The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

by Benjamin F. Taylor

Gratefully,

Lucy.

Late husband indeed! The pulses of a pound of cold putty are lively compared with my circulation at the idea of that sort of "late"—too late ever to be again "on time." Well, all I want of that doctor is that he shall solicit me once more, when I will say, "Insure? Do I look like a man who needs help for his perishing family? Examine my will—Lucy, $50,000! 'Port,' $20,000! Accept an invitation to my Free Library. Be silent and be happy. Good morning," and with this nightcap for his importunity, I would pass graciously on like a great harvest-moon when it gives the last touch to the ripening regiments of corn.

And the thirty-first of October came at last, and the supreme hour for the turn of the wheel away there in the city of the Golden Gate, but what should I care? The capital prize had all been won, and invested, and given away and expended. I had rehearsed the fortune and it had left no corroding care—that word "corroding," heart-gnawing it ought to mean; think of a lively rodent, say a squirrel, in a beating heart!—had kindled no passion, scattered no Greek fire of pride or envy anywhere. What more need I desire, and yet I could hardly help wondering if they knew I had purchased the ticket 104,163; whether when—not if, for there is never an "if" in the land of dreams and of Spain—when the capital prize should be declared off to me out of the great wheel, they would not telegraph me at once from San Francisco, for I certainly would pay the expense without a murmur. I went to the door once or twice to see if the telegraph messenger might not be coming, and I at once gave him one hundred dollars in gold. But night distanced the telegram and reached me first. Possibly, though, the agent in Chicago may write me by the evening mail, and I gave one hundred dollars in gold to the man that licked the envelope, and one hundred dollars in gold to the man who delivered the letter. But the mail came and the letter did not. I was sorry for the loss the clerk in the post-office had suffered, and made up my mind to make him librarian of my Free Library at a salary of a thousand dollars a year.

Along in the evening Lucy and I had a little discussion as to whether we should not take the prize in gold, say double eagles, and put them all to roost on the dining table, and call in a few friends to see the golden aviary with its blessed birds of Paradise, and borrow the neighbor's steelyards, as somebody did in the touching story of the "Forty Thieves," or some other Arabian Night's entertainment, and weigh the hundred thousand avoirdupois, and then send it back to Chicago and have the dead metal return all in full leaf, green as Vallombrosa, say an hundred 1,000-dollar bills, or a thousand 100-dollar bills, Lucy and I could hardly tell which.

The first of November dawned as brightly as November ever dawns, and with it came the tidings that my "$100,000 in gold" had somehow, by mistake no doubt, been drawn by somebody else, and that ticket 104,163 was worth—well—about a twist for a cigar-lighter! My imagination slipped down the golden ladder that, like the Patriarch's, had an angel at the top and a pillow of stone at the bottom—slipped down from its high estate and made a Rachel of itself, "and would not be comforted." I left the parlor, where I had been sitting for the last month because I thought I could afford to, and went away disconsolate into the kitchen, but "Willie," the mocking bird, was singing a pleasant song. I returned to the parlor and Lucy, the heiress to the half of my fortune, was laughing a pleasant laugh, and "Port," whom I had forgiven in a codicil, and left $20,000, said he did not care a "Continental" for the whole business, which, considering that Continental currency, toward the last of it, was sold low, at about so much a peck, "dry measure," may be taken as a pretty forcible expression of his perfect cheerfulness under the disaster.

But was it a disaster? Had I not had the prize, and enjoyed it and shared it and bequeathed it? My fortune had never tempted a thief. It had neither put the prayer of the Lord nor of Agur out of fashion: "Give us this day our daily bread!" "Give me neither poverty nor riches!" So far as I have heard, "104,163" was the lucky number after all, and I certainly believe nobody ever before received so much for so little—$100,000 in imperishable gold for five dollars and sixty-five cents, true coin of the realm of an imagination and a fancy both warmed into a life curiously fresh and new by the touch of a hope, never to be realized, of mere material wealth.

"One blast upon a bugle horn,"—if we may trust a man who was more conscientious in the telling of fiction than most men are in relating the truth,—was "worth a thousand men." Jericho came down at the blast of a horn.

Fame's shall give breath, and all the land shall give heed. Gabriel's shall sound, and the dead shall be intent. But cornucopia the golden is the exalted horn among the nations. They always see the glittering millions lavished from the broader end that flares and blossoms like a tulip, but it is strange they do not oftener discern the diminished man coming out at the other and the lesser end of the self-same horn. The wealth may make a ladder and rig it out with rounds commanding loftier planes and broader views, but there must be a foot bold enough to climb them, and a brain balanced enough to regard the grander horizons and the growing lights undizzied and undazzled, and a heart true enough to be touched and softened and kindled by it all into the living belief that these words are worthy of all acceptation: "Faith, Hope, Charity—these three, but the GREATEST of these is Charity." A belief lodged in the head is there, but a belief lodged in the heart is everywhere.

As for Lucy and I, our "castles in Spain" are all builded and peopled, the lawns around them are Elysian, the sky above them is clear heaven, sunshine plays forever around their purple towers. Let us make fast the door against the wolf we thought we had killed with a bludgeon of gold, and betake ourselves again with cheerfulness and content to our possessions in Spain—ours forever and a day by the power of the charm that lay hid in the ticket I purchased—and Lucy, "Port" and I do earnestly wish that all the readers of this chapter from life, if they do not draw the Capital Prize, may at least gain that next best thing—the treasure wrapped up, like a rose in a bud, in Number 104,163.