I am not one of the old men who take delight in "lecturing" the young. I hate the very word, for I shall never travel far enough from my youth to forget how I disliked both the lecture and the lecturer. But sometimes I have an indescribable yearning to go and say a word to them. I feel pretty much like one who, having found a circus to be of no account and leaving the performance, finds another man at the ticket-wagon eagerly putting down his money for a ticket. It looks like a pity and I want to tell him so. I saw a lot of nice-looking young fellows the other day—I was told they were boys from one of the Universities,—standing on a corner badly flushed with liquor and swearing at a high rate. They were evidently out for "a time." I should have liked to say something like this: "Now, boys, just let this thing drop there. Really, there is nothing in it. No young man with a sound body can need liquor, and no one with a sound reason can need the excitement of cards. We old fellows have been all along there, and there is nothing in it. I am the chief secretary of the Ancient Order of Old Boys, and my opportunities of acquiring knowledge have been exceptional. I don't wish to hold up any raw head and bloody bones of premature death and disgrace, and all that sort of thing, but I would like to say this much to you: If you want to take a drink, take it and go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting for drunkards—heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief, disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,—"associating together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights, the early morning drinks, taken more frequently later on, and lastly the appetite. It is the associating together for the purpose of drinking that causes that selvage of bad company to adhere to the good company you started out with earlier in the evening, and it is the selvage of low company that will give every self-respecting man a good deal of disagreeable reflection when he comes to look back at it. Don't buy that sort of a ticket, my boy; the show won't pay you."
Speaking of veterans reminds me of something I would like to say right here. Do you know there is nothing more awkward to a man—that is nothing more awkward to me, and like all egotists I judge all by myself—than meeting a familiar friend whom I have not seen for twenty years. We expect each other to be the old heart-to-heart friends of long ago, but how to go about re-establishing the relation is the puzzle. We have all had new friends, new histories, new lives since twenty years ago, and while we make an unsatisfactory attempt to be the same "old boys" to each other, each feels the dismal failure. Memory is faithful, but while we remember with affection that we were Tom and Dick to each other then (twenty years ago) we cannot, out of that slender material, build up a hearty fraternal conversation of to-day. And with advancing years we find that the old subjects that we spent hours of mirth over, a life-time ago, are not amusing to-day, if indeed our defective memories can recall them. Ah! how little it took to furnish youth with mirth, that common standing ground upon which all so easily form acquaintance and friendship. I trust I may be forgiven, seeing that I meant well, but I declare to you that I have practiced outrageous deceit in affecting to remember incidents that some of these old boys recall, and in trying to be agreeable by so doing. But doubtless you have also. Perhaps we all have. After all I take it that separation, like time, tries everything—love, friendship, even acquaintance, and those of the three which survive the test are like the ruins of ancient cities, of great value as curiosities, but worth little for aught else. Mrs. Boyzy remarks that this is a heartless view of it. But I silence that estimable woman by the observation that philosophers do not take the heart into account; the heart is the field of young lovers, physicians' fees and patent medicines. This observation which she does not understand, and, I may admit to you I am not so clear about myself, convinces her that I am not only a philosopher, but a profound one. Ah! to a man of profound observation, how many better ways of securing the respect of the female sex there are than the primitive one of clubbing them.
OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XI
I do not reverence ministers of the gospel simply because they hold that office, any more than I esteem a man as a gentleman simply because he has the manners and dress of one. The bare fact that at some period in his life, oftenest the period of youth, when the mind teems with odd fancies and ambitions, a man has concluded that he is called to the ministry, has successfully gotten through theology and been ordained, forms too uncertain a foundation on which to base reverence, which is one of the most solemn emotions of the mind. But I do respect and reverence the credentials of an earnest, God-fearing and self-sacrificing life which are found with these men, and I am obliged in excusing this weakness, to say that in a long and varied experience with them, these traits have been characteristic of those I have met. But it is not my lack of reverence that I intended to write about, it is the contradictory way in which those who are under their charge view this matter. The practical, effective and active irreverence of professing Christians astonishes as much as it puzzles me. They believe, or assume to believe, in the sacredness of the ministry and in the reverence due ministers as such; how do they show it? It seems to me that the architectural custom of elevating the pulpit above the heads of the people arose out of the congregational custom of shooting at the preacher. You may tell me what you please about the world's people, but it is the well-directed volley from the communicants' pews, generally fired from ambush, that does the business for the preacher's influence. Did you ever think of the marked absurdity in the contrast? The subject of calling a preacher is prefaced by prayer; the Almighty is invoked to send a man of His choice; the man is installed with impressive ceremony and much prayer; he is introduced by other ministers at the installation with allusions to him as the under shepherd to whom is to be rendered obedience and reverence. The new man then goes heartily to work for God, and the congregation goes heartily to work on him. They criticise his style, peck at every imperfection, intellectual and social, and soon put him in a state of siege. If the Almighty, who it was at first claimed sent him, delivers him, he is in luck; but the usual end is that the congregation itself effects his deliverance by giving him the same warm experience that the terrapin undergoes when it is desired to see him walk. After a persistent ham-stringing of the ministerial horse, the congregation are astonished that he cannot pull his load. I am a business man, and in many years have had many men in my employment, but nothing would have more astonished me at any time in my business life than to be told that I was systematically impairing and obstructing the usefulness of the men that I was paying to work for me and from whose labor I expected some profit. It is the most inexplicable inconsistency to me in congregations, which generally include a large percentage of business men. I have used the word systematically, because it seems to me that it is a system which pervades to a greater or less extent all congregations of all denominations, and is confined exclusively to no one. Nor is it the worst element in a congregation that is guilty of it; I am sorry to say that it is prevalent among even the best members. Even that excellent woman, Mrs. Boyzy, whose mind is often tortured by the apprehension that absence from church service will seriously affect my future prospers, often regales me after church with keen criticism of the sermon and the weak points of our preacher. And yet that estimable woman, on hearing our eldest daughter indulge last Sunday in a similar strain, warned her against the wickedness of her irreverence. I beg you to understand that I am not taking the part of pastors against congregations any more than I would take the part of our little girl against her pious mother, but what I write is merely to blaze the way, as it were, to a settlement of the question: Whether a pastor is a shepherd set over a congregation by the Almighty, or whether he is a man whom an angry God has delivered into their hands that he may suffer for his sins.
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Have I said anywhere in this paper that Spring has come? Well, I say it now. It is a sad, gloomy time to man, however woman may look at it. It is now that the family man sees looming ahead the Easter bonnet trimmed with deadly $ marks, and the Spring outfits embroidered with the same costly material. Why is this? Now, I have known X., my next door neighbor, for eleven years, and in that time I have never known him to have an Easter hat or an Easter coat or an Easter pair of pants. I saw him at the Opera lately and his wife had on a seal skin sacque, and plain X. himself had on no gloves. Why should X. be compelled to carry through life a bird of paradise, while he appears in the sombre and often shiny costume of the more humble crow? And now that I have asked that audacious question, let me ask another: Why is it that as soon as the frost of age touches a man he commences to tone down his dress, and as soon as it touches a woman she commences to tone hers up with all the hot house appliances to imitate the spring time of life. I don't ask this in a snarly spirit; but as a psychological riddle. Why is it that in November, with all her brown foliage and scarlet leaves and wind reddened sky, cannot be content with being handsome and natural, but should resort to the buds and flowers and bird-like airs of beautiful June to make her pretty. Ah, there are no flowers, no feathers, no ribbons, no latest fashions that can hold their own against Youth. Before it the milliner, the tailor and the mantua-maker are helpless to render effective assistance to Age. Ah, Youth, careless, painless, peerless, I drink to you—and put a drop of peppermint in it. Tom, I was up a little late with the boys last evening.
OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XII
Somehow the town presents to me a bereaved appearance. Since the action of the authorities clearing the sidewalks, I seem to miss some of my best friends. The tenants of the pavement had become my companions, after a fashion, so familiar were they to me. The extravagant gentleman who stood in front of the clothing store, with his change of clothes every day and the fixed stare out of his rain-washed eyes, was one of my warmest friends. He was no fair weather friend. The dusts of March, the showers of April, made no difference with him. He was there, always there, with his waterproof for the rain, his duster for the summer heat, and his sou-wester perched on his head when the Equinox set in. He had one of the most even dispositions I ever knew and always regarded me with the same mild, far-off look, whatever uniform or decoration he wore. He was the same with a blue jumper and overalls as he was with a diagonal suit with "This style $25" flying from the button-hole. There was a great gap the morning he disappeared. The deserted street looked like a Sunday or a funeral or some other occasion of unusual sadness. I went in one day to inquire about him. I didn't have far to go; he had been tumbled into a corner with empty collar boxes, a broken coal scuttle, and some fire kindling. He appeared deeply mortified. "This is a strange fix you find me in, Mr. Boyzy," he said as he struggled to sit endwise on the bottom of the coal scuttle, "and it is a strange world we find both of ourselves in, sir. Great crimes are committed in the name of progress, sir, very great, and this is one of them. I have been a public man in this city for ten years, sir. I have guided the tastes of the public—few knew how to clothe themselves until I showed them, and few would buy their clothing until they had seen me. I have had men stand and discuss my clothes for hours, making up their minds about the spring fashions. These city authorities little know what they are doing. But what do they care? Look at their clothes and tell me how many of them fit. What is it to them that a public man and benefactor lies here in a pile of collar boxes? They say that the old ideas that admitted of my standing on the sidewalk are done away with, and that this is an age of progress. What sort of progress is this, that takes a man who has been prominent before the people for years and dumps him into a dust pile? Look at me! I have never lacked backbone. Why, I am all backbone. [He had a backbone of iron]. No man ever knew me to get out of the way of a crowd or go with it. I have been a consistent public man with a backbone for ten years and here I am in a dust-pile!" Here the coal scuttle slipped and my old friend tumbled into the collar boxes with a groan. As I left him I could not help thinking how many public men all consistency and backbone have made similar reputations with my dummy friend by never going with or getting out of the way of the crowd, and ended by being tumbled into the dust-bin just for the lack of a little wisdom. Alas, how like my dethroned friend we all are, in the respect of clamoring about our opinions and wrongs long after the public has forgotten both them and us.
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"This is a pretty condition for me to be in now, isn't it?" asked another old friend of mine that I went to look after. "Why, don't you remember me? I'm the fish that always used to be at the door as you went by." It was true, I could hardly remember him. He used to lie in state on a board on the sidewalk on hot days, half covered with ice, and his scales looking as bright as silver. Some mornings, I am afraid I used to catch a faint whiff of his breath, but of course this was not to be remembered against him in his great trouble now. His troubles had greatly changed him. From the aristocratic exclusiveness of the ice-board he had been reduced to being strung up by a string through his gills to a nail in the wall. The brightness of his scales was gone, and as far as rank went, he looked as ordinary as the bunch of humble hickory shad that hung near him. "What do you think of this way of treating a fish that has come three hundred miles from the coast to help you out in Lent? What sort of infidel authorities has this city got, to string up the friend of repentance and reform in this sort of way? Why, such a town as this ought to have nothing but herrings to keep Lent with, and they ought to be salt." It was no use trying to comfort my noble friend, but I could not help thinking that, fish that he was, he was human in finding his great trouble not so much in being strung up now, as in having seen better days and more distinction. And very human he was, too, in taking the ill-treatment of himself as an offence against Lent. We are so prone to take a grievance directed against ourselves as an affront to our politics, our church, or something else to which we bear about the same relation that a fish does to Lent.