“Well, to make a long story short, we concluded a treaty of peace, and down I went, and there was Colonel Snell, who said he had drove over to beg my pardon for the wrong he had done to me, and said he, ‘Sam, come to me at ten o’clock on Monday, and I will put you in a way to make your fortune, as a recompense for saving my child’s life.’
“Well, I kept the appointment, tho’ I was awful skared about old Rose kissin of me again; and sais he, ‘Sam, I want to show you my establishment for making wooden clocks. One o’ them can be manufactured for two dollars, scale of prices then. Come to me for three months, and I will teach you the trade, only you musn’t carry it on in Connecticut to undermine me.’ I did so, and thus accidentally I became a clockmaker.
“To sell my wares I came to Nova Scotia. By a similar accident I met the Squire in this province, and made his acquaintance. I wrote a journal of our tour, and for want of a title he put my name to it, and called it ‘Sam Slick, the Clockmaker.’ That book introduced me to General Jackson, and he appointed me attaché to our embassy to England, and that again led to Mr Polk making me Commissioner of the Fisheries, which, in its turn, was the means of my having the honour of your acquaintance,” and I made him a scrape of my hind leg.
“Now,” sais I, “all this came from the accident of my havin’ saved a child’s life one day. I owe my ‘wise saws’ to a similar accident. My old master and friend, that you have read of in my books, Mr Hopewell, was chock full of them. He used to call them wisdom boiled down to an essence, concretes, and I don’t know what all. He had a book full of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and above all, Bible ones. Well, he used to make me learn them by heart for lessons, till I was fairly sick and tired to death of ’em.
“‘Minister,’ sais I, one day, ‘what under the sun is the use of them old, musty, fusty proverbs. A boy might as well wear his father’s boots, and ride in his long stirrups, as talk in maxims, it would only set other boys a laughin’ at him.’
“‘Sam,’ sais he, ‘you don’t understand them now, and you don’t understand your Latin grammar, tho’ you can say them both off by heart. But you will see the value of one when you come to know the world, and the other, when you come to know the language. The latter will make you a good scholar, and the former a wise man.’
“Minister was right, Doctor. As I came to read the book of life, I soon began to understand, appreciate, and apply my proverbs. Maxims are deductions ready drawn, and better expressed than I could do them, to save my soul alive. Now I have larned to make them myself. I have acquired the habit, as my brother the lawyer sais, ‘of extracting the principle from cases.’ Do you take? I am not the accident of an accident; for I believe the bans of marriage were always duly published in our family; but I am the accident of an incident.”
“There is a great moral in that too, Mr Slick,” he said. “How important is conduct, when the merest trifle may carry in its train the misery or happiness of your future life.”
“Stick a pin in that also. Doctor,” said I.
Here Cutler and the pilot cut short our conversation by going on board. But Peter wouldn’t hear of my leaving his house, and I accordingly spent the night there, not a little amused with my new acquaintances.