With remarkable presence of mind the Governor picked up his hat as if he had merely happened to drop it on the guard of the boat, and walked quietly off to his state-room, leaving the regular ushers to restore order.
If I have not before mentioned Dorr’s presence on the Palace, it has been because I have been trying to explain in my puzzled memory how he came there, and what was the line of his duties. I should have put him down at once as the literary gentleman of the establishment, were it not for the fact that we had another who manifestly filled that office.
I allude to the gentleman who edited the daily paper which was printed in the museum and distributed gratuitously to its patrons. This man was the founder and for a long time the editor of one of the best-known and most influential journals now published in the Union. The wreck of a fine scholar and a graphic writer, who had been the associate of some of the highest and best of our land, it was a melancholy sight to see him industriously printing his little paper before the stolid, curious people who thronged about his stand.
At the same stand gingerbread and brilliant-colored candies and lemonade were dispensed,—pale red lemonade, which seemed, as one might say, continually beholding its maker, and only half succeeding in its attempt to blush. Poor old fellow! the labor of his hands and brain was, as I have remarked, distributed gratuitously. The lemonade was sold for five cents a glass.
This thought, if it ever occurred to him, could have had little force, for his philosophy taught him to accept every situation unmurmuringly. He had but one argument to establish his theory of fate, and he was never weary of repeating it. When any passing philanthropist would grapple with him and endeavor to show him that he ought to be very miserable, he would tell this story.
“There was a man,” he would say, “at work on a scaffold of a four-story building in Cincinnati. The scaffolding gave way, and he fell those four stories, and one besides, down into the cellar. Fifteen minutes thereafter he was up again, uninjured, at his work. A week afterward he was walking in front of Alf Burnett’s saloon, stepped on a watermelon-rind, fell, broke his neck, and died instantly.”
The narrator would never vouchsafe any explanation. When his hearer, making an application for himself, would accuse our philosopher of fatalism, he would only smile good-naturedly, and go about his duties. It must, indeed, have been a dull penetration that could see nothing better in the old fellow’s story,—especially under the every-day commentary of his uncomplaining life. And I am glad to say others put this larger interpretation upon him and his philosophy, that his own misfortunes had taught him, more than his story, the ways of God are inscrutable; that He is all in all, and that, high or low, successful or broken, we are all alike in His merciful hands.
Scarcely three years ago I saw my old friend for the last time. We met in the street at San Francisco, where he then lived, and where he has since died. How well he was known and loved there was in some measure attested by the honorable manner of his burial.
There are few printers, at least, in the metropolis of the Pacific who will not remember him, although they may have known nothing more of his personal history than that he was the veteran attaché of Calhoun’s job-rooms. Whatever the straits to which his peculiar misfortune brought him, he never lost that indescribable dignity and courtesy which were a part of his heritage as a born gentleman.
Poor old John McCreary! he would have written a better obituary of me than this, and published it in his Palace Journal, if I had chanced to get knocked on the head in some of the riots and perilous fights which we witnessed together at those lawless backwoods landings.