It is pleasant to meditate upon past journeys with the Bibliotaph. He was an incomparable traveling companion, buoyant, philosophic, incapable of fatigue, and never ill. Yet it is a tradition current, that he, the mighty, who called himself a friend to physicians, because he never robbed them of their time either in or out of office-hours, once succumbed to that irritating little malady known as car-sickness. He succumbed, but he met his fate bravely and with the colors of his wit flying. The circumstances are these:—
There is a certain railway thoroughfare which justly prides itself upon the beauty of its scenery. This road passes through a hill-country, and what it gains in the picturesque it loses in that rectilinear directness most grateful to the traveler with a sensitive stomach. The Bibliotaph often patronized this thoroughfare, and one day it made him sick. As the train swept around a sharp curve, he announced his earliest symptom by saying: ‘The conspicuous advantages of this road are that one gets views of the scenery and reviews of his meals.’
A few minutes later he suggested that the road would do well to change its name, and hereafter be known as ‘The Emetic G. and O.’
They who were with him proffered sympathy, but he refused to be pitied. He thought he had a remedy. He discovered that by taking as nearly as possible a reclining posture, he got temporary relief. He kept settling more and more till at last he was nearly on his back. Then he said: ‘If it be true that the lower down we get the more comfortable we are, the basements of Hell will have their compensations.’
He was too ill to say much after this, but his last word, before the final and complete extinction of his manhood, was, ‘The influence of this road is such that employees have been known involuntarily to throw up their jobs.’
The Bibliotaph invariably excited comment and attention when he was upon his travels. I do not think he altogether liked it. Perhaps he neither liked it nor disliked it. He accepted the fact that he was not as other men quite as he would have accepted any indisputable fact. He used occasionally to express annoyance because of the discrepancy between his reputation and appearance; in other words, because he seemed a man of greater fame than he was. He suffered the petty discomforts of being a personage, and enjoyed none of the advantages. He declared that he was quite willing to be much more distinguished or much less conspicuous. What he objected to was the Laodicean character of his reputation as set over against the pronounced and even startling character of his looks and manner.
He used also to note with amusement how indelible a mark certain early ambitions and tentative studies had made upon him. People invariably took him for a clergyman. They decided this at once and conducted themselves accordingly. He made no protest, but observed that their convictions as to how they should behave in his presence had corollaries in the shape of very definite convictions as to how he should carry himself before them. He thought that such people might be described as moral trainers. They do not profess virtue themselves, but they take a real pleasure in keeping you up to your profession.
The Bibliotaph had no explanation to give why he was so immediately and invariably accounted as one in orders. He was quite sure that the clerical look was innate, and by no means dependent upon the wearing of a high vest or a Joseph Parker style of whisker; for once as he sat in the hot room of a Turkish bath and in the Adamitic simplicity of attire suitable to the temperature and the place, a gentleman who occupied the chair nearest introduced conversation by saying, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but are you not a clergyman?’
‘This incident,’ said the Bibliotaph, ‘gave me a vivid sense of the possibility of determining a man’s profession by a cursory examination of his cuticle.’ Lowell’s conviction about N. P. Willis was well-founded: namely, that if it had been proper to do so, Willis could have worn his own plain bare skin in a way to suggest that it was a representative Broadway tailor’s best work.
I imagine that few boys escape an outburst of that savage instinct for personal adornment which expresses itself in the form of rude tattooing upon the arms. The Bibliotaph had had his attack in early days, and the result was a series of decorations of a highly patriotic character, and not at all in keeping with South Kensington standards. I said to him once, apropos of the pictures on his arms: ‘You are a great surprise to your friends in this particular.’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘few of them are aware that the volume of this Life is extra-illustrated.’