JOHN HAY.
AUTHOR OF “LITTLE BREECHES.”
SIDE from General Lew Wallace and Edmund Clarence Stedman few business men or politicians have made a brighter mark in literature than the subject of this sketch.
John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, October 8th, 1838. He was graduated at Brown’s University at the age of twenty, studied law and began to practice at Springfield, Illinois, in 1861. Soon after this he was made private secretary of President Lincoln, which position he filled throughout the latter’s administration. He also acted as Lincoln’s adjutant and aid-de-camp, and it was in consequence of this that he was brevetted colonel. He also saw service under Generals Hunter and Gilmore as major and assistant adjutant general. After the close of the war Mr. Hay was appointed United States [♦]Secretary of Legation at Paris, serving in this capacity from 1865 to 1867, when he was appointed charge d’affaires, where he served for two years, being removed to take a position as Secretary of Legation at Madrid, where he remained until 1870, at which time he returned to the United States and accepted an editorial position on the “New York Tribune.” This he resigned and removed to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1875, where he entered politics, taking an active part in the presidential campaigns of 1876, 1880 and 1884. Under President Hayes he was appointed as first assistant Secretary of State, which position he filled for nearly three years, and has made his home at Washington since that date. On March 17th, Mr. Hay was appointed by President McKinley as ambassador to Great [♣]Britain, where he was accorded the usual hearty welcome tendered by the British to American ambassadors, many of whom during the past fifty years having been men of high literary attainment. Shortly after Mr. Hay’s arrival he was called upon to deliver an address at the unveiling of the Walter Scott monument, in which he did his country credit and maintained his own reputation as an orator and a man of letters.
[♦] ‘Secrectary’ replaced with ‘Secretary’
[♣] ‘Britian’ replaced with ‘Britain’
As an author Mr. Hay’s first published works were the “Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces” (1871), “Castilian Days” (1871), “Poems” (1890), and, (in conjunction with Mr. Nicolay), “Abraham Lincoln: a History,” which is regarded as the authoritative biography of Mr. Lincoln. This was first published in serial form in the “Century Magazine” from 1887 to 1889. Colonel Hay has also been a frequent contributor to high class periodicals, and to him has been ascribed the authorship of the anonymous novel “The Bread Winners,” which caused such agitation in labor circles a few years ago.
Like many authors, Mr. Hay came into popularity almost by accident. Certainly he had no expectation of becoming prominent when he wrote his poem “Little Breeches;” yet that poem caused him to be remembered by a wider class of readers, perhaps, than anything else he has contributed to literature. The following account of how this poem came to be written was published after Mr. Hay’s appointment to the Court of St. James in 1897. The statement is given as made by Mr. A. L. Williams, an acquaintance of Mr. Hay, who lives in Topeka, Kansas, and knows the circumstances. “The fact is,” says Mr. Williams, “the poem ‘Little Breeches’ and its reception by the American people make it one of the most humorous features of this day. It was written as a burlesque, and for no other purpose. Bret Harte had inaugurated a maudlin literature at a time when the ‘litery’ people of the United States were affected with hysteria. Under the inspiration of his genius, to be good was commonplace, to be virtuous was stupid—only gamblers, murderers and women of ill fame were heroic. Crime had reached its apotheosis. John Hay believed that ridicule would help cure this hysteria, and thus believing, wrote the burlesque, ‘Little Breeches.’ Wanting to make the burlesque so broad that the commonest intellect could grasp it, he took for his hero an unspeakably wretched brat whom no angel would touch unless to drop over the walls into Tophet, and made him the object of a special angelic miracle.
“Well, John sprung his ‘Little Breeches’ and then sat back with his mouth wide open to join in the laugh which he thought it would evoke from his readers. To his intense astonishment, people took it seriously, and instead of laughing Bret Harte out of the field, immediately made John Hay a formidable rival to that gentleman.”
Next to “Little Breeches” the poem “Jim Bludso,” perhaps, contributed most to Mr. Hay’s reputation. Both of these selections will be found in the succeeding pages.
LITTLE BREECHES.
DON’T go much on religion,
I never ain’t had no show;
But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir,
On the handful o’ things I know.
I don’t pan out on the prophets
And free-will, and that sort of thing—
But I b’lieve in God and the angels,
Ever sence one night last spring.
I come into town with some turnips,
And my little Gabe come along—
No four-year-old in the county
Could beat him for pretty and strong,
Peart and chipper and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight—
And I’d learnt him to chaw terbacker
Jest to keep his milk-teeth white.
The snow come down like a blanket
As I passed by Taggart’s store;
I went in for a jug of molasses
And left the team at the door.
They scared at something and started—
I heard one little squall,
And hell-to-split over the prairie
Went team, Little Breeches and all.
Hell-to-split over the prairie;
I was almost froze with skeer;
But we rousted up some torches,
And searched for ’em far and near.
At last we struck hosses and wagon,
Snowed under a soft white mound,
Upsot—dead beat—but of little Gabe
No hide nor hair was found.
And here all hope soured on me,
Of my fellow-critters’ aid,
I jest flopped down on my marrowbones,
Crotch deep in the snow, and prayed.
By this, the torches was played out,
And me and Isrul Parr
Went off for some wood to a sheepfold
That he said was somewhar thar.
We found it at last, and a little shed
Where they shut up the lambs at night,
We looked in and seen them huddled thar,
So warm and sleepy and white;
And thar sot Little Breeches and chirped,
As peart as ever you see,
“I want a chaw of terbacker,
An’ that’s what’s the matter of me.”
How did he git thar? Angels.
He could never have walked in that storm;
They jest scooped down and toted him
To whar it was safe and warm.
And I think that saving a little child,
An’ fotching him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around the Throne.
JIM BLUDSO.[¹]
OF “THE PRAIRIE BELLE.”
ALL, no; I can’t tell you whar he lives,
Because he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He weren’t no saint—them engineers
Is all pretty much alike—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied—
I reckon he never knowed how.
And this was all the religion he had—
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot’s bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire—
A thousand times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn’t be passed,
And so she come tearin’ along that night—
The oldest craft on the line—
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
A fire burst out as she cl’ared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin’, and cursin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
Through the hot black breath of the burnin’ boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word,
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He weren’t no saint; but at judgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty—a dead-sure thing—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
[¹] Copyright, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
HOW IT HAPPENED.[¹]
PRAY your pardon, Elsie,
And smile that frown away
That dims the light of your lovely face
As a thunder-cloud the day,
I really could not help it,—
Before I thought, it was done,—
And those great grey eyes flashed bright and cold,
Like an icicle in the sun.
I was thinking of the summers
When we were boys and girls,
And wandered in the blossoming woods,
And the gay wind romped with her curls.
And you seemed to me the same little girl
I kissed in the alder-path,
I kissed the little girl’s lips, and alas!
I have roused a woman’s wrath.
There is not so much to pardon,—
For why were your lips so red?
The blonde hair fell in a shower of gold
From the proud, provoking head.
And the beauty that flashed from the splendid eyes
And played round the tender mouth,
Rushed over my soul like a warm sweet wind
That blows from the fragrant South.
And where after all is the harm done?
I believe we were made to be gay,
And all of youth not given to love
Is vainly squandered away,
And strewn through life’s low labors,
Like gold in the desert sands,
Are love’s swift kisses and sighs and vows
And the clasp of clinging hands.
And when you are old and lonely,
In memory’s magic shrine
You will see on your thin and wasting hands,
Like gems, these kisses of mine.
And when you muse at evening
At the sound of some vanished name,
The ghost of my kisses shall touch your lips
And kindle your heart to flame.
[¹] Copyright, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
WELL-KNOWN WESTERN POETS.
EUGENE FIELD • BRET HARTE
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
JOAQUIN MILLER
(CINCINNATUS HEINE) • WILL CARLETON
