BY MRS. CAROLINE H. BUTLER.
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Perched, like a large gray owl with folded wings, upon the summit of the very highest hill within a day’s journey from “our village,” but within half a mile of the old meeting-house, stands a narrow stone dwelling, with a narrow, pointed roof, narrow windows, or loop-holes, as they might be more properly termed, and one narrow door; the whole inclosed within a narrow yard, from which two slender poplars point their “tall columns to the skies.”
One would scarcely imagine from so unpromising an aspect that a heart-history could be gleaned from “lifting” that narrow roof. I must confess, too, that there is certainly very little romance in the appearance of the inmate whom it shelters—so gaunt and cadaverous—nearly as tall as the poplars, and with arms like the evolving sails of a windmill. Yet, as by searching there is gold to be found even amid the most rocky and unpromising defiles of California, so is there sterling mettle hid beneath the rough exterior of Apollos Dalrymple, and this having found I will disclose.
When I say that Apollos is the sole tenant of this owl-like habitation, I need not add that he belongs to the bachelor fraternity—but in justice to him I will say that he was not made a bachelor from any contempt or irreverence of the fair sex, but from “sweet love’s teen” having “loved not wisely, but too well.”
It is now many years since Apollos thus retired from the world. His hair is nearly silver white, and old age sits upon his shoulders, yet still he washes and mends his clothes, with his long, bony fingers knits his stockings, and cooks his own food from the little plat of vegetables behind the house—for Apollos is a Grahamite, as well as a Gray-eremite. I must retrace some twenty years in the life of Apollos, for the first record of the heart-history I have promised—I will even go still further back, and introduce him a “puling infant in the nurse’s arms.”
It was the misfortune of Apollos to be born with an ear—I mean an ear for music! Whether the euphonious name by which he was christened had any thing to do with the quaverings of his innocent cradle-dom I cannot say, but certain it is, his infantine warblings were loud and incessant—“prestissimo” and “fortissimo,” seldom allowing a “rest” either to himself or his poor worn-out mother. The period of infancy passed, Apollos was sent to school, where he was distinguished for the long drawn nasal tones in which he might be said to chant his lessons, and being moreover somewhat given to whistling and tuning up of jews-harps, the terrible ire of Schoolmaster Ferule vented itself in drawing long scales upon his tender flesh, to which Apollos composed the notes upon a high key.
As soon as he could read the tenth chapter of Nehemiah without drawing a long breath, his father made him ruler over countless heads of cattle, and set him to ploughing and planting, sowing and reaping the fertile acres which were one day to become his own. Even into the drudgery of the farm Apollos bore with him his musical mania, and while he sowed the seed and planted the corn it was all done to music, so that when the green grain burst through the ground there was no stiff regularity about it, but falling off into minims, crotchets, quavers and demi-semi-quavers, it swept through the broad fields like a living sheet of music, from which no doubt the little ground-sparrow and the glassy-winged grasshopper, learned many new variations.
Not “blest as the gods,” Apollos could strike no harp but the jews-harp, for his father had no music in his soul, though a very clever man, Shakspeare to the contrary, and would never allow his son to spend his earnings in cultivating so useless an art. The singing-school he tolerated, and there, in the long winter evenings, by the flickering light of tallow candles did Apollos luxuriate—also at all trainings, when “the spirit-stirring drum and ear-piercing fife” echoed through the streets, there was the tall, ungainly figure of Apollos to be seen, almost envying even the little fat drummer the powers of his rub-a-dub.
One day our musical hero purchased a cracked flute! How trilled his heart in joyful cadence as he held in his hand the precious bargain—with what ecstasy did he turn it over and over, and then, as soon as the cattle were foddered, and the shades of evening resting over the farm, he would nightly retire into the recesses of the forest, and there blow and puff, like Sam Weller’s “aggrawated glass-blower,” until his eyes almost started from their sockets—the rocks and trees to be sure kept their places in the firm earth, but the whip-po-wils and the owls peeped forth to listen, and more than once did he hear his notes re-echoed by some young, aspiring screech-owl.