As there is no period of history without its John Smith, so there is no profession that does not enroll, no trade that does not contain, no occupation, from an office-holder’s up to that of an honest man’s, that does not embrace his name. Everywhere, on the sea and land; between every parallel of latitude, almost between every pair of sheets; at every pole and at every polling-place; on all rivers and in every strait; at every point, and even at Point-no-point; on the top, at the middle and bottom of every hill, enterprise, company, board of directors, and job; in all churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples; preaching, singing, and listening; talking all tongues, as well as curing, drying, and eating them; in prisons, police-stations, pulpits, grand-jury and other boxes; to-day hung, to-morrow putting on his black cap and sentencing the culprit to the rope’s end, and the day following condemning a pair to a less hempen noose; in the pugilistic ring, or ecclesiastical fight; the actor on the stage, and at the same time the spectator in the box, looking at himself personating his own character,—for every character is his,—everywhere, and in everything, is found this jolly, morose, lazy, active, sleepy, wakeful, fighting, pacific, coarse, refined, fat, lean, tall, short, blue-eyed, black-eyed John Smith.
In truth, when we think of him as ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipresent, doing all things in all places, carrying on all businesses, living on all the real estate, owning at some time or other all the personal property, pocketing all the greenbacks, whistling to all the dogs, riding all the horses, looking after all the little poodle dogs, buying shoes and stockings for all the children agreeable and disagreeable, we get into such a world of John Smiths, such a nightmare of Johns, such a maelstrom of Smiths, such a gurgling, roaring, splitting, spitting, laughing, screeching, titilated, exhilarated, carnival, and Fourth of July of John Smiths, that we seem to be in a room lined with mirrors that reflect only John Smiths from all sides; indeed, we almost fancy ourselves a John Smith, our father and mother a John Smith, and all our aunts, cousins, uncles, nephews, brothers, and sisters, and even their clergymen, grocers, shoemakers, bootblacks, to be John Smiths, and that our last note and the mortgage on our house is owned by John Smith.
But the Smith family do not create all the humor and spend all the jollity upon others. Funny are the scenes which transpire among themselves. At a family party two John Smiths introduced, and each staring at his other self, is a conundrum; three a charade, in which the whole company give it up. A popular young lady, with card in her belt to carry the memory of her numerous engagements, finds herself swimming in doubt as to the identity of her partners, when John Smith claims her in the next dance, then for the following cotillon, then bows over her hand for the succeeding polka, and so confronts her at every turn of the figure and every return of the dance, until she doubts her own individuality, and requests to be baptized over again with a new name to get out of the tangle. Then at a family dinner-party of Smiths, when Mr. Smith asks Mr. John Smith the part of the turkey he prefers, and several voices in different tones and keys indicate as many different portions of the bird, there is a delightful series of warm explanations which enables the meal to become healthily cool, while each of the responders courteously leaves the piece he wants and takes one he did not desire.
Among the comic situations which Mr. Smith unconsciously creates are, that of a conveyancer, in a large city, endeavoring to trace a title through a J. S., or trying to ascertain which of the one hundred in the directory is the rightful defendant in a judgment, or the mortgagor in a mortgage, constituting a lien on the property sought to be transferred; or a country cousin, for the first time in New York or Philadelphia, consulting the directory to find her puzzled way to the forgotten residence of her cousin John Smith, or innocently asking a polite but humorous gentleman, in the street whether he knows John Smith’s house; or a clergyman in a city prayer-meeting asking John Smith to lead in prayer, and finding three or four, with closed eyes, responding to the request; or a notary making up his mind where to leave a notice of protest of a large note on the indorser John Smith, who wittily wrote his name without any address under it. Indeed, it would be one of the causes célèbres for a jury to determine whether a child might not guiltlessly mistake his parent who bore only this undistinguishing name; whether a forgery of the name could be committed; whether an express company be bound to deliver a trunk to this nominis umbræ; or whether a wife, Mrs. John Smith, could be lawfully convicted of eloping with any one.
Then when John Smith comes to die, in the churchyard, and afterwards when the dead arise—but we stagger under the vision of puzzled bones and stop.
We cannot write more lucidly the history of the John Smith of Pocahontas fame. It grows mythical the more we look at it; an abstraction dancing over the coals of the early settlement of Virginia, a face and figure flitting like a twisting flame, up, around, and through the grate; seeming as we try to fix our attention upon him like a dozen different men, one falling in love with the young squaw, another surveying the James and Rappahannock, another mastering the turbulent spirits of a dissolute and discontented settlement; another caught and brought before Powhatan, while a graceful girl of twelve summers gently puts away the descending club; another sailing to England, and peeping out ever and anon among the friendly faces that make the living frame to her young virgin face, yet again dissolving and melting into the gray dimness of the morning light. Of only one thing do we feel certain in regard to John Smith in general, the average John Smith, that the portrait here presented, taken by instantaneous photography, representing his multitudinous character, is the only genuine and original likeness ever published.
CHAPTER IV.
OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NEW ENGLAND STATES.
Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies, etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and Doings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means.
“Tell me,” says a witty Frenchman, “what time in the morning a man rises, and I will tell you his notions of the character of the Germans.” Tell us the kind of church a man attends, and we will undertake to give you his opinion of the character of the Puritan Pilgrims, and the objects and value of the New England settlements. Not more various are men’s religions than their New England convictions; as checkered and contrary as the black and white squares on a Scotch shawl. Some people, of pious trainings but of an agricultural turn of mind, hold the idea that New England came, like the wonderful coach in the story of Cinderella, from a pumpkin; and hence travel naturally to the conclusion that the principal mission of her people is to keep up Thanksgiving day.
Others run all their lives with the notion that the Yankee States were settled by a race of peripatetic traders,—a revival of the school of Aristotle,—let out in Greece, and taking a play-spell here. Their picture of New England would be a pedler, dipped like a tallow-candle in an economical, tight-fitting suit of tawny homespun, driving a wagon full of tin notions, clocks, and a variety of domestic nutmegs, artistically whittled out of bass-wood, singing Old Hundred, with a pitch-pipe close to his nose to keep it in tune. Others, on the contrary, regard it as a large, full-bearing orchard in autumn, laden with golden fruit, fall-pippins, pearmains, seek-no-furthers, russets, and spitzenbergs, supplying its owners, the neighborhood, and the distant market with their incomparable harvest. Fortunate for the historian, for debating-societies, and the magazines are these variegated opinions. They give a spiciness to New England, as if she were a tropical garden instead of a poor-man’s patch, fenced in with rocks and spiked down with long pegs to prevent the frost in the spring from heaving her up uncomfortably. They serve, like French cookery, to present the same dish simmering in various sauces under different aspects and names, and yet all from the same little market-basket.