A day or two after, a highly respectable and aged citizen, attracted by the articles, in the Transcript, informed me, that his father, born in 1727, told him, that he had seen Peter Faneuil, in his garden, and that, on one foot, he wore a very high-heeled shoe. This, probably, gave occasion to the considerate bequest of Thomas Kilby.
The will, as my informant states, upon the authority of Mr. John Page, coming to the knowledge of Peter, he was so much pleased with the humor of it, that, probably, having a knowledge of the testator before, he sent for him, and made him his agent, at Canso.
Peter was a kind-hearted man. The gentleman who gave me the fact, concerning the high-heeled shoe, informed me, upon his father’s authority, that old Andrew Faneuil—the same, who, in his will, prays God, for “the perfecting of his charities”—put a poor, old, schoolmaster, named Walker, into jail, for debt. Imprisonment then, for debt, was a serious and lingering affair. Peter, in the flesh—not his angel—privately paid the poor man’s debt, and set the prisoner free.
No. CXXXVII.
Those words of Horace were the words of soberness and truth—Oh imitatores, vulgum pecus!—I loathe imitators and imitations of all sorts. How cheap must that man feel, who awakens hesterno vitio, from yesterday’s debauch, on imitation gin or brandy! Let no reader of the Transcript suppose, that I am so far behind the times, as to question the respectability of being drunk, on the real, original Scheidam or Cogniac, whether at funerals, weddings, or ordinations. But I consider imitation gin or brandy, at a funeral, a point blank insult to the corpse.
Everybody knows, that old oaks, old friendships, and old mocha must grow—they cannot be made. My horse is frightened, nearly out of his harness, almost every day of his life, by the hissing and jetting of the steam, and the clatter of the machinery, as I pass a manufactory, or grindery, of imitation coffee. Imitation coffee! What would my old friend, Melli Melli, the Tunisian ambassador, with whom—long, long ago—I have taken a cup of his own particular, once and again, at Chapotin’s Hotel, in Summer Street, say to such a thing as this!
This grindery is located, in an Irish neighborhood, and there used to be a great number of Irish children thereabouts. The number has greatly diminished of late. I know not why, but, as I passed, the other day, the story that Dickens tells of the poor sausage-maker, whose broken buttons, among the sausage meat, revealed his unlucky destiny, came forcibly to mind. By the smell, I presume, there is a roastery, connected with the establishment; and, now I think of it, the atmosphere, round about, is filled with the odor of roast pig—a little overdone.
Good things, of all sorts, have stimulated the imitative powers of man, from the diamond to the nutmeg. Even death—and death is a good thing to him, whose armor of righteousness is on, cap-a-pie—death has been occasionally imitated; and really, now and then, the thing has been very cleverly done. I refer not to cases of catalepsy or trance, nor to cases of total suspension of sensibility and voluntary motion, for a time, under the agency of sulphuric ether, or chloroform.
In 1843, at the request of her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State, for the Home Department, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, Barrister at Law, made “a report on the results of a special inquiry into the practice of interment in towns.” This report is very severe upon our fraternity; but, I must confess, it is a most able and interesting performance, and full of curious detail. The demands of the English undertaker, it appears, are so oppressive upon the poor, that burial societies have been formed, upon the mutual principle. It is asserted by Mr. Chadwick, that parents, under the gripings of poverty, have actually poisoned their children, to obtain the burial money. At the Chester assizes, several trials, for infanticide, have occurred, on these grounds. “That child will not live, it is in the burial club,” is a cant and common phrase, among the Manchester paupers.