“This rheumatism o’ mine is a queer thing. I’ll tell ye sumpen confidential. You prob’ly won’t believe it, an’ I wouldn’t want what I say to git out ’cause its so improb’le, an’ it might hurt my credit, but I’ve bin cured o’ my rheumatism twice by carryin’ a petrified potato in my pocket. An old friend of mine, Catfish John’s got it now, an’ I don’t want to take it away from ’im as long as it’s helpin’ ’im, but when ’e gits through with it, I’m goin’ to have it back on the job, an’ you bet I’ll be hoppin’ ’round ’ere as lively as a cricket. The potato ’ll prob’ly be ’ere next week. I’ve had it fer ten years, an’ it beats everything I’ve ever tried.”
I asked the old man to allow me to see some of the poetry he had “made,” and thereby opened up a literary mine. The request touched a tender chord and I was ushered back to a worn desk of antique pattern in the rear of the store. He raised the lid and extracted the treasure. A book had been removed from its binding, and the covers converted into a portfolio. He gently removed about a hundred sheets of paper of various shapes and sizes, covered with closely written matter. Some of the spelling would have shocked the shade of Lindley Murray, and made it glad that he had passed away, and some of it would have made a champion of spelling reform quite happy. It was vers libre of the most malignant type. Rhymes were freely distributed at picturesque random, and while the ideas, rhythm, and meter were quite lame at times, much of the verse was better than some recently published imagist poetry, which contains none of these things. Humor and pathos were intermingled. Sometimes there was much humor where pathos was intended, and often real pathos lurked among the lighter lines.
There are many singers who are never heard. Melodies in impenetrable forests and trills that float on desert air are for those who sing, and not for those who listen. A happy soul may pour forth impassioned song in solitude, for the joy of the singing, and a solitary bard may distil his fancy upon pages that are for him alone.
The verse of Elihu Baxter Brown is its own and only excuse for being. It has solaced the still hours, and if its creator has been its only reader, he has been most appreciative.
A touching lay depicts his elation upon the departure of his wife “in a autobeel” on a long visit to distant relatives, but the joy prevails only during the first six lines. The remaining thirty are devoted to sorrow and “lonely misery as I walketh the street,” and end with “when will she be back I wonder?” He falls into a “reverree” and from under its gentle spell the virile lines, “The brite moon makes a strong impress on me,” and “I’ve named my pet hen after thee,” float into the world. With “eyes full of weep” he reflects that “sometimes she’s cold as all git out,” and further on he wishes that his “loved one was a pie,” so as to facilitate immediate and affectionate assimilation.
He bids the world to “go on with its music and kink it another note higher.” In later lines he naïvely admits that “of all the poets I love myself the best.” Alas, he has much company! This effusion ends with “Gosh, I can’t finish this poetry till I pull myself together.”
War, love, spring, and beautiful snow flow through the limping measures. There are odes to the sun, the rain, and to his old bob-tailed gray cat, “Tobunkus,” who drowses peacefully on the counter near the scales.
The inspection of the poems led to the exhibition of his box of relics and curios, which he greatly valued. Among the carefully ticketed and labeled items, which we spread out on the counter, was a small chip from Libby Prison, a fragment of stone picked up near the National Capitol, a shark’s tooth, some Indian arrow-heads, an iron ring from a slave auction pen of ante-bellum days, a chip from the pilot house of a steamboat that was wrecked sixty years ago on the Atlantic coast, the dried stump of a cigar which had been given to him when he visited a Russian man-of-war in Boston harbor in 1859, and many other odds and ends that were of priceless value to him.
I picked up a small, round piece of wood, which he told me was the most remarkable and interesting relic of the whole lot. “That,” said he, “is a piece of the first shaving brush I ever shaved with”—a fact fully as important as most things, seemingly significant at present, will be a century hence. This wonderful object completed the exhibition, and the collection was carefully put away.
The interior of the store was rather gloomy, badly ventilated, and was pervaded with numberless and commingled odors. I could distinguish kerosene, dead tobacco-smoke, stale vegetables, damp dry-goods, and smoked herrings, but the rest of the indescribable medley of smells baffled analysis.