AMERICAN HUMOUR.
I.
THE THIMBLE GAME.
Forty years ago, Augusta, Ga., presented a very different appearance from the busy and beautiful city of the present day. Its groceries, stores, and extensive warehouses were few in number, and the large quantities of cotton and other produce, which are still conveyed thither, were transported entirely by waggons. The substantial railroad, which links it with the richest and most beautiful regions of the empire state of the South, was a chimera, not yet conceived in the wild brain of Fancy herself; and many of the improvements, luxuries and refinements, which now make it the second city in the state, were then “in the shell.” Yet, by the honest yeomanry of forty years ago, Augusta was looked upon as Paris and London are now viewed by us. The man who had never been there was a cipher in the community—nothing killed an opinion more surely, nothing stopped the mouth of “argyment” sooner, than the sneering taunt: “Pshaw! you ha’n’t been to Augusty.”
The atmosphere of this favoured place was supposed to impart knowledge and wisdom to all who breathed it, and the veriest ass was a Solon, and an umpire, if he could discourse fluently of the different localities, and various wonders, of Augusty.
The farmers of the surrounding country paid a yearly visit to Augusta, and having sold their “crap” of the great Southern staple, and laid in their stock of winter necessaries, returned home with something of that holy satisfaction with which the pious Mohammedan turns his face homeward from Mecca. The first step upon arriving in the city was to lay aside their “copperas-coloured,” fabrics of the wife’s or daughter’s loom, and purchase a new suit of “store-clothes.”
These were immediately donned, and upon returning home were carefully embalmed, nor again permitted to see the light until the next Sunday at “meetin’,” when the farmer, with head erect and ample shirt-collar, strutted up the aisle, the lion of the occasion, the “observed of all observers” till the next Sabbath, when his neighbour returning with his new suit, plucked off his laurels and twined them green and blooming upon the crown of his own shilling beaver.
These annual trips were the event and era of the year, and the farmer returned to his home big with importance and news. The dishonesty and shrewdness of “them Gimblit fellers,” (Cotton-Buyers,) the extortions of hotel-keepers, the singular failures of warehouse steelyards to make cotton-bales weigh as much in Augusta as at home, the elegant apparel of the city belles and beaux, and the sights and scenes which greeted their astonished gaze, formed the year’s staple of conversation and discussion; and it would be difficult to say who experienced the greater delight—the farmer in relating his wondrous adventures, or his wife and daughters in listening to them with open mouths, uplifted hands, and occasional breathless ejaculations of “Good Lord, look down!” “Oh! go away!” or, “Shut up!” “You don’t ses so!”
Early in the fall of 18–, Farmer Wilkins announced to his son Peter, that as he, “his daddy,” would be too busy to make the usual trip in propria persona, he, Peter, must get ready to go down to Augusty, and sell the “first load.” Now Peter Wilkins, jun., a young man just grown, was one of the celebrities of which his settlement (neighbourhood) boasted. He was supposed to have cut his eye-teeth—to have shaken off that verdancy so common to young men; and while he filled up more than half his father’s capacious heart, to the discomfiture of Mahaly (his mother), and Suke and Poll (his sisters), he was the pet and darling of the whole neighbourhood. An only son, the old man doted upon him as a chip of the old block, and was confident that Peter, in any emergency of trade, traffic, or otherwise, would display that admirable tact, and that attentive consideration for “No. One,” for which Mr. P. Wilkins, sen., was noted. A horse-swap with a Yankee, in which Peter, after half an hour’s higgling, found himself the undisputed owner of both horses and ten dollars boot, was the corner-stone of his fame. Every trip to Augusta added another block; and by the time Peter arrived at the years of discretion, he stood upon a lofty structure with all the green rubbed off, the pride of his family and the universal favourite of his acquaintances.
The night before his departure the family were all gathered around the roaring fire, Mrs. and the Misses Wilkins engaged in ironing and mending our hero’s Sunday apparel, the old man smoking his pipe, and occasionally preparing Peter for the ordeal in Augusta, by wholesome advice, or testing his claim to the tremendous confidence about to be reposed in him, by searching questions, as to how he would do in case so-and-so was to turn up. To this counsel, however, our hero paid less attention than to the preparations making around him for his comely appearance in the city. Nor, until he got upon the road, did he revolve in his mind the numerous directions of his father, or resolve to follow to the letter his solemn parting injunction to “bewar of them gimblit fellers down to Augusty.”