The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors, show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.
While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet. Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology, paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean spindles.
Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can. The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.
But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris. Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving maturities.
CHAPTER XXI.
PUZZLES AND CROSS-READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS.
APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869.
Puzzles about Hemp and Paper.—Weak Brains at rest.—The Return of the Holders of Sabres and Guns.—Our Dead.—Fighters become Workers.—A Modern Sisyphus rolls a Stone up Hill.—How it rolled back.—The Interpretation by Congress of its own Rights.—Southern Delegates declined.—Puzzles solved.—Vetoing made easy.—The New Orleans Riots.—The Zigzag Journey of the President to the Tomb of Douglas.—The Fenian Republic in Union Square.—The Sham-rock compared with other Rocks.—The French Moths in Mexico; and how they were singed.—Amnesties and Pardons.—Scripture outdone.—Forgiveness forced upon the Unrepenting.—Results of Congressional Reconstruction.—The President tried and one found wanting.—Value of one Vote.—Alaska and St. Thomas.—Chicago, unalarmed, goes on dis-pairing but not despairing.—The Narrow Escapes of New York.—Fiske-Ville.—Johnson gets Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.
Where to find hemp enough to suspend those who had supported the overwhelmed Confederacy was the first puzzle that presented itself to the furious patriotism of the constitutional Substitute. This, however, soon gave place to the still more difficult one, where to find paper enough to pardon them.
Four of the assassins of the good man were effectively deprived of any further earthly abuse of their weak brains, maudlin sentiments, and passions; the others were sent between stone walls or to the dry sands of the Tortugas.
The heroic holders of the sabre and musket,—their stern, sad work now done, bore them back,—draped in sable for the comrades who slept in trenched glory along the furrowed parallel, in the storm-swept field, or on the banks of the Mississippi, the Chickahominy and James,—back to the plough, to the workshop, to the peaceful businesses of life, to reunions with those whose busy fingers and busier hearts had forwarded to them love messages and mindful tokens while absent.
The army of fighters was disbanded into battalions of workers.