I'll tell you what it is, my friend. The older I grow, the more I feel inclined to let every man and woman, every boy and girl, act out himself, or herself. "That is a singular fellow," we often hear it said. "He's as odd as Dick's hat-band. I don't know what to think of him. He seems to be a good sort of a man. But he is odd. His head is as full of crotchets as it can hold."
When I hear a person talk in this style, I feel like saying, "Stop a moment, my dear sir. He's 'a good sort of a man—but,' you say. That shows you are not precisely satisfied with his goodness; and pray, what is the matter with it? Why don't you like it, sir? What particular fault have you to find with it? Come, out with it now."
Press a man, who is talking in this way about a crotchety neighbor, right up to the point, and you will generally find that the reason he does not like him is because he has a different way of saying and doing things from his own.
Now I believe that some folks are odd because they cannot help it. True, there are a great many who are odd, just for the sake of being odd. They are ambitious to be known as singular people. We will let them pass. They certainly work hard to earn the name they love to be known by; and perhaps we ought not to try to rob them of it, or to say any thing very severe about their taste. We will let them pass.
But there are a multitude of other people who are odd, and whose oddities cannot be accounted for in the same way. They are odd, because they were born so. They are odd, because they cannot help being odd. If they should try, with all their might, to do as most of their neighbors do, they would make perfect dunces of themselves; for every body, old or young, makes a dunce of himself, and nothing else, whenever he undertakes to be what he is not—whenever he undertakes to be somebody else. He is not very well acquainted with the race he belongs to, who, as he goes through the world, does not get this truth hammered into him.
Why, at this very moment, I can think of at least a dozen odd people, whom I am in the habit of meeting every day, and who, I verily believe, could no more help their oddities and crotchets than some of their neighbors could help having warts come out on their hands. The crotchets are natural and unavoidable in one case—the warts are natural and unavoidable in the other.
These are my notions about crotchety people, in general, and I have thrown them out, as one throws out feather beds from the garret windows, when the house is on fire—so that the articles that are to be thrown afterward may find a good soft spot to alight on, and not get damaged by their fall.
The truth is, I am going to introduce to you an old gentleman, who had a large head, tolerably well filled with crotchets; and as it is such a common thing for people to raise a hue and cry against every body who has any oddities about him, I thought I would put you on your guard a little, by a word of apology for that entire race of people, who are odd because they cannot be any thing else.
This old gentleman, who, by the way, was a great friend of the little folks, is Mike Marble. I introduce him to you as an old gentleman. But, although he was old, when I first saw him, I must not forget that he was young once—as young as any of my readers—and that he played his part as a boy, as well as his part as a man. There are a good many anecdotes afloat about him and his odd way of doing things, before he grew up to manhood. My grandfather knew him when he was a lad at school. I believe he and Mike were nearly of the same age.
That grandfather of mine, now I think of it, was a great story-teller. I have sometimes nearly half made up my mind, while casting about me, to find some new mine of stories for my young readers, that I would put my thinking cap on, and see if I could not recollect a budget of my grandfather's stories, large enough to fill a book. I am not sure but I will do so one of these days; and, if I do, I shall print the budget, depend upon it.