This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows closely after the foregoing:
After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr. Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside, began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.
There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board. Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle could have kept him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put together in a face, would not have been odder than was this house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion, justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style was the best.”
Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.
The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation, and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that, planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.
To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes, of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and when a stroller eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners solemnly as if testing its muscular development.
Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs through it all:
One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting, turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was, time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in all the long years when he was not hungry.
Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper food—the blood running slower and slower through their veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic, exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.
But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity. His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty? From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?