“Well, then, I’ll tell you how I sarved Chunkey for leavin’ me under the raft. Moses! diddent I pay him back! Did I ever tell you ’bout takin’ Chunkey out on Sky Lake, makin’ him drunk, takin’ his gun and knife away from him, and a puttin’ him to sleep in a panter’s nest?”

“No, you never did; but was you not apprehensive they would kill him?”

“Kill him! No! If they’d commenced bitin’ Chunkey, they’d have been looed, as that’s a game Chunkey invented! But here he comes; and if you mention it afore him, it puts the dander in him. Let’s licker.”

[13] A barrel of whiskey is called a “stranger,” from the fact that It is brought from a distance, there being none made in the country.

XXII.
DILLY JONES; OR, THE PROGRESS OF
IMPROVEMENT.[[14]]

One of the most difficult things in the world is to run before the wind; and, by judiciously observing the changes of the weather, to avoid being thrown out. Fashion is so unsteady, and improvements are so rapid, that the man whose vocation yields him an abundant harvest now, may, in a few years, if he has not a keen eye, and a plastic versatility, find that his skill and his business are both useless. Many were the poor barbers ship-wrecked by the tax upon hair-powder, and numerous were the leather breeches’ makers who were destroyed by the triumph of woollens. Their skill was doubtless very great, but it would not avail in a contest against the usages of the world; and unless they had the capacity to strike out a new course, they all shared the fate of their commodities, and retired to the dark cellars of popular estimation. Every day shows us the same principle of change at work, and no one has more reason to reflect and mourn about it than one Dilly Jones of this city. Dilly is not, perhaps, precisely the person who would be chronicled by the memoir writers of the time, or have a monument erected to him if he were no more; but Dilly is a man of a useful though humble vocation, and no one can saw hickory with more classic elegance, or sit upon the curbstone and take his dinner with more picturesque effect.

Yet, as has been hinted above, Dilly has his sorrows, particularly at night, after a hard day’s work, when his animal spirits have been exhausted by reducing gum logs to the proper measure. In the morning he is full of life and energy, feeling as if he could saw a cord of Shot-towers, and snap the pillars of the Bank across his knee like pipe-stems. In the full flush of confidence at that time of day, reflection batters against him in vain; but as the night draws on, Dilly feels exhausted and spiritless. His enthusiasm seems to disappear with the sun, and neither the moon nor the stars can cause high tide in the river of his mind. The current of his good spirits shrinks in its channel, leaving the gay and gorgeous barques of hope and confidence drearily ashore on the muddy flats; and his heart fails him as if it were useless longer to struggle against adversity.

It was in this mood that he was once seen travelling homeward, with his horse and saw fixed scientifically upon his shoulders. He meandered in his path in the way peculiar to men of his vocation, and travelled with that curvilinear elegance which at once indicates that he who practises it is of the wood-sawing profession, and illustrates the lopsided consequences of giving one leg more to do than the other. But Dilly was too melancholy on this occasion to feel proud of his professional air, and perhaps, had he thought of it, would have reproved the leg which performed the “sweep of sixty,” for indulging in such graces, and thereby embarrassing its more humble brother, which, knowing that a right line is the shortest distance between two places, laboured to go straight to its destination. Dilly, however, had no such stuff in his thoughts. His mind was reasoning from the past to the future, and was mournfully meditating upon the difficulties of keeping up with the changes of the times, which roll onward like a Juggernaut, and crush all who are not swift enough to maintain themselves in the lead. He wondered why fashions and customs should so continually change, and repined that he could not put a spoke in their wheel, that the trade of one’s early days might likewise be the trade of one’s latter years. So complete was his abstraction that he unconsciously uttered his thoughts aloud:

“Sawing wood’s going all to smash,” said he, “and that’s where everything goes what I speculates in. This here coal is doing us up. Ever since these black stones was brought to town, the woodsawyers and pilers, and them soap-fat and hickory-ashes men, has been going down; and, for my part, I can’t say as how I see what’s to be the end of all their new-fangled contraptions. But it’s always so; I’m always crawling out of the little end of the horn. I began life in a comfortable sort of a way; selling oysters out of a wheelbarrow, all clear grit, and didn’t owe nobody nothing. Oysters went down slick enough for a while, but at last cellars was invented, and darn the oyster, no matter how nice it was pickled, could poor Dill sell; so I had to eat up capital and profits myself. Then the ‘pepree pot smoking’ was sot up, and went ahead pretty considerable for a time; but a parcel of fellers come into it, said my cats wasn’t as good as their’n, when I know’d they was as fresh as any cats in the market; and pepree pot was no go. Bean soup was just as bad; people said kittens wasn’t good done that way, and the more I hollered, the more the customers wouldn’t come, and them what did, wanted tick. Along with the boys and their pewter fips, them what got trust and didn’t pay, and the abusing of my goods, I was soon fotch’d up in the victualling line—and I busted for the benefit of my creditors. But genius riz. I made a raise of a horse and saw, after being a wood-piler’s ’prentice for a while, and working till I was free, and now here comes the coal to knock this business in the head. My people’s decent people, and I can’t disgrace ’em by turning Charcoal Jemmy, or smashing the black stones with a pickaxe. They wouldn’t let me into no society at all if I did.”