“Ah! old Mother Church of England!” I thought, “could you do no better by your son than this? Whose fault is this credulity? How is it that he needs phenomena to give him faith in truth?”
“But I have not told you,” the old gentleman went on, “about my disasters. Perhaps you are getting tired of my prattle, sir, my old man’s talk. I am really not so very old, if my hair is thin, and my beard gray,—barely fifty, and after this journey I expect to be quite a boy again. I suppose you were surprised this afternoon, when I spoke of having worked in a coal-mine, were you not?”
The old man seemed to have some little pride in this singularity of fortune. I expressed the proper interest in such a change of destiny.
“You shall hear how it happened,” he said. “You remember,—no, you are too young to remember, but you have heard how we all went mad about mills and mines in Lancashire some twenty years ago.”
“Yes,” said I, “it was then that steam and cotton began to understand each other, and coal and negroes became important.”
“What a panic of speculation we all rushed into in Lancashire!” said the old gentleman. “We all felt, we gentlemen, that we were mere idlers, not doing our duty, as England expects every man to do, unless we were building chimneys, or digging pits. We were all either grubbing down in the bowels of the earth for coal, or rearing great chimneys up in the air to burn it. I really think most of us began to like smoke better than blue sky; certainly it tasted sweeter to us than our good old English fog.
“Well, sir,” continued he, “I was like my neighbors. I must dabble in milling and mining. I was willing to be richer. Indeed, as soon as I began to speculate, I thought myself richer. I spent more money. I went deeper into my operations. One can throw a great treasure into a coal-mine without seeing any return, and can send a great volume of smoke up a chimney before the mill begins to pay. It is an old story. I will not tire you with it. I was all at once a ruined man.”
He paused a moment, and looked about the dim, star-lit prairie, with the white wagons and the low fort in the distance.
“Well,” said he, in the careless, airy manner which seemed his characteristic one, “if I had not been ruined, I should have stayed stupidly at home, and never worked in a coal-mine, or travelled on the plains, or had the pleasure of meeting you and your friend here. It is all fresh and novel. If it were not for my daughter and my duties to the church, I should take my adventures as lightly as you do when your gun misses fire and you lose a dinner.
“The thing that troubled me most at the time of my disasters,” he resumed, “was being defeated for Parliament. There had always been a Clitheroe there. When my father died, I took his seat. I used to spend freely on elections; but I thought they sent me because they liked me, or for love of the old name. When I lost my fortune there came a snob, sir, and stood against me. He accused me of being a free-thinker,—as if the Clitheroes had not always been liberal! He got up a cry, and bought votes. My own tenants, my old tenants, whom I had feasted out of pure good-will a hundred times, turned against me. I lost my election and my last shilling.