives occasion for some side-slashes at Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon; the deaths of these are contrasted with the obsequies of the righteous, and the old-fashioned, material place of punishment is reasserted and minutely described. The text is then said to naturally resolve itself into three parts—the injunction, the direction, and some practical illustrations. The injunction, it is further allowed, re-subdivides itself, and these parts are each proclaimed in the form of speech of "Once more." We are quite too old a hand at listening to imagine that "once more" means only once more, and start to enumerate the beams in the roof, the panes in the windows, and the gray hairs in the old gentleman's head before us. About the time that we feel sleepy an anecdote arouses us: then the iteration of expletives from the membership succeeds; we see that the owner of the tuning-fork has fallen to sleep in so ingenious an attitude that he would never have been detected but for his snore, and are amused by the fashion one good lady has of slowly wagging her head as she drinks in the discourse. A slight commotion in the gallery arises, which gives a steward excuse to steal down the aisle and hasten to the scene of disturbance; the final appeal, brimming with the poetry of mercy, grace, patience, and salvation is said; we all kneel down upon the hard cold floor while the last prayer is being made, and receive the benediction, as if some invisible shadow of bright wings had fallen upon the dust and fever of our lives.
To say that the first person is weary but vindicates the sagacity of our father, who steals down to our side and whispers, "You may go out, Fred, if you are tired." But curiosity compels us to remain after the congregation is dismissed, that we may hear the class-meeting experiences.
Those solemn corollaries to the service thrill me with their recollection even now. The almost empty church echoing the sobs of the weary, and heart-bruised, and spirit-broken; the pinched, hard faces of the older people telling their bitter trials in bereavement, misappreciation, and poverty. But bursting through all, that unconquerable enthusiasm which lends to the face more than the glow of intelligence, and to the heart more than the recompense of riches; the timid utterance of the younger converts, outlining the rebellious instincts of their tempted bodies, and their need of more faith, grace, and help divine. While these speak in order, the bald-headed chorister interpolates appropriate snatches of psalms, and the preacher cries, "Patience, my brother! All will be well! Hope on, hope ever!"
At last the impatient negroes in the gallery have their opportunity, and roll down thunders of exuberant piety, which, by their natural, almost inspired eloquence, pathos, and vehemence, stir even their masters to ejaculations of praise.
How must such spiritually social reunions cheer the long, hard lives of these poor, remote believers! He was a profound statesman who, projecting a gospel for the lowly, devised the class-meeting as an outlet for their suppressed emotions, sympathies, and sorrows.
However, it is all over, and there is quite a dispute after the "class" as to who shall have the pastor's company to dinner. It is a piece of fine diplomacy to determine this. Policy dictates the most influential; feeling, the most reverend and poor. But the interest of the church is paramount; a compliment or a promise appeases the vanity of the humbler, and we follow the double team of the great landholder, Tibbet, and are soon sitting before his roaring fire.
Itinerants are notoriously big eaters. Our father keeps a weather eye on the provender as it is brought in smoking, and it being soon apparent that the dinner is to be orthodox, if not apostolic, his social attributes improve wonderfully. He breaks out in little spurts of anecdote, not entirely secular, nor yet too didactic to be jovial. They run upon young Brother Bolt, who once, after an unusual happy "revival" night, to show his great faith, tried to leap over a creek and doused himself to the ears; upon the great controversialist, Whanger, who, being invited to preach in a "High Church" pulpit, improved the occasion to trace apostolic succession as far back as Pope Joan; upon the first intelligent contraband of his kind, whose mistress affirmed that if one's ill deeds were numerically greater than his good ones he would be—jammed, and if the contrary, saved, and who responded, "Spose'n dey boff de same, missus?"
These are told with inimitable spirit and mimicry, as want of clerical wit is a direct impeachment of the validity of one's "call" to preach; and when the table is filled, and with outstretched hands the blessing said, our father gets a universal compliment for his carving. There is roast turkey, with rich stuffing, bright cranberry sauce, and savory pies of pumpkin, mince, and persimmon, cider to wash down the mealy ripeness of the sweet potato, and at the end transparent quinces drowned in velvet cream. How glibly goes the time! We play with a young miss, who shows us her library, in which, we are sorry to say, a book about pirates deeply absorbs us. But at last the sulky comes to the door; we say good-by with touched full hearts, and pass hummingly to appointment No. 2.
This is "Sand Hill," perhaps, or "Mumpson Town," or "Ebenezer," or "Dry Pond;" and when we have mustered again in the afternoon, and in the evening for the third time, turn Sal's head toward the parsonage, and sail along in the night, cold and worn, past fields of stubble, over which the wind sweeps, past negro cabins, watching like human things upon us, through dreary woods where the tall pines rock against the stars and the clouds sail whitely by like witches going to a rendezvous, past cheerful homes, gleaming light and rest and worldly competence, the owners whereof have heard no deep command to carry the gospel into wildernesses, or hearing disobeyed. And all the while our father sings softly to himself, looking now and then at us who are his cross, and again into the shining constellations which hide his crown.
But we "preacher's sons," by which name we are universally distinguished, have our own crosses as well. It is generally agreed that much ought to be expected of us and little obtained. Let one of us play truant from school, or use a naughty word in play, or make marbles a source of revenue, or fight on the common when provoked, or steal a cherry, and the fact travels our town over like a telegram. We once suffer greatly in repute by selling our neighbor's old iron and brass to an itinerant pedler, and are alleged to have run up a debit account of one dime with an old negro who sells spruce beer and "horse cakes"—whereafter we fail.
The church people, much to our dissatisfaction, present us with castaway coats and boots, which we are made to wear, and once or twice, when we encounter Margot in this shape, we burst into tears and run home to hide our wounded vanity in the stable loft. There, in the "mow," while we devise bitter and futile conspiracies against society, the mare, munching her fodder, looks up at us with patient eyes, as if to say: "Am I not also mortified for the faith?" But we are cut to the heart to think that Margot may contrast us with better-dressed boys, and therefore think us of little spirit, learning, and courage. It is for you, pretty coquette, that we carry many scandals and scars! We do not quite love you, Margot; but we are foolishly vain and sensitive, and your eyes are very beautiful!
Still we are acknowledged at school to be "smart." All preacher's sons are so by common concession, and though we may not visit the circus, like others, we get abundance of free tickets for concerts, panoramas, and glass-blowers. Once, indeed, the great Chippewa chief, Haw-waw-many-squaw, having thrown the town into consternation by placards of himself scalping his enemies and smoking their tobacco, makes a triumphal entry into the main street at full gallop, and pitching his tent before the court-house, walks into the parsonage—war plumes, moccasins, and all—gives us complimentary seats, and eats the better half of our dinner. This incident is a source of pride to ourself beyond any thing experienced by any urchin besides. We boast of it frequently, and, being disliked therefor, commit several impromptu scalpings on our own account.
Vagabonds unnumbered beg our hospitality, and get it. Some of these it would be difficult to determine, either as to profession or destination. Many of them are systematic pensioners upon the preacher, and plead devotion to our denomination as a means of gaining our hearts. They have the gossip of the "Conference" at their tongues' ends, and lead our family devotion with the grace and hypocrisy of Belial.
The weddings that we hold are frequent and various. Runaway couples come to us, blushing and short-winded, satisfy us of their lawful age, are united, and pass into the moon, leaving a five-dollar bill behind them. We cannot quite find it in our hearts, even at this late day, to forgive those numerous candidates for felicity who hold the par value of a wedding ceremony to be no more than two dollars. Yet, though we grieve to admit it, two dollars is the average fee. At one time the negro population, anxious to be wived by a white preacher, makes inroads upon us en masse to the detriment of decorum and our carpets. We summarily shut down upon this business when we find that their fees come to but half a dollar a pair.
However, the year drifts by, and we are greatly concerned to know if it is the sentiment of Swan Neck that we shall continue its pastor another year. Old Yeasty, Margot's father, as we are aware, feels himself slighted because we do not call upon him of Sundays to make the closing prayers; for Yeasty's prayer is a sermon under another name, and runs the morning into twilight; but a sly compliment that we pay him in a diplomatic sermon at the end of the conference year brings him round all right, and back we go to Swan Neck.
So with burying the dead and writing their obituaries; making the babes pure with that holy sprinkling which gives them, dying early, to a Christian immortality; launching our thunders upon the bold, softening the hearts of the errant, mingling with our unbending creed the more pliable ethics of worldly graces, and, in a word, walking like Saint John on the savage border of civilization, to thrill the brutal and unlettered with the tidings of one just day to come—our itinerant lives drift on till the marble slab in the meeting-house wall writes the itinerant's only human memorial.
We have dreamed our last. Burst from the narrow chrysalis which we would gladly rebuild again, the seething, churning sea is before us and around us; we only catch, like the strains of bells through the fog, the hum of hymns, the drowsy murmur of the buzzing Sabbath-school, and the nasal ring of the itinerant's summer sermon. Margot is married to Chough, our whilom colleague, and makes her migration in his Bedouin train, and does not know how once she thrilled us. The tuning-fork is rusty, and the chorister in his coffin may hear, if he can, his successor stirring the birds in the roof with his sonorous melody. All are at rest, and we live on—moving, moving, moving—so deeply fastened into our natures are our early instincts; but every night we say the same parsonage prayer, and every morning look upon the wall where hangs the grave, grim features we revere—the Itinerant Preacher.
CHESTER RIVER.
Wise is the wild duck winging straight to thee,
River of summer! from the cold Arctic sea,
Coming, like his fathers for centuries, to seek
The sweet, salt pastures of the far Chesapeake.
Soft 'twixt thy capes like sunset's purple coves,
Shallow the channel glides through silent oyster groves,
Round Kent's ancient isle, and by beaches brown,
Cleaving the fruity farms to slumb'rous Chestertown.
Long ere the great bay bore the Baltimores,
Yielded thy virgin tide to Virginian oars;
Elsewhere the word went, "Multiply! increase!"
Long ago thy destinies were perfect as thy peace.
Still, like thy water-fowl, dearly do I yearn,
In memory's migration once more to return,
Where the dull old college from the gentle ridge,
O'erlooks the sunny village, the river, and the bridge.
On the pier decrepit I do loiter yet,
With my crafty crab-lines and my homespun net,
Till the silver fishes in pools of twilight swam,
And stars played round my bait in the coves of calm.
Sweet were the chinquapins growing by thy brink,
Sweet the cool spring-water in the gourd to drink,
Beautiful the lilies when the tide declined,
As if night receding had left some stars behind.
But when the peach tints vanished from the plain,
Or struggled no longer the shad against the seine,
Every reed in thy march into music stirred,
And to gold it blossomed in a singing bird.
Eden of water-fowl! clinging to thy dells
Ages of mollusks have yielded their shells,
While, like the exquisite spirits they shed,
Ride the white swans in the surface o'erhead.
Silent the otter, stealing by thy moon,
Through the fluttered heron, hears the cry of the loon;
Motionless the setter in thy dawnlight gray
Shows the happy hidden cove where the wild duck play.
Homely are thy boatmen, venturing no more
In their dusky pungies than to Baltimore,
Happy when the freshet from northern mountains sweeps,
And strews the bay with lumber like wrecks upon the deeps.
Not for thy homesteads of a former space,
Not for thy folk of supposititious race;
Something I love thee, river, for thy rest,
More for my childhood buried in thy breast.
From the mightier empire of the solid land,
A pilgrim infrequent I seek thy fertile strand,
And with a calm affection would wish my grave to be
Where falls the Chester to the bay, the bay unto the sea.
OLD WASHINGTON ALMSHOUSE.
A stranger in Washington, looking down the wide outer avenue named "Massachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that when the whistle, like
"the pibroch's music, thrills
To the heart of those lone hills,"
the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more frequent signs of habitation and visitation.
To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor, physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called "Georgia" he will pass to his right the Congressional burying-ground, and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.
It is a smart brick building, four stories high, with green trimmings, standing on the last promontory of some grassy commons beloved of geese and billygoats. The short, black cedars, which appear to be a species of vegetable crape, give a stubby look of grief to the region round the poor-house, and, thickest at the Congressional Cemetery, screen from the paupers the view of the city. Across the plains, once made populous by army hospitals, few objects move except funeral processions, creeping toward the graveyard or receding at a merry gait, and occasional pensioners, out on leave, coming home dutifully to their bed of charity. The report of some sportsman's gun, where he is rowing in the marshes of the gray river, sometimes raises echoes in the high hills and ravines of the other shore, where, many years ago, the rifles of Graves and Cilley were heard by every partisan in the land. Now the tall forts, raised in the war, are silent and deserted; the few villas and farm-houses look from their background of pine upon the smart edifice on the city shore, and its circle of hospitals nearer the water, and its small-pox hospital a little removed, and upon the dead-house and the Potter's Field at the river brink. We all know the melancholy landscape of a poor-house.
The Potter's Field preceded the poor-house on this site by many years. The almshouse was formerly erected on M Street, between Sixth and Seventh, and, being removed here, it burned to the ground in the month of March, fourteen years ago, when the present brick structure was raised. The entire premises, of which the main part is the almshouse garden, occupy less than fifty acres, and the number of inmates is less than two hundred, the females preponderating in the proportion of three to one. Under the same roof are the almshouse and the work-house, the inmates of the former being styled "Infirmants," and of the latter "Penitents." The government of the institution is vested in three commissioners, to whom is responsible the intendent, Mr. Joseph F. Hodgson, a very cheerful and practical-looking "Bumble."
Every Wednesday the three commissioners meet at this almshouse and receive the weekly reports of the intendent, physician, and gardener. Once every year these officers, and the matron, wagoner, and baker are elected. Sixteen ounces of bread and eight ounces of beef are the ration of the district pauper. The turnkey, gate-keeper, chief watchmen, and chief nurses, are selected from the inmates. The gates are closed at sunset, and the lights go out at eight P.M. all winter. The inmates wear a uniform, labelled in large letters "Work-house," or "Washington Asylum."
The poor-house is an institution coeval with the capital. We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate of the poor-house.
Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a Congressman, and was buried in a "mausoleum" on H Street, Remus died without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.
The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind—for such was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every capital of Western Europe—drew to its site artists, adventurers, and speculators from all lands. From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in the Potter's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of official society, and the defective education of the young men of tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were prosperous?
In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the District Almshouse contains few government employés. Now and then, as Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of manfulness, and of labor. The class of well-bred young men who are ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and hear no response in the public tone. Duelling is over; visiting one's relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man. The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one's friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a jest to precipitate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of some old parish church, horses hitched to the gravestones, and punch mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence, decay! Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain thresholds.
The Washington poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one respect: under the same roof, divided only by a partition and a corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate for refuge.
We passed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless women, semi-imbecile girls—the relicts of error, the heirs of affliction—three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong, rosy Irish nurse. Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third upon the floor halloaing for joy. Such noble specimens of childhood we had never seen; heads like Cæsar's, eyes bright as the depths of wells into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the complexions and carriage of high birth. The woman was suckling them all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and walls light up as with pictures. A few yards off, though out of hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and fro restlessly. Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where bad cases were locked up. The association of the poor and the wicked affected us painfully.
Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead—those who have escaped the dissecting-knife. Scattered about, with little stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks, we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of "Give me neither poverty nor riches!"
1871.
OLD ST. MARY'S.
This is the river. Like Southampton water
It enters broadly in the woody lands,
As if to break a continent asunder,
And sudden ceasing, lo! the city stands:
St. Mary's—stretching forth its yellow hands
Of beach, beneath the bluff where it commands
In vision only; for the fields are green
Above the pilgrims. Pleasant is the place;
No ruin mars its immemorial face.
As young as in virginity renewed,
Its widow's sorrows gone without a trace,
And tempting man to woo its solitude.
The river loves it, and embraces still
Its comely form with two small arms of bay,
Whereon, of old, the Calvert's pinnace lay,
The Dove—dear bird!—the olive in its bill,
That to the Ark returned from every gale
And found a haven by this sheltering hill.[4]
Lo! all composed, the soft horizons lie
Afloat upon the blueness of the coves,
And sometimes in the mirage does the sky
Seem to continue the dependent groves,
And draw in the canoe that careless roves
Among the stars repeated round the bow.
Far off the larger sails go down the world,
For nothing worldly sees St. Mary's now;
The ancient windmills all their sails have furled,
The standards of the Lords of Baltimore,
And they, the Lords, have passed to their repose;
And nothing sounds upon the pebbly shore
Except thy hidden bell, Saint Inigo's.
[4] The Catholic settlers of Maryland had a ship called The Ark, and a pinnace called The Dove.
There in a wood the Jesuits' chapel stands
Amongst the gravestones, in secluded calm.
But, Sabbath days, the censer's healing balm,
The Crucified with His extended hands,
And music of the masses, draw the fold
Back to His worship, as in days of old.
Upon a cape the priest's house northward blinks,
To see St. Mary's Seminary guard
The dead that sleep within the parish yard,
In English faith—the parish church that links
The present with the perished, for its walls
Are of the clay that was the capital's,
When halberdiers and musketeers kept ward,
And armor sounded in the oaken halls.
A fruity smell is in the school-house lane;
The clover bees are sick with evening heats;
A few old houses from the window pane
Fling back the flame of sunset, and there beats
The throb of oars from basking oyster fleets,
And clangorous music of the oyster tongs,
Plunged down in deep bivalvulous retreats,
And sound of seine drawn home with negro songs.
Night falls as heavily in such a clime
As tired childhood after all day's play,
Waiting for mother who has passed away,
And some old nurse, with iterated rhyme
Of hymns or topics of the olden time,
Lulls wonder with her tenderness to rest:
So, old St. Mary's! at the close of day,
Sing thou to me, a truant, on thy breast.