This proposition being dismissed as impracticable,—first, by reason of the notorious unwillingness of the turtles to be caught, and, waiving that objection, because of the length of time it would take to achieve any passable imitation of the aldermanic dainty,—I was moved to an aside-declaration to the effect that my slight observation of the tastes of British tourists in the Federal States led to the suggestion of oysters as delicacies not wholly unlikely to find favor with their eminent guest.
An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,—Betty should stop there and leave a generous order.
Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner; but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.
Sir Joseph Barley—Heaven bless him!—knew nothing of that smattering of Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits. He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was delightfully confident that—he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject, not having heard of them—they could not, by any possibility, be worth hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in Greece;—the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular, but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of Edinburgh, whom George IV. honored with a baronetcy,—a splendid recompense for his great literary industry.
This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of infinite space,—were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth class—ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of life—who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments—why not confess it? for is not man body as well as soul?—when it is a relief to get away from our mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet, and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced serenity,—good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and these men of high and acknowledged genius.
"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had endeavored to explain to him his own spiritual intrusion on the previous evening. "I have heard of Doctor Pordage and the Dragon, and of the Drummer of Tedworth; but when you tell a sane British subject that his apparition comes before him, and takes, as it were, the froth off his welcome"——
"No, no, my dear friend," interrupted Colonel Prowley, "you must know that nothing could do that! As to the obituary I had written, it may do for some other time,—for, indeed, my felicity in such compositions has been highly commended, and this by mundane authorities of no common weight."
"Let us change the subject," said Sir Joseph, dryly; "I have no wish to test your powers in that direction; and so long as I don't give up the ghost, I suppose you must."
"I would only say this," observed the Colonel,—"that in your book upon America I hope you will not fail to declare, that, in folly, deception, and unmitigated humbug, our Foxden spirits exceed all others ever seen or heard."
"Sir Joseph Barley would be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to speak the moral tag to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of a mental disorder which seems to confound the reasoning powers of man,—causing its subjects to accept as teachers phantoms of their morbid imaginations, or deceiving intelligences from without. To all, I say, but such as these, an imposition of the sort here noticed must send reflections of our total inability to identify any pretended spirit merely because he flatters our vanity, or talks what may seem to us good morality or sound sense."