One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of this class: he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has ever been my fortune to meet. About dusk I found myself some distance away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells. A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky, that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and a kind of terror—that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always excites in the mind.
I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me, and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk, especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our long financial depression. However, I decided to go on. Several overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one of them. A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings. The cabin was considerably smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the overhanging bank of the river. No human being was visible at first. But presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior of the cabin. I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer and beard the old lion in his lair. But on his inviting me to come in I went up to the door. It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech that led him to say "Come in," for it would hardly have been possible to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting by a large rusty stove right over against the door. He placed a bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon. There was no window in the cabin. Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with straw which served as a bed.
And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard reached to the middle of his breast—
His beard a foot before him, and his hair
A yard behind.
His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entrance might be had to the inner man. The eyes that looked out from this thicket of hair had not that hard, dangerous, angry look that experience of such persons had taught me to expect, but they expressed loneliness. He told of the high tides of the month of January in a certain year, when the water rose so as to enter his cabin and ponderous cakes of ice were knocking and grinding against its sides in the night. We talked of fish. He spoke of fyke-nets and drag-nets and warp-lines, and of eel-spearing through the ice. He took especial delight in telling me how the snow in winter was swept away from his door in a clean circle by the broom of some friendly wind. "It is the wind that does it," said he with touching naïveté. It almost seemed to the poor old man's lonely heart like a special favor on the part of the wind, like a tender feeling and relenting on the part of the icy-hearted winter wind for him in his solitude and sadness as he lay there cast out on the desolate shore of the world, deformed and shattered in health—
Gleich einer Leiche
Die grollend ausgeworfen das Meer—
"Like a corpse which the bellowing sea
has cast out."
Strange life! O utter barrenness of existence! A pipe, a fire, fish, rags and a bed of straw. God pity thee! God pity thee, thou poor stricken deer! Take heart, man, take heart! Be brave, and dash away the bitter tear. Look up from the lowly cabin-door into the solemn night with its golden-burning stars, and even the loosened harp-strings of thy shattered old frame will vibrate and tremble to the eternal melodies that thrill through the mystic All: "God is in his heaven."
Dickens and Hawthorne have each written of canal-life in America, the one in a satirico-humorous way, the other sympathetically. People side with one or the other according as their disposition is active and restless or indolent and epicurean. I fight under the banner of Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a poetic mind, but was drawn from Nature, every bit of it.
The first and most novel sensation I experienced was that of the quiet and seemingly mysterious gliding movement of the boat. Ever and anon we passed through a lock. How strange and thrilling the feeling, to stand on the deck and see yourself slowly sinking into the great mossy box, and then to see the great valves of the lock slowly open, disclosing what seemed a new land and fresh vistas of green landscape! It was like the opening of the gates of the future (I pleased myself with fancying) to my triumphant progress. Gate after gate swung back its ponderous valves: I was Habib advancing from isle to isle of the enchanted sea. I uttered the word of power, and the huge unwieldy gates of opposition swung back with sullen and unwilling deference, compelled to respect the talisman I held. But hark! Hear the sweet notes of the supper-horn floating through the cool gloom of twilight as the tired reapers trudge home with their grain-cradles swung over their shoulders. Listen to the tinkling mule-bells on the tow-path, see the bright crimson tassels of the bridles, and the gayly-decorated boats, their cabin-roofs adorned with pots of herbs and flowers.