WOMAN’S BUILDING.
Among the homesteading pioneers, there came to the great timber lands a New England family by the name, we will say, of Brewster, as it is a good one. The young people had a battle with the great pines and firs and the bears, and with a clearing. They had a rich aunt in old Massachusetts; and as young Brewster was her favorite, she decided to come and make her home with him.
She was a benevolent old lady, such as are to be found in all the village churches of New England. Her first concern, upon arriving in the new country, was to find a way to invest a part of her money in missionary enterprises.
She saw an Indian graveyard in the trees. Then she met some Flatheads, and was at once happy in the thought that a special providence had directed her here, as a pioneer in a mission field.
She secured as a first pupil an Indian by the name of Curley. Finding that he and his family lived in a tent of skins, she thought that she would build for him a house, and promised him that she would go and visit him when it was completed.
“What kind of a house would you like to have, Curley?” she asked, one day after he had been especially teachable.
“Oh, a white house like the Great Father’s at Washington.”
“Aunt Boston” gave Curley one hundred dollars to build a white house, and he rode away delighted, on his little Cayuse horse.
Weeks passed; Christmas came, and good Aunt Boston thought that she would ride over to the reservation and surprise Curley in the new white house, which she had not yet seen. The thought greatly pleased her, as Curley had told her that he was raising a Cayuse colt as a present for her.
So she set out on Christmas morning in a mountain wagon. The air was clear and warm, for the Puget Sound atmosphere is an almost continuous springtime. The tops of the giant firs were filled with sunlight instead of snow. Here and there a deer bounded across the way.
She came at last to a clearing, and saw the white house.
There was no mistaking it. Close by was a tent of skins, which she took to be the former habitation of Curley. She rode up to the white house. The window was open.
The rattle of the wheels had caused a commotion in the interesting place. A pretty Cayuse colt put his head out of the window of the white house, and Curley at the same time opened the fold of the tent.
Aunt Boston was quite outdone in her plan of benevolence. Curley had made the white house a stable for her colt, and was as happy as she in his plans of benevolence and charity.
An Episcopal missionary recently told me, to his own disadvantage, the following story, which illustrates the same generous trait in the Puget Sound Indians:—
“There once came to the mission station on a visit an old Christian Indian, and he continued to make the mission his home. In my early work in the territory I had lived with him, and had found him very brotherly and benevolent. He had shared everything with me.
“A month or more passed, and as he gave me no hint of departure, and did nothing toward the support of himself or the cause, I said to him,—
“‘Mountain Pine, you have been here two moons; how much longer do you intend to stay?’
“‘It may be one week, it may be one month, it may be one year, it may be one life.’
“‘But, Mountain Pine, the Good Book says that if a man do not work, neither shall he eat.’
“Mountain Pine rose slowly, and drew his blanket around him. He raised his arm and pointed to the chapel.
“‘Do you wah-wah over there?’
“‘Yes, you know, Mountain Pine, there is where I worship.’
“‘Brother, you wah-wah over there. You came a stranger to me in my cabin. I say, “You have half; you may stay one week, you may stay one moon, you may stay one year, you may stay one life. I hunt and give you half my venison.” I come to your cabin. You say, “How long you stay?” You say, “You go work!”’
“‘You wah-wah over there. You heap wah-wah, but you no good!’
“He drew his blanket closer around him, and majestically strode out of the house, and I never saw Mountain Pine again.”
The favorite chiefs of the early settlers were Seattle and Pat Keanim, of the Snoqualmees. Seattle was appointed chief by a territorial governor, but Pat Keanim had the heart of his people. He espoused the cause of the pioneers and fought for them, and though often distrusted, was true in the dark days of the war. He had a poetic and really beautiful face.
The hop harvest in the Puyallup valley yearly gathers the Indians there, as they used to meet, according to the old legend, in the happy valley of the Olympic mountains. The harvest begins in August, and lasts a month.
The days are bright, and at night the moon hangs clear over the waters. Working people, young and old, Indians, Chinese, white people, black people, every one desiring much money for light work, congregate here.
All is gay and happy. The nights are festivals. Hither the Indians come on Cayuse horses and in canoes. Their boats fill the harbors. And here the dying races renew their primitive life.
CHINESE THEATRE.
THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER
A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp, or morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water’s edge, into a high ridge, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size. It was under one of these gigantic trees, according to old stories, that Kidd, the pirate, buried his treasure. The inlet allowed a facility to bring the money in a boat secretly, and at night, to the very foot of the hill. The elevation of the place permitted a good look-out to be kept, that no one was at hand; while the remarkable trees formed good landmarks by which the place might easily be found again. The old stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well known, he always does with buried treasure, particularly when it has been ill gotten. Be that as it may, Kidd never returned to recover his wealth,—being shortly after seized at Boston, sent out to England, and there hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were prevalent in New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees, there lived near this place a meagre, miserly fellow of the name of Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone, and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin-trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his hunger, and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the passer-by, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine. The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom’s wife was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them: the lonely wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamor and clapper-clawing, eyed the den of discord askance, and hurried on his way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood, he took what he considered a short cut homewards, through the swamp. Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noon-day, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water-snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous forest,—stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees,—startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a piece of firm ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during their wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of fort which they had looked upon as almost impregnable, and had used as a place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained of the Indian fort but a few embankments gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks and other forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the dark pines and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the old fort; and he paused there for a while to rest himself. Any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely melancholy place,—for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed down from the time of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here, and made sacrifices to the Evil Spirit. Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving with his walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on the weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this death-blow had been given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in the last foothold of the Indian warriors.
“Humph!” said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake the dirt from it.
“Leave that skull alone!” said a gruff voice.
Tom lifted up his eyes, and beheld a great black man, seated directly opposite him on the stump of a tree. He was exceedingly surprised, having neither seen nor heard any one approach, and he was still more perplexed on observing, as well as the gathering gloom would permit, that the stranger was neither negro nor Indian. It is true, he was dressed in a rude half-Indian garb, and had a red belt or sash swathed round his body; but his face was neither black nor copper color, but swarthy and dingy and begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires and forges. He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood out from his head in all directions, and he bore an axe on his shoulder.
He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.
“What are you doing in my grounds?” said the black man, with a hoarse growling voice.
“Your grounds?” said Tom, with a sneer; “no more your grounds than mine,—they belong to Deacon Peabody.”
“Deacon Peabody be damned,” said the stranger, “as I flatter myself he will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to his neighbors’. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is faring.” Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one of the great trees, fair and flourishing without, but rotten at the core, and saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so that the first high wind was likely to blow it down. On the bark of the tree was scored the name of Deacon Peabody. He now looked round, and found most of the tall trees marked with the name of some great men of the colony, and all more or less scored by the axe. The one on which he had been seated, and which had just been hewn down, bore the name of Crowninshield; and he recollected a mighty rich man of that name, who made a vulgar display of wealth, which it was whispered he had acquired by buccaneering.
“He’s just ready for burning!” said the black man, with a growl of triumph. “You see I am likely to have a good stock of firewood for winter.”
“But what right have you,” said Tom, “to cut down Deacon Peabody’s timber?”
“The right of prior claim,” said the other. “This woodland belonged to me long before one of your white-faced Yankee race of rascals put foot upon the soil.”
“And pray, who are you, if I may be so bold?” said Tom.
“Oh, I go by various names. I am the Wild Huntsman in some countries; the Black Miner in others. In this neighborhood I am known by the name of the Black Woodsman. I am he to whom the red men devoted this spot, and now and then roasted a white man by way of sweet-smelling sacrifice. Since the red men have been exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at the persecutions of Quakers and Anabaptists. I am the great patron and prompter of slave-dealers, and the grand master of the Salem witches.”
“The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not,” said Tom, sturdily, “you are he commonly called Old Scratch.”
“The name at your service!” replied the black man, with a half-civil nod.
Such was the opening of this interview, according to the old story, though it has almost too familiar an air to be credited. One would think that to meet with such a singular personage in this wild lonely place, would have shaken any man’s nerves; but Tom was a hard-minded fellow, not easily daunted, and he had lived so long with a termagant wife, that he did not even fear the devil.
It is said that after this commencement, they had a long and earnest conversation together, as Tom returned homewards. The black man told him of great sums of money which had been buried by Kidd the pirate, under the oak-trees on the high ridge not far from the morass. All these were under his command and protected by his power, so that none could find them but such as propitiated his favor. These he offered to place in Tom Walker’s reach, having conceived an especial kindness for him; but they were to be had only on certain conditions. What these conditions were, may be easily surmised, though Tom never disclosed them publicly. They must have been very hard, for he required time to think of them, and he was not a man to stick at trifles where money was in view. When they reached the edge of the swamp, the stranger paused.
“What proof have I that all you have been telling me is true?” said Tom.
“There is my signature,” said the black man, pressing his finger on Tom’s forehead. So saying, he turned off among the thickets of the swamp, and seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down, into the earth, until nothing but his head and shoulders could be seen, and so on, until he totally disappeared.
When Tom reached home he found the black print of a finger burnt, as it were, into his forehead, which nothing could obliterate.
The first news his wife had to tell him was the sudden death of Absalom Crowninshield, the rich buccaneer. It was announced in the papers, with the usual flourish, that “a great man had fallen in Israel.”
Tom recollected the tree which his black friend had just hewn down, and which was ready for burning. “Let the freebooter roast,” said Tom; “who cares!” He now felt convinced that all he had heard and seen was no illusion.
He was not prone to let his wife into his confidence; but as this was an uneasy secret, he willingly shared it with her. All her avarice was awakened at the mention of hidden gold, and she urged her husband to comply with the black man’s terms, and secure what would make them wealthy for life. However Tom might have felt disposed to sell himself to the devil, he was determined not to do so to oblige his wife; so he flatly refused, out of the mere spirit of contradiction. Many and bitter were the quarrels they had on the subject; but the more she talked, the more resolute was Tom not to be damned to please her. At length she determined to drive the bargain on her own account, and if she succeeded, to keep all the gain to herself. Being of the same fearless temper as her husband, she set off for the old Indian fort toward the close of a summer’s day. She was many hours absent. When she came back she was reserved and sullen in her replies. She spoke something of a black man whom she had met about twilight, hewing at the root of a tall tree. He was sulky, however, and would not come to terms; she was to go again with a propitiatory offering; but what it was she forbore to say. The next she set off again for the swamp, with her apron heavily laden. Tom waited and waited for her, but in vain: midnight came, but she did not make her appearance; morning, noon, night returned, but still she did not come. Tom now grew uneasy for her safety; especially as he found she had carried off in her apron the silver tea-pot and spoons, and every portable article of value. Another night elapsed, another morning came; but no wife. In a word, she was never heard of more.
A FAMILY OF BERBERINES IN THE STREET OF CAIRO, MIDWAY.
What was her real fate nobody knows, in consequence of so many pretending to know. It is one of those facts that have become confounded by a variety of historians. Some assert that she lost her way among the tangled mazes of the swamp, and sunk into some pit or slough; others, more uncharitable, hinted that she had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some other province; while others assert that the Tempter had decoyed her into a dismal quagmire, on top of which her hat was found lying. In confirmation of this, it was said a great black man, with an axe on his shoulder, was seen late that very evening coming out of the swamp, carrying a bundle tied in a check apron, with an air of surly triumph.
The most current and probable story, however, observes that Tom Walker grew so anxious about the fate of his wife and his property that he set out at length to seek them both at the Indian fort. During a long summer’s afternoon, he searched about the gloomy place, but no wife was to be seen. He called her name repeatedly, but she was nowhere to be heard. The bittern alone responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull-frog croaked dolefully from a neighboring pool. At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the clamor of carrion crows that were hovering about a cypress-tree. He looked, and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron, and hanging in the branches of the tree, with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy, for he recognized his wife’s apron, and supposed it to contain the household valuables.
“Let us get hold of the property,” said he, consolingly to himself, “and we will endeavor to do without the woman.”
As he scrambled up the tree, the vulture spread its wide wings, and sailed off screaming into the deep shadows of the forest Tom seized the check apron, but, woful sight! found nothing but a heart and liver tied up in it.
Such, according to the most authentic old story, was all that was to be found of Tom’s wife. She had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her husband; but though a female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have died game, however, from the part that remained unconquered. Indeed, it is said Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and several handfuls of hair, that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse black shock of the woodsman. Tom knew his wife’s prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the signs of a fierce clapper-clawing. “Egad,” said he to himself, “Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!”
Tom consoled himself for the loss of his property by the loss of his wife; for he was a little of a philosopher. He even felt something like gratitude toward the Black Woodsman, who he considered had done him a kindness. He sought, therefore, to cultivate a further acquaintance with him, but for some time without success: the old black legs played shy, for whatever people may think, he is not always to be had for calling for; he knows how to play his cards when pretty sure of his game.
At length, it is said, when delay had whetted Tom’s eagerness to the quick, and prepared him to agree to anything rather than not gain the promised treasure, he met the black man one evening in his usual woodman dress, with his axe on his shoulder, sauntering along the edge of the swamp, and humming a tune. He affected to receive Tom’s advance with great indifference, made brief replies, and went on humming his tune.
By degrees, however, Tom brought him to business, and they began to haggle about the terms on which the former was to have the pirate’s treasure. There was one condition which need not be mentioned, being generally understood in all cases where the devil grants favors; but there were others about which, though of less importance, he was inflexibly obstinate. He insisted that the money found through his means should be employed in his service. He proposed, therefore, that Tom should employ it in the black traffic, that is to say, that he should fit out a slave ship. This, however, Tom resolutely refused; he was bad enough in all conscience, but the devil himself could not tempt him to turn slave-dealer.
Finding Tom so squeamish on this point, he did not insist upon it; but proposed instead that he should turn usurer,—the devil being extremely anxious for the increase of usurers, looking upon them as his peculiar people. To this no objections were made, for it was just to Tom’s taste.
“You shall open a broker’s shop in Boston next month,” said the black man.
“I’ll do it to-morrow, if you wish,” said Tom.
“You shall lend money at two per cent. a month.”
“Egad, I’ll charge four!” replied Tom Walker.
“You shall extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchant to bankruptcy—”
“I’ll drive him to the devil,” cried Tom, eagerly.
“You are the usurer for my money!” said the black legs, with delight. “When will you want the rhino?”
“This very night.”
“Done!” said the devil.
“Done!” said Tom Walker. So they shook hands, and struck a bargain.
A few days’ time saw Tom Walker seated behind his desk in a counting-house in Boston. His reputation for a ready moneyed man, who would lend money out for a good consideration, soon spread abroad. Everybody remembers the days of Governor Belcher, when money was particularly scarce. It was a time of paper credit. The country had been deluged with government bills; the famous Land Bank had been established; there had been a rage for speculation; the people had run mad with schemes for new settlements, and for building cities in the wilderness; land-jobbers went about with maps of grants, and townships, and Eldorados, lying nobody knew where, but which everybody was ready to purchase. In a word, the great speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, and everybody was dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual, the fever had subsided; the dream had gone off,—and the imaginary fortunes with it,—the patients were left in doleful plight, and the whole country resounded with the consequent cry of “hard times.”
At this propitious time of public distress did Tom Walker set up as a usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged with customers. The needy and the adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit,—in short, every one driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices,—hurried to Tom Walker. Thus Tom was the universal friend of the needy, and he acted like “a friend in need,”—that is to say, he always exacted good pay and good security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the hardness of his terms. He accumulated bonds and mortgages, gradually squeezed his customers closer and closer, and sent them at length dry as a sponge from his door.
In this way he made money hand over hand, became a rich and mighty man, and exalted his cocked hat upon ’Change. He built himself a vast house out of ostentation, but left the greater part of it unfinished and unfurnished out of parsimony. He even set up a carriage in the fulness of his vain-glory, though he nearly starved the horses which drew it; and as the ungreased wheels groaned and screeched on the axle-trees, you would have thought you heard the souls of the poor debtors he was squeezing.
As Tom waxed old, however, he grew thoughtful. Having secured the good things of this world, he began to feel anxious about those of the next. He thought with regret on the bargain he had made with his black friend, and set his wits to work to cheat him out of the conditions. He became, therefore, all of a sudden, a violent church-goer. He prayed loudly and strenuously, as if Heaven were to be taken by force of lungs. Indeed, one might always tell when he had sinned most during the week, by the clamor of his Sunday devotion. The quiet Christians who had been modestly and steadfastly travelling Zionward, were struck with self-reproach at seeing themselves so suddenly outstripped in their career by this new-made convert. Tom was as rigid in religious as in money matters; he was a stern supervisor and censurer of his neighbors, and seemed to think every sin entered up to their account became a credit on his own side of the page. He even talked of the expediency of reviving the persecution of Quakers and Anabaptists. In a word, Tom’s zeal became as notorious as his riches.
Still, in spite of all this strenuous attention to forms, Tom had a lurking dread that the devil, after all, would have his due. That he might not be taken unawares, therefore, it is said he always carried a small Bible in his coat pocket. He had also a great folio Bible on his counting-house desk, and would frequently be found reading it when people called on business; on such occasions he would lay his green spectacles on the book to mark the place, while he turned around to drive some usurious bargain.
Some say that Tom grew a little crack-brained in his old days, and that, fancying his end approaching, he had his horse new shod, saddled, and bridled, and buried with his feet uppermost; because he supposed that at the last day the world would be turned upside down,—in which case he should find his horse standing ready for mounting, and he was determined at the worst to give his old friend a run for it. This, however, is probably a mere old wives’ fable. If he really did take such a precaution, it was totally superfluous; at least so says the authentic old legend, which closes his story in the following manner:
On one hot afternoon in the dog-days, just as a terrible black thunder-gust was coming up, Tom sat in his counting-house in his white linen cap and India silk morning-gown. He was on the point of foreclosing a mortgage, by which he would complete the ruin of an unlucky land-speculator, for whom he had professed the greatest friendship. The poor land-jobber begged him to grant a few months’ indulgence. Tom had grown testy and irritated, and refused another day.
“My family will be ruined, and brought upon the parish,” said the land-jobber.
