PART I.
There lived a few years ago in one of the small seaport towns of New England a solitary, friendless man, of the name of John Chidlaw,—a gray-headed, stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested person of about fifty years of age at the time our story begins. He was sober, steady, and industrious, and always had been so since his first appearance in the place, but somehow he never got ahead. He was thriftless, people used to say, and they got in the habit of calling him "Johnny," and then "Old Johnny," until nobody called him anything else, unless it were here and there some poor child or sympathetic woman, who said "Uncle Johnny," with that sort of gentle kindness that is never bestowed on the prosperous.
He did not resent anything, even pity, but took his hard fortune as a matter of course, and the heavier the burden, why, the more he bent his shoulders, but he did not complain. Nobody had ever asked his history,—the history of a man who has patches at his knees, and whose elbows are out, is not, by those more fortunate persons who have no patches at their knees, and whose elbows are not out, generally supposed to be of an interesting character. John Chidlaw was, therefore, never bothered with questions.
Could he lift a heavy log? Could he tend a saw-mill? Could he drive a team, or carry a hod of bricks? These, and the like, were the questions that were asked him mostly; and as he could say yes to any and all of these, and as people did not require him to say more, he seldom did say more, but lifted the log, or drove the team, as the case might be, in silence.
He looked a good deal older than he was,—not that his head was so gray, and not that his shoulders bent so much, but the rather that there was an utter absence of buoyancy, an indurated and inflexible style and expression about the whole man, as if, in fact, he had been born old. You could not think of him as having ever been a boy, with cherry cheeks, and laughing eyes, and steps that were careless and fleet as the wind, but he had had his boyhood and his boyhood's dream, as will appear by and by.
It had happened to him at one time that a saw had gone into his hand, and left a jagged and ugly scar across the back; another time it had happened that his horse had run away, upsetting his cart, and breaking one of his legs, so that he limped thereafter, and was disabled from some of the harder kinds of work he had been used to do. He had been dismissed by one and another, in consequence of his inability to make a full day's work, and was sitting one day on a pile of bricks in the outer edge of the town where he lived, quite down-hearted, and chewing, not the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, but, instead thereof, a bit of pine stick, which he held partly in and partly out of his mouth.
His eyes looked solemnly out from under his gray eyebrows as now and then a whistling teamster drove by, throwing a whole cloud of hot, suffocating dust over him. Sometimes a pedler, or some stroller with a monkey on his shoulder and an organ on his back, would nod to him as he passed; but the pedler did not think of exhibiting his wares, nor the organman of grinding out a tune, or of setting his monkey to playing tricks, for the like of old Johnny. The sun was growing large toward the setting, and nothing had turned up, when all at once there was a wild whirl of wheels, and a crying and shouting and holding up of hands by all the men and boys along the road. A horse was running away. On he came, galloping furiously, while the old heavy-topped buggy to which he was attached rattled and creaked and swayed from side to side frightfully,—frightfully, because it was in imminent danger of being crushed all to pieces; and sitting still and solemnly upright, swaying with the buggy, and in imminent danger of being crushed to pieces too, was a child,—a beautiful little girl, with a cloud of yellow curls rippling down her bare shoulders. Her white dress fluttered in the wind, and her hat was swimming on the pond half a mile in the rear; but still she sat, sober and quiet as though she had been on her mother's knees, and not so much as puckering her pretty lip for all the tumult and fright.
A dozen men were in the road, some with rails in their arms, with which they no doubt intended to intercept the mad creature; but the best intentions fail sometimes, and the men with rails in their arms threw them down, and got themselves out of the way, as soon as the danger came near them.
John Chidlaw went into the road among the rest, but without a rail in his arms. He did not, however, get himself out of the way,—not he. He threw himself with might and main upon the neck of the frightened beast, and there he held, and was dragged along,—half the time, as it seemed, under his very feet.
"That's you, Johnny!" "Go it!" "Good for you!" were the cheers and calls of encouragement that followed him. The horse was valuable, and he was in danger of breaking his neck; and what matter about John Chidlaw! He had no friends!