Brave old Donald McNaughton! thrice honored be thy memory! Year after year didst thou live on in the very greenness of decrepitude; and though old Time filched one by one the glories of thy manhood, it mattered little, so long as listeners would come to thy long stories of the feats of daring at Louisburg and the Plains of Abraham! Thou type of graceful covetousness, thou realization of penurious modesty, it irks me to think that thou, at the last, malgré thy unwearied care and long delay, shouldst have been forced to pass the Lethean stream in leaky Stygian wherry! But Death took thee unawares; and he whom thou hadst so long defied, impatient of the delay, and distrusting perchance his skill to meet thee in open day, stole upon thee in thy midnight slumbers, and carried thee, a poor forked shape, unresisting because unconscious, to the pale kingdom.
The history of Donald McNaughton's life would be replete with worldly wisdom. Commencing life a 'puir bairn,' to use his own phrase, though at the time to which he alluded he must well-nigh have completed his fiftieth year, by unremitted industry and careful economy he amassed a fortune, remarkable in a new and unproductive country. Up to his one hundredth year he labored daily in the field, and his best workmen could seldom surpass him in the amount of labor. Even at that age it was not the decrepitude of years but of an accidental injury, which laid the old man by, and to the very day of his confinement, which preceded his death but a single week, he personally superintended all the business of his homestead. At the distant market-town in the coldest winter weather; at the polls on every day of election through the 'sleety dribble' and miry roads of earliest spring; at church and funeral, auction-sale and country gathering, he was ever the foremost man. Indeed in all matters, whether of state or church, public or private, he prided himself upon his superior sagacity; and not without reason. Shrewd, careful, far-sighted, firm in the tenacity with which he held, and cool in the manner with which he expressed, his opinions, he retained over three generations the undisputed sway of a superior man.
The secret of the great age to which he attained was in contravention of all the principles of dietetics. No man was ever more imprudent in his diet, or in his exposure to the weather. He was, however, habitually cheerful; a consequence rather than a cause of his continued healthfulness; and no war-worn hero ever better loved, by the fireside of the wintry night, or under the summer shade of his broad roof-tree, 'to count his scars, and tell what deeds were done,' than did old Scotch Donald. How well I remember the lighting up of his bright hazle eye as he would commence in his broad highland accent some tale of flood or field; and how readily we boys would quit the game of cricket or marbles, to listen to a story of the wars by old 'Gran'fth McNaughton!'
Nor was it in narrative alone that the old man excelled. No man better loved a ready joke, and no man better turned one, than did he. I remember a pedler one day riding up to his door, the poor beast he bestrode being ladened from shoulder to haunch with the variety of wares which he had to dispose of. Greatly to our surprise, old Donald met him at the door with a most cheerful greeting, for we well knew that pedlers were his utter abomination, and, offering him a chair, inquired what he had to sell. 'Oh, every thing, Sir; every thing,' replied he of the packs; 'ribbons, silks, calicoes, combs, thimbles, needles, scissors, gloves, belts, sewing-silk—every thing, Sir, every thing! What will you have?' 'Got any grind-stones?' asked the old man. 'Oh, no Sir, I came a horse-back.' 'Ah, I thought you came a foot!' was the reply, uttered in a tone and manner that sent the poor hawker out at the door with a speed that no maledictions could have effected.
For many years Mr. McNaughton was the only justice of the peace in the town where he resided; and a history of the cases which came before him, and of his decisions thereupon, would furnish a new chapter in civil jurisprudence amusing enough. Whatever may have been the landmarks in law which influenced those decisions, it is certain that they generally gave satisfaction, and were considered by the parties in dispute as final beyond resort. Nothing gave the old man more satisfaction in his judicial capacity than to puzzle the lawyer, for we had but one in the county in those days, by the decisions he pronounced, and his frequent reply to the objections urged. 'So ye dinna ken my reasons, ye say, Mr. Bartlett, for the decision I mad' to-day? Weel, weel, I ken them mysel', an' that's a' sufficient in the law, nae doubt!' became almost proverbial in the mouths of the people. I remember two men being brought before him upon a charge of stealing the poultry of a poor widow, who lived in the outskirts of the parish, for whose conviction, Esquire Bartlett, from some personal pique, had made extraordinary efforts. The men had been taken the night previous about ten o'clock, one in bed and asleep, the other sitting up by his kitchen fire. There was but little evidence of their guilt, and the advocate had to make the most of every circumstance, in order to show a semblance of justice in binding the men over for appearance at a higher tribunal. Of course the situation in which each was found was strongly insisted upon as a proof of guilt; and while one was awake at the dead of night, stung by remorse for his crimes beyond the power of sleep to quiet, the other was shown to be even more deep in iniquity, by the utter indifference he manifested in going to sleep upon his pillow, after the perpetration of the horrible deed. Without perceiving the inconsistency of the two parts of his argument, the lawyer rested his case, and waited for the decision, which the old justice was not slow in giving. Calling the two culprits before his chair, he arose and said: 'I dinna ken what lawyer Bartlett would ha'e a mon do, at ten o'clock at night. Gin he sits up by his fire, he is a rogue for sure; an' gin he gang to bed, he is nae honest mon! Here, you John Wilkins, you may gang free this time, only never let me hear you sitting up ayont ten at night again; and you, Sam Wilkins, you may gang free too, gin you promise ne'er to shut your e'en till eleven o'clock, whenever you rob a hen-roost!'
Although Donald McNaughton was the oldest man in the town, yet there was not after all that visible contrast between him and his associates, which a stranger would have expected. At that day, the minister who sat above him in the pulpit, and who, though he did not preach, still deemed himself able to do so, and the deacon who administered the sacramental ordinance, were both nearly a century in age. Of the former, one of that staunch little band of clergymen, who, from the time the constitution was accepted up to the close of the administration of Jefferson, stood manfully on the democratic side, and lived, and preached, and prayed for the people's rights, we have many anecdotes to relate at another time. If any man ever deserved a record in the hearts of freemen, it was he, the faithful pastor, the unswerving champion of the truth; and though it is a long time since
'His labors all were done,
And the work he loved the best,'
yet it is fitting to call up from the past the spirits of those who won for us the liberty we enjoy.
But the Deacon, good old Deacon Richardson, was in political sentiment, as in every thing else, the very antipodes of the minister. He too, however, was a veteran of the war of the Revolution; and the stories he told, though not equal in interest to the old Scotchman's, were yet not without their merit. Of his years, the Deacon was the most agile person I ever saw; and up to the age of ninety-four, would mount his horse, and ride over hill and dale to church or tavern, with the speed of a reckless plough-boy. Indeed he had a physical frame which seemed never to feel the effects of old age; one of those lean, tough, shrivelled bodies that wilt early, but decay late, and which, however seared by increasing winters, still cling to life, like the last leaf to the tree. At fifty years the good Deacon looked as old, and felt as old, as he did forty years after. Through Saratoga, and Monmouth, and Breed's Hill encounters, he had escaped unscathed; and but for the untoward fall of the last forest-tree he ever chopped, there was no reason apparent why he might not have lived through another century. Cheerful, merry, and frolicksome as a lamb at midsummer, the dapper little centenarian would frisk about among the matrons and spinsters at our country parties, like the licensed beau of a boarding-school. But with all his partialities for the sex, the Deacon was never married. Why this was so, no one could ever tell, unless, from a habit of stuttering, which nearly overcame him when he was embarrassed, he found it difficult to get out words enough for a proposal. And yet there were those among our lone damsels, who, one would have thought, would have eked out the sentence when it was once fairly begun, for the solitude of no man had ever more commiseration from the gentler sex than did his.
Speaking of the Deacon's stuttering habit of talking, reminds me of a reply he made to some brethren of the church, who had been deputed to converse with him upon his known disaffection to a new clergyman, whom the parish were about to settle. The real objection which he had to the minister was never known, but the avowed one was the inferior mental endowments which the sermons he had preached showed him possessed of. This he urged upon the committee from the church, and this they in turn combated and denied. At last, finding the Deacon's objections to be indomitable, beyond the hope of removing, one of the brethren said: 'Well, Deacon Richardson, let us grant you all that you say, still I think you are wrong. We must not expect a man of first-rate abilities in our little congregation. We must be content with one of moderate talents. You know the Bible says, that 'one star differeth from another star in glory.'