“Oh, you shall have it! You shall have it,” he answered. “We shall meet again I dare say, and then you can give it back to me.”
Before he went, he brought it down—a large roll of somewhat yellow paper. Conceiving it might be valuable, and without the slightest idea of prying into his affairs, I asked where I could send it to him, if we did not meet soon.
He replied, with a very peculiar smile, “it does not matter. It does not matter. If I do not see you before thirteen years are over, I shall then be seventy years of age or dead, and you may do with it what you please.”
More than twenty years have now passed, and we have not met, and I give the manuscript to the world with very little alteration, trusting that if the writer of the autobiography which follows should ever see these pages, he will claim his own and forgive their publication. I will only add, that when I received the manuscript, I certainly thought that my good friend of the inn was the writer of it himself. In reading it over, however, and especially in correcting it for the press, I perceived that could not be, as the age of the parties must have differed by fifteen or sixteen years.
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THE FIRST FISH.
Most men have a faint and distant notion from whom to look for parentage—that inestimable boon for which the most miserable often feel the most grateful—inestimable, not only because it confers upon us, if we will, an immortal hereafter of unrevealed joy and glory, but because nobody ever has, ever will, or probably ever can, estimate it rightly. Parents consider their children as under an undischargeable debt of gratitude to them for bringing them into the world at all, without sometimes fully considering a parent’s duties as well as his rights. Children are too apt to make light of the obligation, as well as many another obligation which succeeded it—the care of infancy, the guidance of youth, the love, unextinguishable in all but very cold and stony hearts, which attends our offspring from their birth to our own death-bed. It may be argued that all these acts and feelings on the part of parents, are but in obedience to a law of nature: that the man or woman is like the eagle or the dove, is impelled to nurture, protect, defend his offspring. But if so, the law of love and obedience of the offspring to the parent, is equally binding; and he who neglects the one, is equally a rebel to nature, and to God, as he who neglects the other.
Most men, I repeat, have a faint and distant notion from whom to look for parentage. This is not without exception. Good, as a general rule, the exceptions are quite sufficient to prove it. I myself am one. That I had a father, I take for granted: that I had a mother is perfectly certain. But as to who my father and my mother were, was for many years a question much more doubtful.
However, I will tell you all about it, and you shall judge for yourself.
My first recollections of the world are surrounded by somewhat strange scenery. Figure to yourself, reader, a town situated on the top of a high hill, like an eagle’s eyrie, but far more solid and substantial. The streets are paved with large round stones, and a gutter in the centre, tracking out like rays at every cross-road: the houses, stone-built, and somewhat ponderous, are tall and short, wide and narrow, as in most other towns, but there are some very fine churches in a somewhat severe style in the place, and it seems to possess two peculiar characteristics. Whether, because so far elevated that nothing could obstruct the drainage on every side, or because at that high point it caught the clouds as they whirled by, and attracted the wrath of every storm by its menacing front, it was the cleanest town in the universe. In vain did cooks and old women throw out cock’s-heads divested of their combs, and the gizzards of ducks and fowls—in vain on the Saturday night was every gutter in the place made the receptacle of all the dust of all the houses—in vain were a number of other untidy tricks practiced to defile the highways, and offend the olfactories of the passing stranger—before the Monday morning all was clear again—except in very rainy seasons, when I have known a dust-heap lie for a fortnight. This was one of its peculiar characteristics: cleanliness.