Suburban sketches

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WILLIAM D. HOWELLS'S WRITINGS.

I. VENETIAN LIFE. Including Commercial, So-
cial, Historical, and Artistic Notice of the Place. In
one volume, crown 8vo, cloth, $ 2.00.

Mr. Howells deserves a place in the first rank of American travel-
lers. Tliis volume thoroughly justifies its title ; it does give a true
and vivid and almost a complete picture of Venetian life. — Jfall
Mall Gazette.

We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr.
Howells's new volume about Venice, as "delightful." — N. A. Re-
view.

There is hardly a feature of Venetian life that escapes his sympa-
thetic observation. — Westminster Review.

The most vivid, accurate, and poetic description of life in Venice
that we recall. — Harper's Monthly.

Every sentence of this charming book is characteristic. It is the
very model of what a light book of travels ought to be. — London
Contemporary Review.

.... America is beginning, in such books as these, to judge
the Old World; to measure it by her new standard, and to mark its
slow progress toward that future on which she has already entered.
— TTie Nation.

II. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. In one volume, crown
8vo, cloth, $ 2.00.

There is no writer of travels in our day so simple, sincere, enjoy-
able, and profitable. — Brooklyn Union.

The reader who has gone over the ground which Mr. Howells
describes will be struck with the life-like freshness and accuracy of
his sketches, while he will admire the brilliant fancy which has cast
a rich poetical coloring even around the prosaic highways of ordinary
travel — New York Tribune.

It possesses all the characteristics of the former volume, so far as
style and qualities of matter are concerned, and those who read that
work will find this quite as admirable and fine. — Liberal Christian.

III. SUBURBAN SKETCHES. In one volume,
crown 8vo, cloth.

SUBTJEBAN SKETCHES.

SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

W. D. HOWELLS,

AOTHOB OP " VENETIAN UFB " AND " ITAUAH JOURHBTI."

NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON.

1871.

■-' -y

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 187^ by

W. D. HowHis,

In the Office of the Librarian of CongresB, at TVa^hington.

KiTiisisK, CAHBamas:

•TiaXOITPIS AHB PRIKTID Bt

a. u. HonaHTOs un> coxrun.

OOI^TEIS"TS.

piai.

Mbs. Johnbon 11

DooBSiEp Acquaintance 35

A Fbdebtbian Tottb 60

Bt Hob3£-Cab to Boston 91

A Dat's Fleasubb 115

A BOHANCE OF BeAL XrlFE 171

Scene 190

Jubilee Dats 195

rLITIINO 220

SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

MRS. JOHNSON.

It was on a morning of the lovely New England
May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our
umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home
in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain
so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate
climate, that no flake knew itself fi:om its sister drop,
or could be better identified by the people against
whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale firom the
east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and
chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the
adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping side-
walks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting
snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfiilness to the
landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots aban-
doned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-
finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits
of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and muti-
lated ground, added their interest to the scene. A
shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own
house (which had been built some years earlier),
while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly

12 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

upon the embankments lifting its base several feet
above the common level.

This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers,
with the idea of turning their thoughts efFectually
from earthly pleasures, came so far to discover, con-
tinued with slight amelioration throughout the month
of May and far into June ; and it was a matter of
constant amazement with one who had known less
austere climates, to behold how vegetable life strug-
gled with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as
chill and damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds
and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called out the sour
Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reck-
less native grape-vine to wander and wanton over
the southern side of the fence, and decked the banks
with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England
girls ; so that about the end of June, when the heav-
ens relented and the sun blazed out at last, there was
little for him to do but to redden and darken the
daring fruits that had attained almost their frill growth
without his countenance.

Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind
of Paradise. The wind blew all day fi"om the south-
west, and all day in the grove across the way the
orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon
rattled merrily up to our gate every morning ; and
if we had kept no other reckoning, we should have
known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were
living in the country with the conveniences and lux-
nries of the city about us. The house was almost
new and in perfect repair ; and, better than all, the

MRS. JOHNSON. 13

kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those
volcanic agencies which are constantly at work there,
and which, with sudden explosion, make Hercula-
neums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households.
Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive
regularity, and were all the most perfect of their
kind ; and we laughed and feasted in our vain se-
curity. We had out from the city to banquet with
us the friends we loved, and we were inexpressibly
proud before them of the Help, who first wrought
miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared
in a clean white apron, and the glossiest black hair,
to wait upon the table. She was young, and cer-
tainly very pretty ; she was as gay as a lark, and
was courted by a young man whose clothes would
have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach,
to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the
idea of staying with us till she married.

In fact, there was much that was extremely pleas-
ant about the little place when the warm weather
came, and it was not wonderful to us that Jenny was
willing to remain. It was very quiet ; we called
one another to the window if a large dog went by
our door ; and whole days passed without the move-
ment of any wheels but the butcher's upon our
street, which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups
and daisies, and in the autumn bmned, like the
borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge,
with the pallid azure flame of the succorj'. The
neighborhood was in all things a frontier between
city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such

14 SUBUEBAM SKETCHES.

civilization — fiill of imposture, discomfort, and sub-
lime possibility — as we yet possess, went by the
bead of our street, and migbt, perhaps, be available
to one sldlled in calculating the movements of
comets ; while two minutes' walk would take us into
a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible
through the trees. We learned, like innocent pas-
toral people of the golden age, to know the several
voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and,
like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the
different whistles of the locomotives passing on the
neighboring railroad. The trains shook the house
as they thundered along, and at night were a kind
of company, while by day we had the society of the
innumerable birds. Now and then, also, the Httle
ragged boys in charge of the cows — which, tied by
long ropes to trees, forever woimd themselves tight
up against the trunks, and had to be unwound with
great ado of hooting and hammering — came and
peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening
pears. AU round us carpenters were at work build-
ing new houses ; but so far from troubling us, the
strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense,
like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness
in the lapse from all fear of pain under the blessed
charm of an anaesthetic.

We played a little at gardening, of course, and
planted tomatoes, which the chickens seemed to like,
for they ate them up as fast a^ they ripened ; and
we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton
blackberries, which, after attaining the most stal-

MBS. JOHNSOK. 15

wart proportions, were still as bitter as the scrub-
biest of their savage brethren, and which, when by
advice left on the vines for a week after they turned
black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous
flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the
frost cut them off in the hour of their triumph.

So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that
Jeimy should be willing to remain with us, and were
a;3 little prepared for her desertion as for any other
change of our moral state. But one day in Septem-
ber she came to her nominal mistress with tears in
her beautiful eyes and protestations of unexampled
devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was
afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and
she never had worked for any one that was more of
' a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the
city. All this, so far, was quite in the manner of
domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the
occupants of haunted houses ; and Jenny's mistress
listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion,
expecting to hear no less than that it was something
which walked up and down the stairs and dragged
iron links after it, or something that came and
groaned at the front door, like populace dissatisfied
with a political candidate. But it was in fact noth-
ing of this kind ; simply, there were no lamps upon
our street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday even-
ing with friends ia East Charlesbridge, was always
{darmed, on her return, in walking from the horse-
car to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny
and our household parted with respect and regret.

16 SUBTJEBAN SKETCHES.

We had not before this thought it a grave disad-
vantage that our street was unlighted. Our street
was not drained nor graded ; no municipal cart ever
came to carry away our ashes ; there was not a
water-butt within half a mile to save us from fire,
nor more than the one thousandth part of a police-
man to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy
tax, I somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of
city government, and never looked upon Charles-
bridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But
when it became necessary to find help in Jenny's
place, the frosty welcome given to application at the
intelligence oflBces renewed a painfiil doubt awakened
by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the
offices were polite enough; but when the young
housekeeper had stated her case at the first to which
she applied, and the Intelligencer had called out to
the invisible expectants in the adjoining room,
"Anny wan wants to do giaer'l housewark in
Charlsbrudge ? " there came from the maids invoked
so loud, so fierce, so full a " No ! " as shook the
lady's heart with an indescribable shame and dread.
The name that, with an innocent pride in its literary
and historical associations, she had written at the
heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter
of reproach to her ; and she was almost tempted to
conceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbridge,
and to pretend that she dwelt upon some wretched
little street in Boston. " You see," said the head of
the office, " the gairls doesn't like to live so far away
from the city. Now if it was on'y in the Port . . . . "

MES. JOHNSON. 17

This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote
reader an idea of the affront offered to an inhab-
itant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing words.
Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report
here all the sufferings undergone by an unhappy fam-
ily in finding servants, or to tell how the winter was
passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it not
the history of a thousand experiences ? Any one
who looks upon this page couid match it with a tale
as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive
that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I ap-
proach a subject of unique interest.

The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure
was the true. sister of the bitter and shrewish spring
of the same year. But indeed it is always with a
secret shiver that one must think of winter in our
regrettable climate. It is a terrible potency, robbing
us of half our lives, and threatening or desolating
the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs.
There is a much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to
man in the more generous latitudes ; and I have
sometimes doubted whether even the energy charac-
teristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing
that it has its spring not so much in pure aspiration as
in the instinct of self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek,
Roman energy was an inner impulse ; but ours is
too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We
must endure our winter, but let us not be guilty of
the hypocrisy of pretending that we like it. Let us
caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it
with something of its own rude and savage sincerity.

18 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow,
and on one of those midsummer-like days that some-
times fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate
zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A
Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen,
if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a
handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some
sable maid with crisped locks, whom, imcoffling
from the captive train beside the desert, we should
make to do our general housework forever, through
the right of lawfiol purchase. But we knew that
this was impossible, and that, if we desired colored
help, we must seek it at the intelligence office, which
is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by the
orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery.
To tell the truth these orphans do not seem to grieve
much for their bereavement, but lead a life of joyous
and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the
city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and
down the street by which the Charlesbridge cars
arrive, — the young with a harmless swagger, and
the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has
already noted as attending advanced years in their
race. They seem the natural human interest of a
street so largely devoted to old clothes ; and the
thoughtftd may see a fehcity in their presence where
the pawnbrokers' windows display the forfeited
pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that
we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our
needy and reckless national youth, and still held
against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the

MES. JOHNSON. 19

Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies of
this race attired, as they trip up and down the side-
walks, and in and out through the pendent garments
at the shop doors ! They are the black pansies and
marigolds and dark-blooded dahhas among woman-
kind. They try to assume something of our colder
race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse-
car can see that it is not native with them, and is
better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly
laugh in encountering friends, letting their white
teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to
their ears. In the streets branching upwards from
this avenue, very little colored men and maids play
with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden
pavements of the entrances to the inner courts.
Now and then a colored soldier or sailor — looking
strange in his uniform, even after the • custom of
several years — emerges from those passages ; or,
more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years,
and cased in shining broadcloth, walks soUdly down
the brick sidewalk, cane in hand, — a vision of
serene self-complacency, and so plainly the expres-
sion of virtuous public sentiment that the great col-
ored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness,
are taken with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf
guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same
moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuf-
fling with an admirer through one of the low open
windows, suspends the strife, and bids him, " Go
along now, do ! " More rarely yet than the gentle-
man described, one may see a white girl among the

20 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is uncovered,
and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and
who, though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange
there as that pale anomaly which may sometimes be
seen among a crew of blackbirds.

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and
yet hardly of unthrift, seems to prevail in the neigh-
borhood, which has none of the aggressive and im-
pudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the
surly wickedness of a low American street. A gay-
ety not born of the things that bring its serious joy
to the true New England heart — a ragged gayety,
which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the
pocket or the conscience, and which affects the coun-
tenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to
some inward music, and at times bursting into a line
of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh — gives
tone to the visible life, and wakens a very friendly
spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a
milder climate, and is half persuaded that the
orange-peel on the sidewalks came from frnit grown
in the soft atmosphere of those back courts.

It was m this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs.
Johnson ; and it was from a colored boarding-house
there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at
us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her.
She was a matron of mature age and portly figure,
with a complexion like cofiee soothed with the rich-
est cream ; and her manners were so fuU of a certain
tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all our
will to ask for references. It was only her barbaric

MRS. JOHNSON. 21

laughter and her lawless eye that betrayed how
slightly her New England birth and breeding cov-
ered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a
thousand years of civilization that lay between her
race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged
by descent ; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wUd-
ness mixed with that of the desert in her veins : her
grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this
side had probably sold their lands for the same value
in trinkets that bought the original African pair on
the other side.

The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into
our kitchen, she conjured from the malicious disorder
in which it had been left by the flitting Irish kobold
a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and
was quite different from a dinner of mere routine
and laborious talent. Something original and au-
thentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and,
though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and
woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of
the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power
in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to
be merely running over the chords of our appetite
with preUminary savorsf as a musician acquaints his
touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before
breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution.
Within a week she had mastered her instrument ;
and thereafter there was no faltering in her perform-
ances, which she varied constantly, through inspira-
tion or from suggestion. She was so quick to receive
new ideas in her art, that, when the Roman statuary

22 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mys-
tery of various purely Latin dishes, she caught their
principle at once ; and visions of the great white
cathedral, the Coliseum, and the " dome of Brunel-
leschi " floated before us in the exhalations of the
Milanese risotto, B,oman stvfadino, and Florentine
straeotto that smoked upon our board. But, after
all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly
excelled. She was one of those cooks — rare as men
of genius in literature — who love their own dishes ;
and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of
taste, and the inherited appetites of her savage fore-
feithers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we
could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings
and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, no
doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our
artless flatteries of her skill ; she waited jealously at
the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was said
of her work, especially if there were guests; and
she was never too weary to attempt emprises of
cookery.

While engaged in these, she wore a species of
sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head,
and about her person those mystical swathings in
which old ladies of the African race delight. But
she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral
fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the
last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and,
taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft
evening air with its pungent odors. K we surprised
her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe

MRS. JOHNSON. 23

from her lips, arid put it behind her, with a low,
mellow chuckle, and a look of half-defiant conscious-
ness ; never guessing that none of her merits took
us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only
feigned to conceal.

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cook-
ing, because of her failing eyesight; and we per-
suaded her that spectacles would both become and
befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a
pair of steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some
great emergencies at first, but had clearly no pride
in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether,
and they had passed from our thoughts, when one
day we heard her mellow note of laughter and her
daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and,
opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spec-
tacles of massive frame. We then learned that their
purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago,
in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore
glasses, they should be gold-bowed ; and I hope the
manes of the dead were half as happy in these votive
spectacles as the simple soul that offered them.

She and her late partner were the parents- of
eleven children, some of whom were dead, and
some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts.
During his life-time she had kept a little shop in her
native town ; and it was only within a few years that
she had gone into service. She cherished a natural
haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although
disposed to do all she could of her own motion.
Being told to say when she wanted an afternoon,

24 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

she explained that when she wanted an afternoon
she always took it without asking, but always planned
so as not to discommode the ladies with whom she
lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven
within three years, which made us doubt the success
of her system in all cases, though she merely held
out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the fu-
ture, and a proof of the ease with which places were
to be found. She contended, moreover, that a lady
who had for thirty years had a house of her own,
was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive
visits from friends where she might be living, but
that they ought freely to come and go like other
guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in-
law, Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with
her ; and her defied mistress, on entering the dining-
room, found the Professor at pudding and tea there,
— an impressively respectable figure in black clothes,
vrith a black face rendered yet more effective by a
pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark
professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island,
and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue
in his science by reason of being blind as well as
black.

I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a
flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all re-
spects. In fact, she had very good philosophical and
Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart
people of new blood, who had come into their white-
ness by no creditable or pleasant process. The late
Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies,

MBS. JOHNSON. 25

whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook
upon a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters,
and had written a book to show the superiority of
the black over the white branches of the human
family. In this he held that, as all islands have been
at their discovery found peopled by blacks, we must
needs believe that humanity was first created of that
color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her hus-
band's work (a sole copy in the library of an Eng-
lish gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought
for money), but she often developed its arguments
to the lady of the house ; and one day, with a great
show of reluctance, and many protests that no per-
sonal shght was meant, let fall the fact that Mr.
Johnson believed the white race descended from
Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman
fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his
original blackness. "And he went out from his
presence a leper as white as snow," said Mrs. John-
son, quoting irrefutable Scripture. " Leprosy, lep-
rosy," she added thoughtfully, — " nothing but lep-
rosy bleached you out."

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not
exult in our taint and degradation, as some white
philosophers used to do in the opposite idea that a
part of the human family were cursed to lasting
blackness and slavery in Ham and his children, but
even told us of a remarkable approach to whiteness
in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit
of charity, no doubt, she reftised ever to attend
church with people of her elder and wholesomer

26 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

blood. When she went to church, she said, she
always went to a white church, though while with
us I am bound to say she never went to any. She
professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on Sun-
days ; but we suspected, from certain sounds and
odors which used to steal out of this sanctuary, that
her piety more commonly found expression in dozing
and smoking.

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs.
Johnson's anxiety to claim honor for the African
color, while denying this color in many of her own
family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all
her people must endure, however proudly they hide
it or light-heartedly forget it, from the despite and
contumely to which they are guiltlessly bom : and
when I thought how irreparable was this disgrace
and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it
must be for ages yet, in this world where every other
shame and all manner of wilftd guUt and wickedness
may hope for covert and pardon, I had little heart
to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this
poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try,
in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own
arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness,
that we must have been very cruel and silly people
to turn her sacred fables even into matter of ques-
tion. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia
and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce — it is impos-
sible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of
the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family — have
as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her

MRS. JOHXSON, 27

reverend maternal fancy painted for them in our
world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to
tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion,
and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once
wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi ;
and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington
Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago,
has found some fortunate zone where his hair and
skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore
to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I have no
means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was
the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be.
Naomi could no more be taken in proof of the one
assertion than of the other. When she came to us,
it was agreed that she should go to school ; but she
overruled her mother in this as in everything else,
and never went. Except Sunday-school lessons, she
had no other instruction than that her mistress gave
her in the evenings, when a heavy day's play and
the natural influences of the hour conspired with
original causes to render her powerless before words
of one syllable.

The first week of her service she was obedient
and faithful to her duties ; but, relaxing in the at-
mosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all
menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying
in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people
rang, of running up the front steps, and letting them
in from the outside. As the season expanded, and
the fine weather became confirmed, she modified
even this form of service, and spent her time in the

28 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

fields, appearing at the house only when nature
importunately craved molasses. She had a parrot-
like quickness, so far as music was concerned, and
learned from the Roman statuary to make the groves
and half-finished houses resound,

" Camicia rossa,
Ove t' aecondi ?
T' a'ppella Italia, —
Tu non respondi ! "

She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all
the neighboring children, so that I sometimes won-
dered if our street were not about to march upon
Rome in a body.

In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone be-
trayed her sylvan blood, for she was in all other
respects negro and not Indian. But it was of
her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly
boasted, — when not engaged in argument to main-
tain the superiority of the African race. She loved
to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of
her own arrogant habit of feeling ; and she seemed
mdeed to have inherited something of the Indian's
hauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning and
abundant amiability. She gave many instances in
which her pride had met and overcome the insolence
of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no
means singular in her pride of being reputed proud.

She could never have been a woman of strong
logical faculties, but she had in some things a very
surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom intro-
duced any purpose directly, but bore all about it,

MBS. JOHNSON. 29

and then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared
antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a
reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred ; as when
she warded off reproach for some delinquency by
saying in a general way that she had lived with
ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen
after they had taken their bitters. " Quality ladies
took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any
sting of personality from her remark ; for, from many
things she had let fall, we knew that she did not
regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often
tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former
places ; and woidd tell the lady over whom she
reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their
three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never
complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had
a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the
family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She
even professed to have herself written, a book, which
was stOI in manuscript, and preserved somewhere
among her best clothes.

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact
with a mind so original and suggestive as Mrs. John-
son's. We loved to trace its intricate yet often
transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond
of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry, —
of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Cus-
tom in each grotesque development. We were con-
scious of something warmer in this old soul than in
ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to
think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She

30 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

had scarcely any being apart from her aflFection ; she
had no morality, hut was good because she neither
hated nor envied ; and she might have been a saint
far more easily than tar more civiHzed people.

There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable
nature, so full of guile and so fiill of goodness, that
reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk in elder lands,
where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints
of fear between master and servant, without disturb-
ing the familiarity of their relation. She advised
freely with us upon all household matters, and took
a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She
could be flattered or caressed into almost any service,
but no threat or conmiand could move her. When
she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in
words, but handsomely expressed her regrets in a
pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish
secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this
form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson
took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we
knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted
like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us,
that she never had done half so much for people
before, and that she never had been nearly so well
suited in any other place ; and for a brief and happy
time we thought that we never should part.

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared
in the basement, and was presented to us as Hip-
polyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had
just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State
of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish

MRS. JOHKSOX. 81

youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and
looking forward to the future with a vacant and list-
less eye. I mean that this was his figurative atti-
tude ; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair
beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we
felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs.
Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was
so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New
Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered
from the example of the sheep lately under his
charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch
of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired
members of Mrs. Johnson's family.

He remained with us all the first day until late in
the afternoon, when his mother took him out to get
him a boarding-house. Then he departed in the
van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect
his spirits, and, after he had sufficiently animated
himself by clapping his palms together, starting off
down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest
terror of the cows in the pastures, and the confusion
of the less demonstrative people of our household.
Other characteristic traits appeared in Hippolyto
Thiicydides within no very long period of time, and
he ran away from his lodgings so often during the
summer that he might be said to board round among
the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches of Charles-
bridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson
seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time
in our basement ; for whenever we went below we
found him there, balanced — perhaps in homage to

82 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

US, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in
himself — upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of
his boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried
in the grass without.

We could formulate no very tenable objection to
all this, and yet the presence of Thucydides in our
kitchen unaccountably oppressed our imaginations.
We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous
eidolon, balanced upon every window-sill ; and he
certainly attracted unpleasant notice to our place, no
less by his fiirtive and hang-dog manner of arrival
than by the bold displays with which he celebrated
his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson,
but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all
the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature
seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy ; and if
we had listened to her we should have believed there
was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted
in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She used
to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry, his
courage, and his talent ; and she put fine speeches in
his mouth with no more regard to the truth than if
she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps
she believed that he really said and did the things
she attributed to him : it is the destiny of those who
repeatedly tell great things either of themselves or
others ; and I think we may readily forgive the illu-
sion to her zeal and fondness. In fact, she was not
a wise woman, and she spoiled her children as if she
had been a rich one.

At last, when we said positively that Thucydides

MBS. JOHKSON. 33

should come to us uo more, and then qualified the
■ prohibition by allowing him to come every Sunday,
she answered that she never would hurt the child's
feelings by telling him not to come where his mother
was ; that people who did not love her children did
not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went.
We thought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin
that Hippolyto must go in any event ; but I am
bound to own that he did not gd, and that his mother
stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory
dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew
our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go
into the country with us, and she, after long reluc-
tation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to
send him away to fi;iends during her absence.

We made every preparation, and on the eve of
our departure Mrs. Johnson went into the city to
engage her son's passage to Bangor, while we awaited
her return in untroubled security.

But she did not appear tiU midnight, and then re-
sponded with but a sad " Well, sah I " to the cheer-
fid " Well, Mrs. Johnson ! " that greeted her.

" AU right, Mrs. Johnson ? "

Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle
and half death-rattle, in her throat. "All wrong,
sah. Hippy's oflF again; and I've been all over
the city after him."

" Then you can't go with us in the morning ? "

" How can I, sah ? "

Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then

34 SUBTJBBAN SKETCHES.

she came back to the door again, and, opening it,
uttered, for the first time in our service, words of
apology and regret : " I hope I ha'n't put you out
any. I wanted to go with you, but I ought to hnowed
I couldn't. All is, I loved you too much."

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE.

Vagabonds the world would no doubt call many
of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt
to defend them altogether against the world, which
paints but black and white and in general terms.
Yet I would fain veil what is onjy half-truth under
another name, for I know that the service of their
Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as
we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must
own that they lead the life they do because they
love it. They always protest that nothing but their
ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practic-
ing some mechanical trade. " What work could be
harder," they ask, " than carrying this organ about
all day ? " but while I answer with honesty that
nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only
pretend a disgust with it, and that they really Hke
organ-grinding, if for no other reason than that they
are the children of the summer, and it takes them
into the beloved open weather. One of my friends,
at least, who in the warmer months is to all appear-
ance a blithesome troubadour, living

" A meny life in sun and shade,"

is a coal-heaver in winter ; and though this more
honorable and useAil occupation is doubtless open to

36 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

aim the whole year round, yet he does not devote
himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring
to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his
organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cel-
lars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his
lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing
with his tambourine but take up a collection, and
who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage
of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of
his father's personal history.

It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which
so many Italians live that one might think to find it
under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I
had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other
streets in Boston, — with houses stuccoed outside,
and with gratings at their ground-floor windows ;
with mouldering archways between the buildings,
and at the comers feeble lamps glimmering before
pictures of the Madonna ; with weather-beaten
shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from
which hung the linen swathings of young infants,
and love-making maidens fiirtively lured the velvet-
jacketed, leisurely youth below : a place haunted
by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the
perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the
stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines
and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells,
the travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not
say that I found Ferry Street actually different from
this vision in most respects ; but as for the vines and
almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the moment

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 37

of my encounter with the little tambourine-boy. At
we stood and talked, the snow fell as heavily and
thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a
vague pain, — the envy of a race toward another
bom to a happier clime, — I heard from him that his
whole faniily was going back to Italy in a month.
The father had at last got together money enough,
and the mother, who had long been an invalid, must
be taken home ; and, so far as I know, the population
of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return,
soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land.

More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in
fact, seemed to have no other stock in trade than
this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our sympa-
thetic community. It is scarcely possible but the
reader has met the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto,
a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire to their
home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in
the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance
in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little
subscription-book which she sent in for inspection,
with a printed certificate to the facts of her history
signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon
names of William Tompkins and John Johnson.
These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can
be reproduced, that her object in coming to America
was to get money to go back to Italy ; and the whole
document had so. fictitious an air that it made us
doubt even the nationality of the bearer; but we
were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested
in an Itahan salutation. There was no longer a

88 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

question of imposture in anybody's mind ; we gladly
paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us
with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation
where it belonged. As she turned to go with many
good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner,
but she answered with a compliment insurpassably
flattering, she had just dined — in another palace.
The truth is, there is not a single palace on Benicia
Street, and our little box of pine and paper would
hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where
these things are often contrived with great simplic-
ity ; but as we had made a little Italy together, she
touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race,
and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, stand-
ing on the Chiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the
Canalazzo.

I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in
Italian, but not, so far as I could see, surprised ; and
altogether the most amazing thing about my doorstep
acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never
sm*prised to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if
they are, never show it. A chestnut-roaster, who
has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money
would have bought of him in English, has not other-
wise recognized the fact that Tuscan is not the dia-
lect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalance
with which my advances have always been received
has long since persuaded me that to the grinder at
the gate it is not remarkable that a man should open
the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and
welcome him in his native language. After the first

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 39

shock of this indiflference is past, it is not to be ques-
tioned but it flatters with an illusion, which a stare
of amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter
to a vulgar reality at once, and I could almost be-
lieve it in those wily and amiable folk to intend the
sweeter effect of their unconcern, which •tacitly im-
plies that there is no other tongue in the world but
Italian, and which makes all the earth and air Ital-
ian for the time. Nothing else could have been the
purpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a sum-
mer's day lying at the foot of one of our meeting-
houses, and doing his best to make it a cathedral,
and really giving a sentiment of mediaeval art to the
noble sculptures of the fagade which the carpenters
had just nailed up, fi^shly painted and newly re-
paired. This poet was stretched upon his back,
eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of
an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever
it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping
it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked
him " Where are you from? " he held a morsel in
air long enough to answer " Da Lucca, signore," and
then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a
reverie in which that crude accent even must have
sounded like a gossip's or a kinsman's voice, but
aever otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see
who passed or lingered. There could have been
jttle else in his circumstances to remind him of
home, and if he was really in the sort of day-dream
attributed to him, he was wise not to look about him.
I have not myself been in Lucca, but I conceive that

40 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

its piazza is not like our square, with a pump and
horse-trough in the midst ; but that it has probably a
fountain and statuary, though not possibly so mag-
nificent an elm towering above the bronze or marble
groups as spreads its boughs of benison over our
pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it
to set the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the
brimming buckets to the smoking nostrils of the
horses, while out from the stable comes clanging and
banging with a fresh team that famous African who
has turned white, or, if he is off duty, one of his
brethren who has not yet begun to turn. Figure,
besides, an expressman watering his horse at the
trough, a provision-cart backed up against the curb
in front of one of the stores, various people looking
from the car-office windows, and a conductor appear-
ing at the door long enough to call out, " Ready for
Boston! " — and you have a scene of such gayety as
Lucca could never have witnessed in her piazza at
high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo
Santo, if the Lucchese had cared to look round the
comer of the meeting-house at its moss-grown head
stones, could have had little to remind him of home,
though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness.
But not for him, not for them of his clime and faith,
is the pathos of those • simple memorial slates with
their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones,
as if by the softening of creeds and customs, to
cherub's heads, — not for him is the pang I feel
because of those who died, in our country's youth,
exiles or exiles' children, heirs of the wilderness and

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTAKCE. 41

toil and hardship. Could they rise from their restful
beds, and look on this wandering Italian with his
plaster statuettes of ApoUo, and Canovan dancers
and deities, they would hold his wares little tetter
than Romish saints and idolatries, and would scarcely
have the sentimental interest in him felt by the mod-
em citizen of Charlesbridge ; but I think that even
they must have respected that Lombard scissors-
grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge to
all the cutlery in the house.

He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came
eighteen years ago, and whither he has returned, —
as he told me one acute day in the fall, when all the
winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered
earthward in the grove across the way, — to enjoy a
little climate before he died (j)ergoder unpo" di clima
prima di morire). Our climate was the only thing
he had against us ; in every other respect he was a
New-Englander, even to the early stages of con-
sumption. He told me the story of his whole life,
and of how in his adventurous youth he had left
Milan and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly
seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to
Greece, and set up his ancestral business of green-
grocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather
worse than in Naples, because of the deeper wicked-
ness of the Athenians, who cheated him right and
left;, and whose Uiws gave him no redress. The
Neapolitans were bad enough, he said, making a wry
face, but the Greeks ! — and he spat the Greeks out
on the grass. At last, after much misfortune in

42 SUBmCBAN SKETCHES.

Europe, Jie bethought him of coming to America,
and he had never regretted it, but for the climate.
You spent a good deal here, — nearly all you earned,
— but then a poor man was a man, and the people
were honest. It was wonderful to him that they aU
knew how to read and write, and he viewed with
inexpressible scorn those Irish who came to this
country, and were so httle sensible of the benefits it
conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best
city in America, and " Tell me," said he, " is there
such a thing anywhere else in the world as that
Public Library ? " He, a poor man, and almost
unknown, had taken books from it to his own room,
and was master to do so whenever he liked. He
had thus been enabled to read Botta's history of the
United States, an enormous compliment both to the
country and the work which I doubt ever to have
been paid before ; and he knew more about Wash-
ington than \ did, and desired to know more than I
could tell him of the financial question among us.
So we came to national politics, and then to Euro-
pean affairs. " It appears that Garibaldi will not go
to Rome this year," remarks my scissors-grinder,
who is very red in his sympathies. " The Emperor
forbids ! Well, patience ! And that blessed Pope,
what does he want, that Pope ? He will be king
and priest both, he wUl wear two pairs of shoes at
once ! " I must confess that no other of my door-
step acquaintance had so clear an idea as this one of
the difference between things here and at home. To
the minds of most we seemed divided here as there

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 48

into rich and poor, — aignori, peraone eivili, and
povera gente, — and their thoughts about us did not
go beyond a speculation as to our individual ■w'illing-
ness or ability to pay for organ-grinding. But tliis
Lombard was worthy of his adopted country, and 1
forgive him the frank expression of a doubt that one
day occurred to him, when offered a glass of Italian
wine. He held it daintily between him and the sun
for a smiling moment, and then said, as if our wine
must needs be as ungenuine as our Italian, — was
perhaps some expression from the surrounding cur-
rant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues
which could never give his language the true life
and tonic charm, — " But I suppose this wine is not
made of grapes, signor ? " Yet he was a very cour-
teous old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking,
and with a quicker sense than usual. It was ac-
counted delicacy in him, that, when he had bidden
us a final adieu, he should never come near us again,
though the date of his departure was postponed some
weeks, and we heard him tinkling down the street,
and stopping at the neighbors' houses. He was a
keen-faced, thoughtftil-looking man ; and he wore a
blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which
always dangled the leaves of some wild salad culled
from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides.

Altogether different in character was that Triest-
jne, who came one evening to be helped home at the
close of a very disastrous career in Mexico. He
was a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered
his bright-colored compliments about, till it appeared

44 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES. •

that never before had such amiable people been
asked charity by such a worthy and generous suf-
ferer. In Trieste he had been a journalist, and it
was evident enough from his speech that he was of
a good education. He was vain of his Italian accent,
which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously
peopled native city ; and he made a show of that
marvelous facility of the Tiiestines in languages, by
taking me down French books, Spanish books, Ger-
man books, and reading from them all with the prop-
erest accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self-
satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and
worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole
providence. As nearly as I could make out, he
was a Johnson man in American politics ; upon the
Mexican question he was independent, disdaining
French and Mexicans alike. He was with the for-
mer from the first, and had continued in the service
of Maximilian after their withdrawal, till the execu-
tion of that prince made Mexico no place for adven-
turous merit. He was now going back to his native
country, an ungratefiil land enough, which had ill
treated him long ago, but to which he nevertheless
returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What a
light-hearted rogue he was, — with such merry eyes,
and such a pleasant smile shaping his neatly trimmed
beard and mustache ! After he had supped, and he
stood with us at the door taking leave, something
happened to be said of Itahan songs, whereupon this
bhthe exile, whom the compassion of strangers was
enabling to go home after many years of unprofitable

DOOBSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 45

toil and danger to a country that had loved him not,
fell to caroling a Venetian barcarole, and went
sweetly away in its cadence. I bore Mm company
as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking signor,
and was there bidden adieu with great efiiision, so
that I forgot tiU he had left me to charge him not to
be in fear of the house-dog, which barked but did
not bite. In calling this after him, I had the mis-
fortune to blunder in my verb. A man of another
nation — perhaps another man of his own nation —
would have cared rather for what I said than how I
said it ; but he, as if too zealous for the honor of his
beautiftil language to endure a hurt to it even in that
moment of grief, hfting his hat, and bowing for the
last time, responded with a " Morde, non morsica,
signore ! " and passed in under the pines, and next
day to Italy.

There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us
pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like roha, whom
I regard as leading quite an ideal life in some re-
spects. Her traffic is Umited to a certain number of
families who speak more or less Italian ; and her
days, so far as they are concerned, must be passed
in an atmosphere of sympathy and kindliness. The
truth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot
help but cast a little romance about whoever comes
to us fi-om Italy, whether we have actually known
the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then
this old lady is in herself a very gentle and lovable
kind of person^ with a tender mother-fece, which is
also the face of a child. A smile plays always upon

46 SUBHBBAK SKETCHES.

her wrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes
are full of friendliness. There is never much stufiF
in her basket, however, and it is something of a mys-
tery how she manages to live from it. None but an
ItaHan could, I am sure ; and her experience must
test the ftiU virtue of the national genius for cheap
salads and much-extenuated soup-meat. I do not
know whether it is native in her, or whether it is a
grace acquired from long dealing with those kindly-
hearted customers of hers in Charlesbridge, but she
is of a most munificent spirit, and returns every
smallest benefit with some present from her basket.
She makes me ashamed of things I have written
about the sordidness of her' race, but I shall vainly
seek to atone for them by open-handedness to her.
She will give favor for favor; she wiU not even
count the money she receives ; our bargaining is a
contest of the courtliest civilities, ending in many
an " Adieu ! " "To meet again ! " " Remain well ! "
and " Finally ! " not surpassed if rivaled in any
Italian street. In her ineffectual way, she brings
us news of her different customers, breaking up their
stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables which
suggest them only to the practiced sense, and is per-
fectly patient and contented if we mistake one for
another. She loves them all, but she pities them as
living in a terrible climate ; and doubtless in her
heart she purposes one day to go back to Italy, there
to die. In the mean time she is very cheerful ; she,
too, has had her troubles, — what troubles I do not
remember, but those that come by sickness and by

DOOBSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 47

death, and that really seem no sorrows nntil they
come to us, — yet she never complains. It is hard
to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dol-
lars a month ; but still one lives, and does not fare
so ill either. As it does not seem to be in her to
dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless guile,
felt to be comforting to servant-ridden householders,
that she always speaks of " those Irish," her neigh-
bors, with a bated breath, a shaken head, a hand
lifted to the cheek, and an averted coimtenance.

Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who
peers up at my window out of infinitesimal black
eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for form's sake
grinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As
we parley together, say it is eleven o'clock in the
forenoon, and a sober tranquillity reigns upon the
dust and nodding weeds of Benicia Street. At that
hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons
of our sex in the whole suburban population ; all
other husbands and fathers having eaten their break-
fasts at seven o'clock, and stood up in the early
horse-cars to Boston, whence they will return, with
aching backs and quivering calves, haJf-pendant by
leathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious
conveyances, in the evening. The Italian might go
and grind his organ upon the front stoop of any one
of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there
would be no arm within strong enough to thrust him
thence ; but he is a gentleman in his way, and, as
he prettily explains, he never stops to play except
where the window smiles on him : a frowning lattice

48 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

he will pass in silence, I behold in him a disap-
pointed man, — a man broken in health, and of a
liver baked by long sojourn in a tropical clime. In
large and dim outline, made all the dimmer by his
dialect, he sketches me the story of his life ; how in
his youth he ran away from the Milanese for love
of a girl in France, who, dying, left him with so
little purpose in the world that, after wqrking at his
trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he lis-
tened to a certain gentleman going out upon govern-
ment service to a French colony in South America.
This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said
to my organ-grinder, " Go with me and I make your
fortune." So he, who cared not whither he went,
went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a
hard life he led there ; and of the wages that had
seemed so great in France, he paid nearly half to
his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in his
master's house. The service was not so irksome
in-doors, but it was the hunting beasts in the forest
all day that broke his patience at last.

" Beasts in the forest ? " I ask, forgetftil of the
familiar sense of bestie, and figuring cougars at least
by the word.

" Yes, those little beasts for the naturalists, — flies,
bugs, beetles, — Heaven knows what."

" But this brought you money ? "

" It brought my master money, but me aches and
pains as many as you will, and at last the fever.
When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to
ask for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that

DOOESTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 49

service. I think the signor would have given it, —
but the signora ! So I left, empty as I came, and
was cook on a vessel to New York."

This was the black and white of the man's story.
I lose the color and atmosphere which his manner as
well as his words bestowed upon it. He told it in a
cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of
a poor devil which had interested him, and might
possibly amuse me, leaving out no touch of character
in his portrait of the fat, selfish master, — yielding
enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who,
with all her avarice and greed, he yet confessed to
be very handsome. By the wave of a hand he
housed them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close
shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with
mute slippered feet over stone floors ; and by another
gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the
forest in which he hunted those vivid insects, — the
luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms,
the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the
invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too,
of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention
of the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the
wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gun-
boats keeping their coasts and swooping down upon
every craft that left the shore. He himself had seen
one such capture, and he made me see it, and the
mortal despair of the ftigitives, standing upright in
their boat with the idle 'oars in their unconscious
hands, while the corvette swept toward them.

For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down.
4

50 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

He had that lightness of temper which seems proper
to most northern Italians, whereas those from the
south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men.
Nothing surpasses for unstudied misanthropy of
expression the visages of diiferent Neapolitan harpers
who have visited us ; but they have some right to
their dejected countenances as being of a yet half-
civilized stock, and as real artists and men of genius.
Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers,
are of their race, and they are of every age, from
that of mere children to men in their prime. They
are very rarely old, as many of the organ-grinders
are ; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the
north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They
arrive in twos and threes ; the violinist briefly tunes
his fiddle, and the hai-per unslings his instrument,
and, with faces of profound gloomj they go through
their repertory, — pieces from the great composers,
airs from the opera, not unmingled with such eflForts
of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley and
Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the
language of Shakespeare and Milton, hold us and
our English cousins in tender bonds of mutual affec-
tion. Beyond the fact that they come " dal Basili-
cat'," or " dal Principat'," one gets very little out
of these Neapolitans, though I dare say they aie
not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not
brighten them to the eye, but yet it touches them,
and they are good in playing or leaving off to him
that pays. Long time two of them stood between
the gateway firs on a pleasant summer's afternoon,

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 51

and twanged and scraped their harmonious strings,
till all the idle boys of the neighborhood gathered
about them, listening with a grave and still delight.
It was a most serious company : the NeapoUtans,
with their cloudy brows, rapt in their music ; and the
Yankee children, with their impassive faces, warily
guarding against the faintest expression of enjoy-
ment ; and when at last the minstrels played a brisk
measure, and the music began to work in the blood
of the boys, and one of them shuffling his reluctant
feet upon the gravel, broke into a sudden and resist-
less dance, the spectacle became too sad for con-
templation. The boy danced only from the hips
down 5 no expression of his face gave the levity
sanction, nor did any of his comrades : they beheld
him with a silent fascination, but none was infected
by the solemn indecorum ; and when the legs and
music ceased their play together, no comment was
made, and the dancer turned unheated away. A
chance passer asked for what he called the Geary-
baldeye Hymn, but the Neapolitans apparently did
not know what this was.

My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race ;
now and then an alien to the common Italian tribe
appeared, — an Irish soldier, on his way to Salem,
and willing to show me more of his mutilation than
I cared to buy the sight of for twenty-five cents ;
and more rarely yet an American, also formerly of
the army, but with something besides his wretched-
ness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such
a one rang the bell, and was discovered on the thresh-

52 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

old wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat that
stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of
the independent citizen in his maimed and emaciated
person to inspire him with deliberation and a show
of that indiflference with which we Americans like to
encounter each other ; but his voice was rather faint
when he asked if I supposed we wanted any starch
to-day.

" Yes, certainly," answered what heart there was
within, taking note willftdly, but I hope not wantonly,
what an absurdly limp figure he was for a peddler of
starch, — " certainly from you, brave fellow ; " and
the package being taken from his basket, the man
turned to go away, so very wearily, that a cheap phi-
lanthropy protested : " For. shame ! ask him to sit
down in-doors and drink a glass of water."

" No," answered the poor fellow, when this indig-
nant voice had been obeyed, and he had been taken
at a disadvantage, and as it were surprised into the
confession, " my family hadn't any breakfast this
morning, and I've got to hurry back to them."

" Haven't you had any breakfast ? "

" Well, I wa'n't rightly hungry when I left the
house."

" Here, now," popped in the virtue before named,
" is an opportunity to discharge the debt we all owe
to the brave fellows who gave us back our coimtrv-
Make it beer."

So it was made bee.r and bread and cold meat,
and, after a little pressing, the honest soul consented
to the refreshment. He sat down in a cool doorway,

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 53

and began to eat and to tell of the fight before
Vicksburg. And if you have never seen a one-
armed soldier making a meal, I can assure you the
sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the
cheerfiiller by his memories of the fights that muti-
lated him. This man had no very susceptible audi-
ence, but before he was carried off the field, shot
through the body, and in the arm and foot, he had
sold every package of starch in his basket. I am
ashamed to say this now, for I suspect that a man
with one arm, who indulged himself in going about
under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was
very probably an impostor. He computed a good
day's profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked
if that was not very little for the support of a sick
wife and three children, he answered with a quaint
effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I im-
agined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain,
"You've done your duty, my friend, and more'n
your duty. If every one did their duty like that, we
should get along." So he took leave, and shambled
out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his
pale face, and his linen coat hugging him close, but
with his basket lighter, and I hope his heart also.
At any rate, this was the sentiment which cheap phi-
lanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out
of sight : " There ! you are quits with those maimed
soldiers at last, and you have a country which you
have paid for with cold victuals as they with blood."
We have been a good deal visited by one dis-
banded volunteer, not to the naked eye maimed, nor

54 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yel
who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound
in his side from a spent shell, and who is certainly a
prey to the most acate form of shifrlessness. I do
not recall with exactness the date of our acquaint-
ance, but it was one of those pleasant August after-
noons when a dinner eaten in peace fills the di-
gester with a mUlennial tenderness for the race too
rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a
moment it is a more natural action to loosen than to
tighten the purse-strings, and when a very neatly
dressed young man presented himself at the gate,
and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked
if I had any little job for him to do that he might
pay for a night's lodging, I looked about the small
domain with a vague longing to find some part of it
in disrepair, and experienced a moment's absurd
relief when he hinted that he would be willing to
accept fifty cents in pledge of ftiture service. Yet
this was not the right principle : some work, real or
apparent, must be done for the money, and the
veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry
bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean
enough for a strawberry bed that never bore any-
thing. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have
said : his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the
throat for reasons that shall be sacred against curios-
ity, and he had on a perfectly clean paper collar ; he
was a handsome young fellow, with regular features,
and a solicitously kept imperial and mustache ; his
hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 55

and brushed. I did not hope &om this figure that
the work done would be worth the money paid, and,
as nearly as I can compute, the weeds he took from
that bed cost me a cent apiece, to say nothing df a
cup of tea given him in grace at the end of his
labors.

My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad
to learn, a native American, though it is to be re-
gretted, for the sake of facts which his case went far
to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by
birth. The most that could be claimed was, that he
pame to Boston from Delaware when very yoimg,
and that there on that brine-washed granite he had
grown as perfect a flower of helplessness and indo-
lence, as fine a fiTiit of maturing civilization, as ever
expanded or ripened in Latin lands. He hved, not
only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency
of democracy to exclude mere beauty from our sys-
tem, but a refiitation of those Old World observers,
who deny to our vulgar and bustling communities
the refining and elevating grace of Repose. There
was something veiy curious and original in his
character, from which the sentiment of shame was
absent, but which was not lacking in the fine in-
stincts of personal cleanliness, of dress, of style.
There was nothing of the rowdy in him ; he was
gentle as an Italian noble in his manners: what
other traits they may have had in common, I do not
know ; perhaps an amiable habit of illusion. He
was always going to bring me his discharge papers,
but he never did, though he came often and had

56 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. '

many a pleasant night's sleep at my cost. If some-
times he did a little work, he spent great part of the
time contracted to me in the kitchen, where it was
understood, quite upon his own agency, that his
wages included board. At other times, he called for
money too late in the evening to work it out that
day, and it has happened that a new second girl,
deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertain
light, has shown him into the parlor, where I have
found' him to his and my own great amusement, as
the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else
seemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much.
We all know how pleasant it is to laugh at people be-
hind their backs ; but this veteran afforded me at a
very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one
might laugh at to his face as much as one liked.

Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his
elegance, I felt that somehow our national triumph
was not complete in him, — that there were yet more
finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World,
till one day I looked out of the window and saw at a
little distance my veteran digging a cellar for an
Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave me a shock
of pleasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer
view of what human eyes have seldom, if ever, be-
held, — an American, pure blood, handhng the pick,
the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman
directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared
that none of the trees grew with their roots in the
air, in recognition of this great reversal of the
natural law ; all the French-roof houses stood, right

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 57

side up. The phenomenon may become more com-
mon in ftitxire, unless the American race accom-
plishes its destiny of dying out before the more pop-
nlatory foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran
with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, how-
ever, seemed to feel unpleasantly the anomaly of his
case, and opened the conversation by saying that he
should not work at that job to-morrow, it hurt his
side ; and went on to complain of the inhumanity of
Americans to Americans. "Why," said he, "they'd
rather give out their jobs to a nigger than to one of
their own kind. I was beatin' carpets for a gentle-
man on the Avenue, and the first thing I know he
give most of 'em to a nigger. I beat seven of 'em
in one day, and got two dollars ; and the nigger beat
'em by the piece, and he got a dollar an' a half
apiece. My luck ! "

Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the
rueftd veteran hastened to pile up another wheel-
barrow with earth. If ever we come to reverse
positions generally with our Irish brethren, there is
no doubt but they will get more work out of us than
we do from them at present.

It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to
do second girl's work in my house if I would take
him. The place was not vacant ; and as the sum-
mer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be
left with him on my hands for the winter, it seemed
well to speak to him upon the subject of economy.
The next time he called, I had not about me the
exact sum for a night's lodging, — fifty cents, namely,

58 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

— and asked him if he thought a dollar would do.
He smiled sadly, as if he did not like jesting upon
such a very serious subject, but said he allowed to
work it out, and took it.

" Now, I hope you won't think I am interfering
with your affairs," said his benefactor, " but I really
think you are a very poor financier. According to
your own account, you have been going on from
year to year for a long time, trusting to luck for a
night's lodging. Sometimes I suppose you have to
sleep out-of-doors."

" No, never ! " answered the veteran, with some-
thing like scorn. "I never sleep out-doors. I
wouldn't do it."

" Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your
lodging. Don't you think you'd come cheaper to
yom- friends, if, instead of going to a hotel every
night, you'd take a room somewhere, and pay for it
by the month ? "

" I've thought of that. If I could get a good bed,
I'd try it awhile anyhow. You see the hotels have
raised. I used to get a lodgin' and a nice breakfast
for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can
do to get a lodgin' for the money, and it's just as
dear in the Port as it is in the city. I've tried hotels
pretty much everywhere, and one's about as bad as
another."

If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a
book, he could not have spoken of hotels with greater
disdain.

" You see, the trouble with me is, I ain't got any

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 59

relations around here. Now," he added, with the
life and eagerness of an inspiration, " if I had a
mother and sister livin' down at the Port, say, I
wouldn't go hunting about for these mean little jobs
everywheres. I'd just lay round home, and wait till
something come up big. What I want is a home."
■ At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked
the homeless orphan, " Why don't you get married,
then?"

He gave me another smile, sadder, fainter, sweeter
than before, and said : " When would you like to see
me again, so I could work out this dollar ? "

A sudden and unreasonable disgust for the charac-
ter which had given me so much entertainment suc-
ceeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover, that I
had bought the right to use some frankness with the
veteran, and I said to him : " Do you know now, I
shouldn't care if I never saw you again ? "

I can only conjecture that he took the confidence
in good part, for he did not appear again after that.

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

Walking for walking's sake I do not like. The
diversion appears to me one of the most factitious
of modern enjoyments; and I cannot help looking
upon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of
a north wind, and profess to come home all the live-
lier and better for it, as guilty of a venial hypocrisy.
It is in nature that after such an exercise the bones
should ache and the flesh tremble ; and I suspect
that these harmless pretenders are all the whUe pay-
ing a secret penalty for their bravado. With a
pleasant end in view, or with cheerful companion-
ship, walking is far from being the worst thing in
life ; though doubtless a truly candid person must
confess that he would rather ride under the same
circumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort of
recreation is necessary after a day spent within doors ;
and one is really obliged nowadays to take a little
walk instead of medicine ; for one's doctor is sure to
have a mania on the subject, and there is no more
getting pills or powders out of him for a slight indi-
gestion than if they had all been shot away at the
rebels during the war. For this reason I sometimes
go upon a pedestrian tour, which is of no great ex-
tent in itself, and which I moreover modify by keep-
ing always within sound of the horse-car bells, or
easy reach of some steam-car station.

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 61

I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but
that their utter lack of interest amuses me. I wiU
be honest with the reader, though, and any Master
Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I
cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk.
There is a Slough of Despond in fiill view, and not
a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose
so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we
shall behold dark blue against the western sky pres-
ently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the
whole suburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me,
— a vast space upon which I can embroider any
fiincy I like as I saunter along. I have no associa-
tions with it, or memories of it, and, at some seasons,
I might wander for days in the most frequented parts
of it, and meet hardly any one I know. It is not,
however, to these parts that I commonly turn, but
northward, up a street upon which a flight of French-
roof houses suddenly settled a year or two since, with
families in them, and many outward signs of per-
manence, though their precipitate arrival might cast
some doubt upon this. I have to admire their uni-
form neatness and prettiness, and I look at their
dormer-windows with the envy of one to whose
weak sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared
the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all
my admiration of the houses, I find a variety that is
pleasanter in the landscape, when I reach, beyond
them, a little bridge which appears to span a small
stream. It unites banks hned with a growth of trees
and briers nodding their heads above the neighboring

62 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

levels, and suggesting a qiiiet water-course ; though
in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls be-
tween them, with rippling freight and passenger
trains and ever-gurgling locomotives. The banks
take the earhest green of spring upon their south-
ward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when
the bells are lamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I
find their sunny tranquillity sufficient to give me a
slight heart-ache for I know not what. If I descend
them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I
come to vast brick-yards, which are not in them-
selves exciting to the imagination, and which yet,
from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me
of Egypt, and are forever newly forsaken of those
who made bricks without straw ; so that I have no
trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out
of the kilns ; while the mills for grinding the clay
serve me very well for those sad-voiced gakias or
wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard wail-
ing at their work of drawing water from the Nile.
A little farther on I come to the boarding-house
built at the railroad side for the French Canadians
who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in
the toil of the brick-yards, and who, as they loiter in
windy-voiced, good-humored groups about the doors
of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the
town of St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont
Cenis tunnel, where so many peasant folk like them
are always amiably quarreling before the cdbarett
when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere,
there must be a gendarme with a cocked hat and a

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 63

sword on, standing with folded arms to represent the
Empire and Peace among that rural population ; if I
looked in-doors, I am sure I should see the neatest
of landladies and landladies' daughters and nieces in
high black silk caps, bearing hither and thither
smoking bowls of bouillon and caf4-au-lait. Well, it
takes as little to make one happy as miserable, thank
Heaven ! and I derive a cheerfiilness from this scene
which quite atones to me for the fleeting desolation
suflPered from the sunny verdure on the railroad
bank. With repaired spirits I take my way up
through the brick-yards towards the Irish settlement
on the north, passing under the long sheds that shel-
ter the kilns. The ashes he cold about the mouths
of most, and the bricks are burnt to the proper com-
plexion ; in others these are freshly arranged over
flues in which the fire has not been kindled ; but in
whatever state I see them, I am reminded of brick-
kilns of boyhood. They were then such palaces of
enchantment as any architect should now vainly at-
tempt to rival with bricks upon the most desirable
comer lot of the Back Bay, and were the homes of
men truly to be envied : men privileged to stay up all
night ; to sleep, as it were, out of doors ; to hear the
wild geese as they flew over in the darkness ; to be
waking in time to shoot the early ducks that visited
the neighboring ponds ; to roast com upon the ends
of sticks ; to tell and to Hsten to stories that never
ended, save in some sudden impulse to rise and dance
a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires.
If by day they were seen to have the redness of

64 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

eyes of men that looked upon the whiskey when it
was yellow and gave its color in the flask ; if now
and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed
the scene of their vigils, and a head broken to match
appeared among those good comrades, the boyish
imagination was not shocked by these things, but
accepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile
life. Some such life no doubt is still to be found in
the Dublin to which I am come by the time my re-
pertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted ;
but, oddly enough, I no longer care to encounter it.

It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality
that Dublin is built around the Irish grave-yard.
Most of its windows look out upon the sepulchral
monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the
funeral trains with their long lines of carriages
bringing to the celebration of the sad ultimate rites
those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose
that the spectacle of such obsequies is not at all de-
pressing to the inhabitants of Dublin ; but that, on
the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which,
if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub-
acute cheerfulness in his presence. None but a
Dubliner, however, would have been greatly ani-
mated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll
through this cemetery one afternoon of early spring.
The fact that a marble slab or shaft more or less
sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less
helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom
once we could caress with every tenderness of speech
and touch ; and tha*^ after all, the memorial we raise

A PEDESTRIAN TOUB. 65

IS rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere
conventionality, — this is a dreadful fact on which
the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it al-
ways seems a desolation never recognized, an anguish
never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this
thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names
upon the stones and the black head-boards, — the
latter adorned with pictures of angels, once gilt, but
now weather-worn down to the yellow paint, — a
wail of intolerable pathos iilled the air : " O my
darling, O my darling ! O — O — ! " with sobs
and groans and sighs ; and, looking about, I saw two
women, one standing upright beside another that had
cast herself upon a grave, and lay clasping it with
her comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The
grave was a year old at least, but the grief seemed
of yesterday or of that morning. At times the
friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped
and spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed
out her woe ; and in the midst some little ribald
Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the
pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song ; and
when both the wailing and the singing had died
away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her
many-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned frill
running round the inside of her cap, dropped down
upon her knees beside a very old grave, and clasped
her hands in a silent prayer above it.

If I had beheld all this in some village campo santo
in Italy, I should have been much more vividly im-
pressed by it, as an sesthetical observer ; whereas I

5

66 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

was now merely touched as a human being, and had
little desire to turn the scene to literary account. I
could not help feeling that it wanted the atmosphere
of sentimental association ; the whole background
was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not
been able to hide from myself so much as I would
like certain points of resemblance between our Irish
and the poorer classes of Italians. The likeness is
one of the first things that strikes an American in
Italy, and I am always reminded of it in Dublin.
So much of the local life appears upon the street ;
there is so much -gossip from house to house, and the
talk is always such a resonant clamoring ; the women,
bareheaded, or with a shawl folded over the head
and caught beneath the chin with the hand, have
such a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from
door to door, or lounging, arms akimbo, among the
cats and poultry at their own thresholds, that one
beholding it all might well fancy himself upon some
Italian calle ' or vioolo. Of course the illusion does
not hold good on a Sunday, when the Dubliners are
coming home from church in their best, — their ex-
traordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk
hats. It does not hold good in any way or at any
time, except upon the surface, for there is benealJi
all this resemblance the difference that must exist
between a race immemorially civilized and one which
has lately emerged from barbarism "after six cen-
turies of oppression." You are likely to find a
polite pagan under the mask of the modem Italian ;
you feel pretty sure that any of his race would,

A PEDESTRIAN TOUB. 67

with a little washing and skilliul manipulation, restore,
like a neglected painting, into something genuinely
graceful and pleasing ; but if one of these Yankee-
fied Celts were scraped, it is but too possible that
you might find a kern, a Whiteboy, or a Pikeman.
The chance of discovering a scholar or a saint of the
period when Ireland was the centre of learning, and
the favorite seat of the Church, is scarcely one in
three.

Among the houses fi-onting on the main street of
Dublin, every other one — I speak in all moderation
— is a grocery, if I may judge by a tin case of corn-
balls, a jar of candy, and a card of shirt-buttons,
with an under layer of primers and ballads, in the
windows. You descend fi-om the street by several
steps into these haunts, which are contrived to secure
the greatest possible dampness and darkness ; and if
you have made an errand inside, you doubtless find
a lady before the counter in the act of putting down
a guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she
neatly wipes her mouth on the back of the other.
She has that efiect, observable in aU tippling women
of low degree, of having no upper garment on but
a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds
and lines. She. slinks out directly, but the lady be-
hind the counter gives you good evening with

" The affectation of a bright-eyed ease,"

intended to deceive if you chance to be a State con-
stable in disguise, and to propitiate if you are a veri-
table customer: "Who was that woman, lamenting

68 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

SO, over in the grave-yard? " " O, I don't know, sir,"
answered the lady, making change for the price of a
ballad. "Some Irish folks. They ginerally cries
that way."

In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I
found a depth of mud appaUing even to one who
had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The
streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in
shifting themselves along the sides of fences and
alert to take advantage of every projecting doorstep.
There were no dry places, except in front of the
groceries, where the ground was beaten hard by the
broad feet of loafing geese and the coming and go-
ing of admirably small children making purchases
there. The number of the Httle ones was quite as
remarkable as their size, and ought to have been
even more interesting, if, as sometimes appears prob-
able, such increase shall — together with the well-
known ambition of Dubliners to rule the land — one
day make an end of us poor Yankees as a dominant
plurality.

The town was somewhat tainted with our archi-
tectural respectability, unless the newness of some
of the buildings gave illusion of this ; and, though
the streets of Dubhn were not at all cared for, and
though every house on the main thoroughfare stood
upon the brink of a slough, without yard, or any
attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many
cottages in the less aristocratic quarters inclosed in
palings, and embowered in the usual suburban pear-
trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, were

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 39

dwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been
inherited from a population now as extinct in that
region as the Pequots, and they were not always
careftdly cherished. On the border of the hamlet is
to be seen an old farm-house of the poorer sort, built
about the beginning of this century, and now thickly
peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown down, and
the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected
by a fence, shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity
of lawless poultry, as little like the steady-habited
poultry of other times, as the people of the house
are like the former inmates, long since dead or gone
West. I offer the poor place a sentiment of regret
as I pass, thinking of its better days. I think of its
decorous, hard-working, cleanly, school-going, church-
attending life, which was full of the pleasure of duty
done, and was not without its own quaint beauty
and grace. What long Sabbaths were kept in that
old house, what scanty holidays ! Yet irom this and
such as this came the dominion of the whole wild
continent, the freedom of a race, the greatness of
the greatest people. It may be that I regretted a
little too exultantly, and that out of this particular
house came only peddling of innumerable clocks
and multitudinous tin-ware. But as yet, it is pretty
certain that the general character of the population
has not gained by the change. What is in the
fiiture, let the prophets say ; any one can see that
something not quite agreeable is in the present;
something that takes the wrong side, as by instinct,
in politics ; something that mainly helps to prop up

70 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

tottering priestcraft among us ; something that one
thinks of with dismay as destined to control so
largely the civil and religious interests erf" the coun-
try. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect.
Mrs. Clannahan's kitchen, as it may be seen by the
desperate philosopher when he goes to engage her
for the spring house-cleaning, is a strong argument
against his fears. If Mrs. Clannahan, lately of an
Irish cabin, can show a kitchen so capably appointed
and so neatly kept as that, the country may yet
be an inch or two from the brink of ruin, and the
race which we trust as little as we love may turn out
no more spendthrift than most heirs. It is encour-
aging, moreover, when any people can flatter them-
selves upon a superior prosperity and virtue, and we
may take heart from the fact that the French Cana-
dians, many of whom have lodgings in Dublin, are
not well seen by the higher classes of the citizens
there. Mrs. Clannahan, whose house stands over
against the main gate of the grave-yard, and who
may, therefore, be considered as moving in the best
Dublin society, hints, that though good Catholics, the
French are not thought perfectly honest, — " things
have been missed " since they came to blight with
their crimes and vices the once happy seat of integ-
rity. It is amusing to find Dublin fearful of the en-
croachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread
the advance of the Irish. We must make a jest of
our own alarms, and even smile — since we cannot
help ourselves — at the spiritual desolation occasioned
by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 71

suburban neighborhoods. The householders view
with fear and jealousy the erection of any dwelling
of less than a stated cost, as portending a possible
advent of Irish ; and when the calamitous race
actually appears, a mortal pang strikes to the bottom
of every pocket. Values tremble throughout that
neighborhood, to which the new-comers communicate
a species of moral dry-rot. None but the Irish will
build near the Irish ; and the infection of fear spreads
to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners
prepare to abandon them, — not always, however,
let us hope, without turning, at the expense of the
invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my
walk from Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw
more than one token of the encroachment of the
Celtic army, which had here and there invested a
Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side,
and thus given to its essential and otherwise quite
hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that attends
failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of
however poor a sort originally. The fortunes of
such a house are, of course, not to be retrieved.
Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and
it is perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know
that the Irish citizen whom we do not always honor
as our equal in civilization loves to speak of us scorn-
fully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The
place remains to the intruder and his heirs forever.
We gracefully retire before him even in politics, as
the metropolis — if it is the metropolis — can wit-
ness ; and we wait with an anxious curiosity the

72 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

encounter of the Irish and the Chinese, now rapidly
approaching each other from opposite shores of the
continent. Shall we be crushed in the collision of
these superior races ? Every intelligence-ofSce will
soon be ringing with the cries of combat, and all our
kitchens strewn with pig-tails and bark chignons.
As yet we have gay hopes of our Buddhistic breth-
ren ; but how will it be when they begin to quarter
the Dragon upon the Stars and Stripes, and buy up
all the best sites for temples, and bum their joss-
sticks, as it were, under our very noses ? Our grasp
upon the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps ?
Is it true that, when we look so anxiously for help
from others, the virtue has gone out of ourselves ?
I should hope not.

As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and
handsomer; and as I draw near the Avenue, the
Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their dor-
mer-windows, and welcome me back to the Ameri-
can community. There are fences about all the
■ houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards ; the
children, which had swarmed in the thriftless and
unenlightened purlieus of Dublin, diminish in number
and finally disappear ; the chickens have vanished ;
and I hear — I hear the pensive music of the horse-
car bells, which in some alien land, I am sure, would
be as pathetic to me as the Ranz des Vaches to the
Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander : in the
desert, where the traveller seems to hear the famil-
iar bells of his far-off church, this tinkle would haunt
the absolute silence, and recall the exile's fancy to

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 73

Charlesbridge ; and perhaps in the mocking mirage
he would behold an airy horse-car track, and a
phantasmagoric horse-car moving slowly along the
edge of the horizon, with spectral passengers closely
packed inside and oyerflowing either platform.

But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to
me yet again, in the figure of an old, old man, wear-
ing the clothes of other times, and a sort of ancestral
roimd hat. In the act of striking a match he asks
me the time of day, and, applying the fire to his
pipe, he returns me his thanks in a volume of words
and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man !
Can age and neglect do so much for any of us ? This
ruinous person was associated with a hand-cart as
decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful ; for
though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered firom
far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had
preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It
groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was
to learn from the old man that there was, and had
been, in his person, for thirteen years, such a thing
in the. world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that
these cans were now filled with that pleasant drink.
They did not invite me to prove their contents, being
cans that apparently passed their vacant moments in
stables and even manure-heaps, and that looked
somehow emulous of that old man's stubble and
wrinkles. I bought nothing, but I left the old ped-
dler .well content, seated upon a thill of his cart,
smoking tranquilly, and filling the keen spring even-
ing air with fumes which it dispersed abroad, and
made to itself a pleasant incense of.

74 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the
Avenu6 and lounged hpmeward along the stately
street. Above the station it is far more picturesque
than it is below, and the magnificent elms that
shadow it might well have looked, in their sapling-
hood, upon the British straggling down the country-
road from the Concord fight; and there are some
ancient houses yet standing that must have been
filled with exultation at the same spectacle. Poor
old revolutionaries I they would never have believed
that their descendants would come to love the Eng-
lish as we do.

The season has advanced rapidly during my prog-
ress irom Dublin to the Avenue ; and by the time I
reach the famous old tavern, not far from the station,
it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the
yellow sunlight falls upon a body of good comrades
who are grooming a marvelous number of piebald
steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these
beasts — which always look so much more like works
of art than of nature — I know that there is to be a
circus somewhere very soon ; and the gay bills pasted
all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be
two performances at the Port on the morrow. The
grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at
their labor ; and their life seems such a low, igno-
rant, happy life, that the secret nomad lurking in
every respectable and stationary personality stirs
within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship
with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence
in our age of railroads ; they wander over the con-

A PEDESTRIAN TOUB. - 75

tinent with their great caravan, and everywhere
pursue the summer from ^outh to North and from
North to South again ; in the mUd forenoons they
groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze
under their wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the
crowd within and without the mighty canvas near
them, — doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-
smelling grass ; and in the starry midnight rise and
strike their tents, and set forth again over the still
country roads, to take the next village on the mor-
row with the blaze and splendor of their " Grand
Entree." The triumphal chariot in which the musi-
cians are borne at the head of the procession is com-
posed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt
swans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving
necks j but the chariot, as I behold it beside the sta-
ble, is mysteriously draped in white canvas, through
which its gilding glitters only here and there. And
does it inove thus shrouded in the company's wander-
ings from place to place, and is the precious spottiness
of the piebalds then hidden under envious drapery ?
O happy grooms, — not clean as to shirts, nor espe-
cially neat in your conversation, but displaying a
Wealth of art in India-ink upon your manly chests
and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking
in every movement your freedom from all conven-
tional gyves and shackles, " seid UTmchlungen ! " —
in spirit ; for the rest, you are rather too damp, and
seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impar-
tially to your o^vn trousers and the horses' legs to
receive an actual embrace from a dilettante vaga-
bond.

76 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

The old tavern is old only comparatively ; but in
our new and change&l life it is already quaint. It
is very long, and low-studded in either story, with a
row of windows in the roof, and a great porch, fiir-
nished with benches, running the whole length of
the ground-floor. Perhaps because they take the
dust of the street too freely, or because the guests
find it more social and comfortable to gather in-doors
in the wide, low-ceiled office, the benches are not
worn, nor particularly whittled. The room has the
desolate air characteristic of offices which have once
been bar-rooms ; but no doubt, on a winter's night,
there is talk worth listening to there, of flocks and
herds and horse-trades, from the drovers and cattle-
market men who patronize the tavern; and the
artistic temperament, at least, could feel no regret if
that sepulchrally penitent bar-room then developed
a secret capacity for the wickedness that once boldly
glittered behind the counter in rows of decanters.

The house was formerly renowned for its suppers,
of which all that was learned or gifted in the old
college town of Charlesbridge used to partake ; and
I have heard lips which breathe the loftiest song and
the sweetest humor — let alone being "dewy with
the Greek of Plato " — smacked regretfully over
the memory of those suppers' roast and broiled. No
such suppers, they say, are cooked in the world any
more ; and I am somehow made to feel that their
passing away is connected with the decay of good
literature.

I hope it may be very long before the predestined

A PEDESTEIAN TOUB. 77

French-roof villa occupies the tavern's site, and turns
into lawns and gardens its wide-spreading cattle-pens,
and removes the great bam that now shows its broad,
low gable to the street. This is yet older and
quainter-looking than the tavern itself ; it is mighty
capacious, and gives a still profounder impression of
vastness with its shed, of which the roof slopes
southward down almost to a man's height from the
ground, and shelters a row of mangers, running
back half the length of the stable, and serving in
former times for the baiting of such beasts as could
not be provided for within. But the halcyon days
of the cattle-market are past (though you may still
see the white horns tossing above the fences of the
pens, when a newly arrived herd lands from the train
to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place looks
now so empty and forsaken, spite of the circus bag-
gage-wagons, that it were hard to believe these
mangers could ever have been in request, but for
the fact that they are all gnawed, down to the quick
as it were, by generations of horses — vanished for-
ever on the deserted highways of the past — impa-
tient for their oats or hungering for more.

The day must come, of course, when the mangers
will all be taken from the stable-shed, and exposed
for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop which
stands over against the tavern. I am no more sur-
prised than one in a dream, to find it a week-day
afternoon by the time I have crossed thither from
the circus-men grooming their piebalds. It is an
enchanted place to me, and I am a frequent and

78 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

unprofitable customer there, bujring only just enough
to make good my footing with the custodian of its
marvels, who is, of course, too true an American to
show any desire to sell. Without, on either side of
the doorway, I am pretty sure to find, among other
articles of furniture, a mahogany and hair-cloth sofa,
a family portrait, a landscape painting, a bath-tub,
and a flower-stand, with now and then the variety
of a boat and a dog-house ; while under an adjoin-
ing shed is heaped a mass of miscellaneous mov-
ables, of a heavier sort, and fearlessly left there night
and day, being on all accounts undesirable to steal.
The door of the shop rings a bell in opening, and
ushers the customer into a room which Chaos her-
self might have planned in one of her happier mo-
ments. Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors,
rocking-chairs, and blue overalls hang from the ' ceil-
ing, and devious pathways wind amidst piles of ready-
made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of
knick-knack and half hidden under heaps of hats
and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of
drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the
stairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back
room overflowing with glassware and crockery.
These things are not all second-hand, but they are
all old and equally pathetic. The melancholy of
ruinous auction sales, of changing tastes or changing
fashions, clings to them, whether they are things that
have never had a home and have been on sale ever
since they were made, or things that have been asso-
ciated with every phase of human hfe.

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 79

Among other objects, certain large glass vases,
omamented by the polite art of potichomanie, have
long appealed to my fancy, wherein they capriciously
allied themselves to the history of aging single
women in lonely New England village houses, —
pathetic sisters lingering upon the neutral ground
between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet
unrisen prospects of consumption. The work implies
an imperfect yet real love of beauty, the leisure for
it a degree of pecuniary ease : the thoughts of the
sisters rise above the pickling and preserving that
occupied their heartier and happier mother ; they are
in fact in that aesthetic, social, and intellectual mean,
in which single women are thought soonest to wither
and decline. With a little more power, and in our
later era, they would be writing stories full of ambi-
tious, unintelligible, self-devoted and sudden collaps-
ing young girls and amazing doctors ; but as they
are, and in their time, they must do what they can.
A sentimentalist may discern on these vases not only
the gay designs with which they omamented them,
but their own dim faces looking wan from the win-
dows of some huge old homestead, a world too wide
for the shrunken family. All April long the door-
yard trees crouch and shudder in the sour east, all
Jvme they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and
then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tat-
tered and hectic foliage. From the window the
fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural Uveliness of
the summer streets through which the summer
boarders are driving, or upon the death-white drifts

80 . SXJBUBBAN SKETCHES.

of the intolerable winter. Their father, the captain,
is dead ; he died with the Calcutta trade, having sur-
vived their mother, and left them a hopeless compe-
tency and yonder bamboo chairs ; their only brother
is in California ; one, though she loved, had never
a lover ; her sister's betrothed married West, whither
he went to make a home for her, — and ah ! is it
vases for the desolate parlor mantel they decorate, or
faneral ums ? And when in time, they being gone,
the Califomian brother sends to sell out at auction
the old place with the household and kitchen furni-
ture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes that the pur-
chaser finds in these jars ?

They are empty now ; and I wonder how came they
here ? How came the show-case of Dr. Merrifield,
Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yon
Italian painting ? — a poor, silly, little affected Ma-
donna, simpering at me from her dingy gilt frame
till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar. From
what country church or family oratory, in what revo-
lution, or stress of private fortunes, — then from what
various cabinets of antiquities, in what dear Vicenza,
or Ferrara, or Mantua, camest thou, O Madonna?
Whose likeness are you, poor girl, with your every-
day prettiness of brows and chin, and your Kaphael-
esque crick in the neck ? I think I know a part of
your story. Tou were once the property of that
ruined advocate, whose sensibilities would sometimes
consent that a valet de place of uncommon delicacy
should bring to his ancestral palace some singularly
meritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from his

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 81

f

rare collection, — a collection of rubbish scarcely to be
equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hung in that fam-
ily-room, reached after passage through stately vesti-
bules and grand stairways ; and O, I would be
cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again
from some such windows as were there, upon some
such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, en-
chanted garden as lay below ! In that room sat the
advocate's mother and hunchback sister, with their
smoky sealdini and their snuffy priest; and there
the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the taste of his
party, inflicted the pang courted by the advocate,
and asked if you were for sale. And then the mined
advocate clasped his hands, rubbed them, set his head
heart-brokenly on one side, took you down, heaved
a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and sold you — you!
a family heirloom ! Well, at least yon are old, and
you represent to me acres of dim, religious canvas in
that beloved land ; and here is the dollar now asked
for you : I could not have bought you for so little at
home.

The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings,
of the kind called Grecian for a reason never re-
vealed by the inventor of an art as old as poticho-
manie itself. It was an art by which ordinary litho-
graphs were given a ghastly transparency, and a tone
as disagreeable as chromos ; and I doubt if it could
have been known to the Greeks in their best age.
But I remember very well when it passed over
whole neighborhoods in some parts of this country,
wasting the time of many young women, and disfig-

82 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

uring parlor walls with the fruit of their accomplish-
ment. It was always taught by Professors, a class
of learned young men who acquired their title by
abandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of
ready-made clothing, travelling about the country
with portfolios under their arms. It was an experi-
ence to make loafers for life of them ; and I fancy
the girls who learnt their art never afterwards made
so good butter and cheese.

" Xon ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e paasa."

Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mez-
zotints ; full length pictures of presidents and states-
men, chiefly General Jackson, Henry Clay, and
Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the
offices or parlors of country politicians. They are aU
statesmanlike and presidential in attitude ; and I
know that if the mighty Webster's lips had language,
he would take his hand out of his waistcoat front,
and say to his fellow mezzotints : " Venerable men !
you have come down to us from a former generation,
bringing your household ftimiture and miscellaneous
trumpery of all kinds with you."

Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my inter-
est -with, certain old willow chairs of an hour-glass pat-
tern, which never stood upright, probably, and have
now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from having
been fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of
hot summer afternoons. In the windows are small
vases of alabaster, fly-specked Parian and plaster fig-
ures, and dolls with stifl" wooden limbs and papier-
mache heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE, . 83

in these days of modish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit
and sturdy india-rubber brunettes. The show-case
is full of an incredible variety, as photograph albums,
fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery
of all sorts, and curious old colored prints of Ade-
laide, and Kate, and EUen. A rocking-horse is sta-
bled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand car-
peting, hat-racks, and mirrors ; and standing cheek-
by-jowl with painted washstands and bureaus are
some plaster statues, aptly colored and varnished to
represent bronze.

There is nothing here but has a marked character
of its own, some distinct yet intangible trait ac-
quired from former circumstances ; and doubtless all
these things have that lurking likeness to former
owners which clothes and furniture are apt to take
on from long association, and which we should in-
stantly recognize could they be confronted with
their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative
moments, as if the strange assemblage of incongrui-
ties must have a consciousness of these latent resem-
blances, which the individual pieces betray when
their present keeper turns the key upon them, and
abandons them to themselves at night ; and I have
sometimes fancied such an effect in the late twilight,
when I have wandered into their resting-place, and
have beheld them in the unnatural glare of a kerosene
lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and
casting every manner of grotesque shadow upon the
floor and walls. But this may have been an illusion ;
at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-driving

84 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

capacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected
by a weird quality in his wares ; though they have
not failed to impart to him something of their own
desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neigh-
bor in charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I
enter, I am watchfully followed about from comer to
corner, and from room to room, lest I pocket a mat-
tress or sUp a book-case under my coat. The store-
keeper himself never watches me ; perhaps he knows
that it is a purely professional interest I take in the
collection ; that I am in the trade and have a second-
hand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and
every sort of literary odds and ends, picked up at
random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same
chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little like
ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen.
They are in part the Canadians who work in the brick-
yards, and it is surprising to find how much business
can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains
struck without the help of a common language. I
am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that no-
body is wronged in these trades. The taciturn store-
keeper, who regards his customers ivith a stare of
solemn amusement as Critturs bom by some extraor-
dinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a lan-
guage that practically amounts to deafiiess and dumb-
ness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them
to affect his commercial efficiency ; he drops them
now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive
Yankee idiom ; he knows very well when they
mean to buy and when they do not ; and they,

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 8£

equally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the
glib allurements of a salesman, judge of price and
quality for themselves, make their solitary offer, and
stand or fall by it.

I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour
without a glance at the wonderful interior of this
cheap store, and I know all its contents familiarly.
I recognize wares that have now been on sale there
for years ; I miss at first glance such accustomed
objects as have been parted with between my fre-
quent visits, and hail with pleasure the additions to
that extraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose,
expect the reader to sympathize with the joy I felt
the other night, in discovering among the latter an
adventurous and universally applicable sign-board
advertising This House and Lot for Sale, and, inter-
twined with the cast-off suspenders which long gar-
landed a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly
added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here
and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as
I do, the poetry of thus buying and offering for sale
the veiy most recondite, as well as the commonest
articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the
predestined purchaser will appear and carry off the
article appointed him from the beginning of time.
This faith is all the more touching, because the col-
lector cannot expect to live until the whole stock is
disposed of, and because, in the order of nature,
much must at last fall to ruin unbought, unless the
reporter's Devouring Element appears and gives a
sudden tragical turn to the poem.

86 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

It is the whistle of a train drawing up at the
neighboring station that calls me away from the
second-hand store ; for I never find myself able to
resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It
cannot cease to be impressive. I stand beside the
track while the familiar monster writhes up to the
station and disgorges its passengers, — suburbanly
packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when
empty-handed somehow proclaiming the jaded char-
acter of men that hurry their work all day to catch
the evening train out, and their dreams all night to
catch the morning train in, — and then I climb the
station-stairs, and " hang with grooms and porters on
the bridge," that I may not lose my ever-repeated
sensation of having the train pass under my feet,
and of seeing it rush away westward to the pretty
blue hills beyond, — hills not too big for a man bom
in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling
along the track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspec-
tive, and is presently out of sight. It has left the
city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the
woods and meadows ; but Nature never in the least
accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part of her
landscape's loveliness. The train passes alien through
all her moods and aspects ; the wounds made in her
face by the road's sharp cuts and excavations are
slowest of all wounds to heal, and the iron rails
remain to the last as shackles upon her. Yet when
the rails are removed, as has happened with a non-
paying track in Charlesbridge, the road inspires a
real tenderness in her. Then she bids it take on

A PEDESTRIAN TOUE. 87

the grace that belongs to all ruin ; the grass creeps
stealthily over the scarified sides of the embank-
ments ; the golden-rod, and the purple-topped iron-
weed, and the lady's-slipper, spring up in the hollows
on either side, and — I am still thinking of that de-
serted railroad which runs through Charlesbridge —
hide with their leafage the empty tomato-cans and
broken bottles and old boots on the ash-heaps
dumped there; Nature sets her velvety willows a
waving near, and lower than their airy tops plans a
vista of trees arching above the track, which is as
wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunset
ever cared to look through and gild a board fence
beyond.

Most of our people come from Boston on the
horse-cars, and it is only the dwellers on the Avenue
and the neighboring streets whom hurrying home-
ward I follow away from the steam-car station. The
Avenue is our handsomest street ; and if it were in
the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge to feel any
local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters
are, I perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a
pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome,
but probably the very dullest street in the world. It
is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly
the whole way from the station to the colleges by
pine palaces rising from spacious lawns, or from the
green of trees or the brightness of gardens. The
splendor is all very new ; but newness is not a fault
that much afiects architectural beauty, while it is the
only one that time is certain to repair : and I find an

88 StffiUBBAN SKETCHES.

honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceftil lines
of those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my
appreciation of the vast quiet and monotony of the
street itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon it
from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks
of Benicia Street, I behold, looking northward, a
monumental horse-car standing — it appears for
ages, if I wish to take it for Boston — at the head
of PUny Street ; and looking southward I see that
other emblem of suburban life, an express-wagon,
fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a
buggy nods round the bend under the elms near the
station; and, if fortune is so lavish, a lady appears
from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car,
thrusts the point of her sun-umbrella into the sandy
sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon effect of the
Avenue ; but later in the day, and well into the
dusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting-
course, — with here and there a spider-wagon, a
twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On
market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks
of bleating sheep, and a pastoral tone is thus given to
its tranquillity ; anon a herd of beef-cattle appears
under the elms ; or a drove of pigs, many-pausing,
inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they
were the heirs of prosperity instead of doom, is
slowly urged on toward the shambles. In the spring
or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enliv-
ened by the progress of a brace or so of students
who, in training for one of the University Courses
of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly

A PEDESTEIAN TOUE. 89

along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths
shut, and a sense of immense responsibility visible in
their faces.

The summer is waning with the day as I turn
from the Avenue into Benicia Street. This is the
hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tus-
can poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grass-
hopper yields to the shrilly cricket in noisiness. The
embrowning air rings with the sad music made by
these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gar-
dens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the
spirits not to be accounted for upon the theory that
the street is duller than the Avenue, for it reaUy is
not so.

Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene ! —
without their light, the cry of those crickets, domi-
nated for an instant, but not stilled, by the bellowing
of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a dis-
tant dog, were too much. If it were the last autumn
that ever was to be, it could not be heralded with
notes of dismaller eifect. This is in fact the hour of
supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but
a newly- accepted lover can be happy at twilight. In
the city, even, it is oppressive ; in the country it is
desolate ; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever
lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet
to stir the languid foliage of the sidewalk maples ;
the lamps are not yet lighted, to take away the
gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses
near ; it is too late for letters, too early for a book.

90 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

In town your fancy would turn to the theatres ; in
the country you would occupy yourself with cares of
poultry or of stock : in the suburbs you can but sit
upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mos-
quito.

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON.

At a former period the writer of this had the for-
tune to serve his country in an Itahan city whose
great claim upon the world's sentimental interest is
the fact that —

" The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets
Ebbing and flowing,"

and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or
wheels. In his quality of United States official, he
was naturally called upon for information concerning
the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated
early in the century to Buenos Ayres, and was com-
missioned to learn why certain persons in Mexico
and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they
were still living, written home to their fiiends. On
the other hand, he was intrusted with business
nearly as pertinent and hopeftd by some of his own
countrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that
he one day received a neatly lithographed circular
with his name and address written in it, signed by a
famous projector of such enterprises, asking him to
cooperate for the introduction of horse-railroads in
Venice. The obstacles to the scheme were of such
a nature that it seemed hardly worth while even to
reply to the circular ; but the proposal was one of

92 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

those bold flights of imagination which forever hft
objects out of Tulgar association. It has cast an
enduring, poetic charm even about the horse-car in
my mind, and I naturally look for many unprosaic
aspects of humanity there. I have an acquaintance
who insists that it is the place above all others suited
to see life in every striking phase. He pretends to
have witnessed there the reunion of friends who had
not met in many years, the embrace, figurative of
course, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation of
lovers ; I do not know but also some scenes of
love-making, and acceptance or rejection. But my
friend is an imaginative man, and may make himself
romances. I myself profess to have beheld for the
most part only mysteries; and I think it not the
least of these that, riding on the same cars day after
day, one finds so many strange faces with so httle
variety. Whether or not that dull, jarring motion
shakes inward and settles about the centres of men-
tal life the sprightliness that should inform the vis-
age, I do not know ; but it is certain that the empti-
ness of the average passenger's countenance is some-
thing wonderfiil, considered with reference to Na-
ture's abhorrence of a vacuum, and the intellectual
repute which Boston enjoys among envious New-
Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold
metropolis is enlivened by a mystery so positive in
character as the young lady in black, who alighted
at a most ordinary little street in Old Charlesbridge,
and heightened her effect by going into a French-
roof house there that had no more right than a dry-

BY HORSE-CAB TO BOSTON. 93

goods box to receive a mystery. She was tall, and
her lovely arms showed through the black gauze of
her dress with an exquisite roundness and morhidezza.
Upon her beautiful wrists she had heavy bracelets of
dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscan de\'ice ; and
from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same
metal and design, which had the singular privilege
of touching, now and then, her white columnar neck.
A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan, and
also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one lit-
tle ungloved hand gUttered a multitude of rings.
This hand was very expressive, and took a principal
part in the talk which the lady held with her com-
panion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in
the gesticulation of Southern or Latin hfe some-
where. Her features, on the contrary, were rather
insipid, being too small and fine ; but they were re-
deemed by the liquid splendor of her beautiiul eyes,
and the mortal pallor of her complexion. She was
altogether so startling an apparition, that all of us
jaded, commonplace spectres turned and fastened
our weary, lack-lustre eyes upon her looks, with an
utter inability to remove them. There was one fat,
unctuous person seated opposite, to whom his interest
was a torture, for he would have gone to sleep except
for her remarkable presence : as it was, his heavy
eyelids fell half-way shut, and drooped there at an
agonizing angle, while his eyes remained immovably
fixed upon that strange, death-white face. How it
could have come of that colorlessness, — whether
through long sickness or long residence in a tropical

94 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

climate, — was a question that perplexed another of
the passengers, who would have expected to hear
the lady speak any language in the world rather than
English ; and to whom her companion or attendant
was hardly less than herself a mystery, — being a
dragon-like, elderish female, clearly a Yankee by
birth, but apparently of many years' absence from
home. The propriety of extracting these people
from the horse-cars and transferring them bodily to
the first chapter of a romance was a thing about
which there could be no manner of doubt, and noth-
ing prevented the abduction but the unexpected vol-
untary exit of the pale lady. As she passed out
everybody else awoke as from a dream, or as if freed
from a potent fascination. It is part of the mystery
that this lady should never have reappeared in that
theatre of life, the horse-car ; but I cannot regret
having never seen her more ; she was so inestimably
precious to wonder that it would have been a kind of
loss to learn anything about her.

On the other hand, I should be glad if two young
men who once presented themselves as mysteries
upon the same stage could be so distinctly and
sharply identified that all mankind should recognize
them at the day of judgment. They were not so
remarkable in the nature as in the degree of their
offense ; for the mystery that any man should keep
his seat in a horse-car and let a woman stand is but
too sadly common. They say that this public un-
kindness to the sex has come about through the in-
gratitude of women, who have fa,iled to return thanks

BY HORSE-CAE TO BOSTON. 95

for places oiFered them, and that it is a just and
noble revenge we take upon them. There might be
something advanced in favor of the idea that we law-
making men, who do not oblige the companies
to provide seats for every one, deserve no thanks
from voteless, helpless women when we offer them
places ; nay, that we ought to be glad if they do not
reproach us for making that a personal favor which
ought to be a common right. I would prefer, on the
whole, to believe that this selfishness is not a con-
certed act on our part, but a flower of advanced civ-
ilization; it is a ripe fruit in European countries,
and it is more noticeable in Boston than anywhere
else in America. It is, in fact, one of the points of
our high polish which people from the interior say
first strikes them on coming among us ; for they de-
clare — no doubt too modestly — that in their Boeo-
tian wilds our Athenian habit is almost unknown.
Yet it would not be fair to credit our whole popula-
tion with it. I have seen a laborer or artisan rise
from his place and offer it to a lady, while a dozen
well-dressed men kept theirs ; and I know several
conservative young gentlemen, who are still so old-
fashioned, as always to respect the weakness and wea-
riness of women. One of them, I hear, has settled
it in his own mind that if the family cook appears in
a car where he is seated, he must rise and give her
his place. This, perhaps, is a trifle idealistic ; but it
is magnificent, it is princely. From his difficult
height, we decline — through ranks that sacrifice
themselves for women with bundles or children in

96 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

arms, for old ladies, or for very young and pretty
ones — to the men who give no odds to the most
helpless creature alive. These are the men who do
not act upon the promptings of human nature like
the laborer, and who do not refine upon their duty
like my young gentlemen, and make it their privilege
to befriend the idea of womanhood ; they are men who
have paid for their seats and are going to keep them.
They have been at work, very probably, all day, and
no doubt they are tired ; they look so, and try hard
not to look ashamed of publicly considering them-
selves before a sex which is bom tired, and from
which our climate and customs have drained so much
health that society sometimes seems little better than
a hospital for invalid woman, where every courtesy
is likely to be a mercy done to a sufferer. Yet the
two young men of whom I began to speak were not
apparently of this class, and let us hope they were
foreigners, — say Englishmen, since we hate Enghsh-
men the most. They were the only men seated, in
a car full of people ; and when four or five ladies
came in and occupied the aisle before them, they
might have been puzzled which to offer their places
to, if one of the ladies had not plainly been infirm.
They settled the question — if there was any in
their minds — by remaining seated, while the lady
in front of them swung uneasily to and fro with the
car, and appeared ready to sink at their feet. In
another moment she had actually done so ; and, too
weary to rise, she continued to crouch upon the
floor of the car for the course of a mile, the young

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 97

men resolutely keeping their places, and not rising
till they were ready to leave the car. It was a horri-
ble scene, and incredible, — that well-dressed woman
sitting on the floor, and those two well-dressed men
keeping their places ; it was as much out of keeping
with our smug respectabilities as a hanging, and was
a spectacle so paralyzing that public opinion took no
action concerning it. A shabby person, standing
upon the platform outside, swore about it, between
expectorations : ev§n the conductor's heart was
touched ; and he said he had seen a good many hard
things aboard horse-cars, but that was a little the
hardest ; he had never expected to come to that..
These were simple people enough, and could not in-
terest me a great deal, but I should have liked to
have a glimpse of the complex minds of those young
men, and I should still like to know something of the
previous life that could have made their behavior pos-
sible to them. They ought to make public the philo-
sophic methods by which they reached that pass of
unshamable selfishness. The information would be
useful to a race which knows the sweetness of self-
indulgence, and would fain know the art of so drug-
ging or besotting the sensibilities that it shall not
feel disgraced by any sort of meanness. They might
really have much to say for themselves ; as, that the
lady, being conscious she could no longer keep her
feet, had no right to crouch at theirs, and put them
to so severe a test ; or that, having suffered her to
sink there, they fell no further in the ignorant public
opinion by suffering her to continue there.

98 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

But I doubt if that other young man could say
anything for himself, who, when a pale, trembling
woman was about to drop into the vacant place at
his side, stretched his arm across it with, "This
seat's engaged," till a robust young fellow, his friend,
appeared, and took it and kept it all the way out from
Boston. The commission of such a tragical wrong,
involving a violation of common usage as well as the
infliction of a positive cruelty, would embitter the
life of an ordinary man, if any ordinary man were
capable of it; but let us trust that nature has pro-
vided fortitude of every kind for the offender, and
that he is not wrung by keener remorse than most
would feel for a petty larceny. I dare say he would
be eager at the first opportunity to rebuke the in-
gratitude of women who do not thank their benefac-
tors for giving them seats. It seems a little odd, by
the way, and perhaps it is through the peculiar bless-
ing of Providence, that, since men have determined
by a savage egotism to teach the offending sex man-
ners, their own comfort should be in the infliction of
the penalty, and that it should be as much a pleasure
as a duty to keep one's place.

Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will
abate, with other nuisances, the whole business of
overloaded public conveyances. In the mean time,
the kindness of women to each other is a notable fea-
ture of all horse-car journeys. It is touching to see
the smiling eagerness with which the poor things
gather close their volumed skirts and make room for
a weary sister, the tender looks of compassion which

BT HOBSE-CAB TO BOSTON. 99

they bend upon the sufferers obliged to stand, the
sweetness with which they rise, if they are young
and strong, to oflFer their place to any infirm or
heavily burdened person of their sex.

But a journey to Boston is not entirely an expe-
rience of bitterness. On the contrary, there are many
things besides the mutual amiability of these beautifol
martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A
whole car-ftJl of people, brought into the closest
contact with one another, yet in the absence of in-
troductions never exchanging a word, each being so
sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus
whatever, is certainly an impressive and stately spec-
tacle. It is a beautiiul day, say ; but far be it from
me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who plainly
would rather die than thus commit himself with me,
and who, in fact, would well-nigh strike me speech-
less with surprise if he did so. If there is any ne-
cessity for communication, as with the conductor, we
essay first to express ourselves by gesture, and then
utter our desires with a certain hoUoAfv and remote
effect, which is not otherwise to be described. I have
sometimes tried to speak above my breath, when,
being about to leave the car, I have made a virtue
of offering my place to the prettiest young woman
standing, but I have found it impossible ; the genius
loci, whatever it was, suppressed me, and I have
gasped out my sham politeness as in a courteous
nightmare. The silencing influence is quite success-
fully resisted by none but the tipsy people who
occasionally ride out with us, and call up a smile,

100 SUBXnjBAN SKETCHES.

sad as a gleam of winter sunshine, to our faces by their
artless prattle. I remember one eventful afternoon
that we were all but moved to laughter by the gayeties
of such a one, who, even after he had ceased to talk,
continued to amuse as by falling asleep, and repos-
ing himself against the shoulder of the lady next him.
Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of the agreeable
variety they contribute to horse-car life, that the
conductor treats his inebriate passengers with such
unfailing tenderness and forbearance. I have never
seen them molested, though I have noticed them in
the indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened
once even to see one of them sit down in a lady's lap.
But that was on the night of Saint Patrick's day.
Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in the
horse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early
afternoon, in the period of lighter travel, I have
found curious figures there : — among others, two
old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom
was dressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with
short sleeves, and inferentially a low neck ; a mender
of umbrellas, with many unwholesome whity-brown
wrecks of umbrellas about him ; a peddler of soap,
who offered cakes of it to his feUow-passengers at a
discount, apparently for friendship's sake ; and a cer-
tain gentleman with a pock-marked face, and a beard
dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a
hymn all the way to Boston, and who gave me no
sufficient reason for thinking him a sea-captain. Not
far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to
be a number of colored ladies waiting to get into the

BY HOBSE-CAB TO BOSTON. 101

car, or to get out of it, — usually one solemn mother
in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthful daughters,
who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure,
and to keep in the laughter that struggles out through
their glittering teeth and eyes, and who place each
other at a disadvantage by divers accidental and in-
tentional bumps and blows. If they are to get out,
the old lady is not certain of the place where, and,
after making the car stop, and parleying with the
conductor, returns to her seat, and is mutely held
up to public scorn by one taciturn wink of the con-
ductor's, eye.

Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to
note one so common and observable as that middle-
aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the one
vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door,
blind and deaf to all the modest beckonings and
benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air
as of better days clings about her ; she seems a per-
son who has known sickness and sorrow ; but so far
from pitying her, you view her with inexpressible
rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit down,
and that she will not. But for a point of honor the
conductor would show her the vacant place ; this
forbidding, however, how can he ? There she
stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as
you must from time to time, and no wild turkey
caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking
down than this middle-aged (shall I say also un-
married?) lady.

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentle-

102 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

men who sit cater-comered, and who will not move
up ; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous
person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practi-
cally sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by
having your knee under him. He implies by this
brutal conduct that you are taking up more space
than belongs to you, and that you are justly made
an example of.

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-
car an advocate of one of the great reforms of the
day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and with-
out any notice passed from a question of crops to a
discussion of suffrage for the negro, and so to woman-
hood sufiirage. " Let the women vote," said he, —
" let 'em vote if they want to. I don't care. Fact is,
I should like to see 'em do it the first time. They're
excitable, you know; they're excitable; " and he
enforced his analysis of female character by thrusting
his elbow sharply into my side. " Now, there's my
wife ; I'd like to see her vote. Be fiin, I tell yon.
And the girls, — Lord, the girls ! Circus wouldn't
be anywhere." Enchanted with the picture which
he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he
laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the
green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin,
" You see," he went on, " I go out playing for danc-
ing-parties. Work all day at my trade, — I'm a
carpenter, — and play in the evening. Take my little
old ten dollars a night. And / notice the women a
good deal ; and I tell you they're all excitable, and
1 sh'd like to see 'em vote. Vote right and vote

BY HORSE-CAK TO BOSTON. 103

often, — that's the ticket, eh ? " This friend of
womanhood suffrage — whose attitude of curiosity and
expectation seemed to me representative of that of
a great many thinkers on the subject — no doubt was
otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man
would not drink wine — if he could find whiskey.
At least I should have said so, guessing from the
odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments.

Something of the character of a college-town is
observable nearly always in the presence of the
students, who confound certain traditional ideas of
students by their quietude of costume and manner,
and whom Padua or Heidelberg would hardly know,
but who nevertheless betray that they are band-
ed to —

" Scorn delights and lire laborious days,"

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a
clannishness of cane or scarf, or a talk of boats and
base-ball held among themselves. One cannot see
them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no
wonder that their young-lady acquaintances brighten
so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is
much good fortune in the world, but none better than
being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale,
handsome, fashionably dressed, with the whole prom-
ise of life before : it's a state of things to disann even
envy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it
must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old : the
generations arise and pass away, but in her veins is
still this tide of warm blood, century in and century
out, so much the same from one age to another that

104 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

it would be hardy to say it was not still one youthftil-
ness. There is a print of the village as it was a cycle
since, showing the oldest of the college buildings,
and upon the street in front a scholar in his schol-
ar's-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish
girl of that period, who is dressed wonderftdly like
the girl of ours, so that but for the student's antique
formality of costume, one might believe that he was
handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no
horse-car in the picture, — that is the only real differ-
ence between then and now in our Charlesbridge,
perennially young and gay. Have there not ever
been here the same grand ambitions, the same high
hopes, — and is not the unbroken succession of youth
in these ?

A^ for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little
or no effect, as I have said. You can, of course, detect
certain classes ; as, in the morning the business-men
going in, to their counters or their desks, and in the
afternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper
parcels. But I think no one can truly claim to know
the regular from the occasional passengers by any
greater cheerfiilness in the faces of the latter. The
horse-car will suffer no such inequality as this, but
reduces us all to the same level of melancholy. It
would be bjit a very unworthy kind of art which
should seek to describe people by such merely exter-
nal traits as a habit of carrying baskets or large
travelling-bags in the car ; and the present muse
scorns it, but is not above speaking of the frequent
presence of those lovely young girls in which Boston

BY HOESE-CAB TO BOSTON. 105

and the suburban towns abound, and who, whethei
. they appear with rolls of music in their hands, or
books from the circulating-libraries, or pretty parcels
or hand-bags, would brighten even the horse-car if
fresh young looks and gay and briUiant costumes could
do so much. But they only add perplexity to the
anomaly, which was already sufficiently trying with
its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, and such
intimate association of velvets and patches as you see
in the churches of Catholic countries, but nowhere
else in the world except in our " coaches of the
sovereign people."

In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot
appear otherwise than very dreary to the fondest
imagination. Coming out, nothing can look more
arctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in
ice and snow, or sadder than the contrast offered to
the same prospect in summer. Then all is laughing,
and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the
Long Bridge at high tide, and, looking southward,
to see the wide crinkle and ghtter of that beautifiil
expanse of water, which laps on one hand the gran-
ite quays of the city, and on the other washes among
the reeds and wild grasses of the salt-meadows. A
ship coming slowly up the channel, or a dingy tug
violently darting athwart it, gives an additional pleas-
ure to the eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid
to the beauty of the scene. It is hard to say at what
hour of the summer's-day the prospect is loveliest ;
and I am certainly not going to speak of the sunset
as tie least of its delights. When this exquisite

106 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

spectacle is presented, the horse-car passenger, happy
to cling with one foot to the rear platform-steps,
looks out over the shoulder next him into fairy-land.
Crimson and purple the bay stretches westward till
its waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here
and there, a hay-rick shows perfectly black against
the light. Afar off, southeastward and westward,
the uplands wear a tinge of tenderest blue ; and in
the nearer distance, on the low shores of the river,
hover the white plumes of arriving and departing
trains. The windows of the stately houses that over-
look the water take the sunset from it evanescently,
and begin to chill and darken before the crimson
bums out of the sky. The windows are, in fact, best
after nightfall, when they are brilliantly lighted from
within ; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and
the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling
tide, the lights reflected far down in the still water,
bring a dream, as I have heard travelled Bostonians
say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same
kind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the
help of no such association ; I am content with it for
what it is. I enjoy also the hints of spring which
one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide
in the first open days. Then there is not only a
vernal beating of carpets on the piers of the draw-
bridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the re-
ceding water show green patches of sea-weeds and
mosses, and flatter the willing eye with a dim hint
of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage,
— which always seems to me, in contrast with dry-

BY HOESE-CAR TO BOSTON. 107

land growths, what the water-logged life of seafaring
folk is to that which we happier men lead on shore,
— taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and bright-
ness of the sun, has then a charm which it loses
when summer really comes ; nor does one, later, have
so keen an interest in the men wading about in the
shallows below the bridge, who, as in the distance
they stoop over to gather whatever shell-fish they
seek, make a very fair show of being some ungainlier
sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come
to the spring-prophesying storks of song and story.
A sentiment of the drowsiness that goes before the
awakening of the year, and is so different firom the
drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber,
is in the air, but is gone when we leave the river
behind, and strike into the straggling village be-
yond.

I maintain that Boston, as one approaches it and
passingly takes in the line of Bunker Hill Monument,
soaring preeminent among the emulous foundry-
chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need
no comparison with other fine sights. Thanks to the
mansard curves and dormer-windows of the newer
houses, there is a singularly picturesque variety
among the roofs that stretch along the bay, and rise
one above another on the city's three hills, grouping
themselves about the State House, and surmounted
by its India-rubber dome. But, after all, does human
weakness crave some legendary charm, some grace
of uncertain antiquity, in the picturesqueness it sees ?
I own that the fiiture, to which we are often re-

108 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

ferred for the " stuff that dreams are made of," is
more difBcult for the fancy than the past, that the
airy amplitude of its possibilities is somewhat chilly,
and that we naturally long for the snug quarters of
old, made warm by many generations of life. Be-
sides, Em-ope spoils us ingenuous Americans, and
flatters our sentimentality into ruinous extrava-
gances. Looking at her many-storied former times,
we forget our own past, neat, compact, and conven-
ient for the poorest memory to dwell in. Yet an
American not infected with the discontent of travel
could hardly approach this superb city without feel-
ing something of the coveted pleasure in her, without
a reverie of her Puritan and Revolutionary times,
and the great names and deeds of her heroic annals.
I think, however, we were well to be rid of this
yearning for a native American antiquity ; for in its
indulgence one cannot but regard himself and his
contemporaries as cumberers of the ground, delay-
ing the consummation of that hoary past which will
be so fascinating to a semi-Chinese posterity, and
will be, ages hence, the inspiration of Pigeon-English
poetry and romance. Let us make much of our two
hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as
our golden age. We healthy-minded people in the
horse-cars' are loath to lose a moment of it, and are
aggrieved that the draw of the bridge should be up,
naturally looking on what is constantly liable to hap-
pen as an especial malice of the fates. All the dri-
vers of the vehicles that clog the draw on either side
have a like sense of personal injury ; and apparently

BY HOESE-CAB TO BOSTON. 109

it would go hard with the captain of that leisurely
vessel below if he were delivered into our hands.
But this impatience and anger are entirely illusive.

We are really the most patient people in the world,
especially as regards any incorporated, non-pohtical
oppressions. A lively Gaul, who travelled among us
some thirty years ago, found that, in the absence of
political control, we gratified the human instinct of
obedience by submitting to small tyrannies unknown
abroad, and were subject to the steamboat-captain,
the hotel-clerk, the stage-driver, and the waiter, who
all bullied us fearlessly ; but though some vestiges of
this bondage remain, it is probably passing away.
The abusive Frenchman's assertion would not at least
hold good concerning the horse-car conductors, who,
in spite of a lingering preference for touching or
punching passengers for their fare instead of asking
for it, are commonly mild-mannered and good-tem-
pered, and disposed to molest us as Uttle as possible.
I have even received from one of them a mark of
such kindly familiarity as the offer of a check which
he held between his lips, and thrust out his face to
give me, both his hands being otherwise occupied ;
and their lives are in nowise such luxurious careers
as we should expect in public despots. The oppres-
sion of the horse-car passenger is not from them, and
the passenger himself is finally to blame for it. When
the draw closes at last, and we rumble forward into
the city street, a certain stir of expectation is felt
among us. The long and eventfiil journey is nearly
ended, and now we who are to get out of the cars

&

110 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

can philosophically amuse ourselves with the passions
and sufferings of those who are to return in our
places. You must choose the time between five and
six o'clock in the afternoon, if you would make this
grand study of the national character in its perfec-
tion. Then the spectacle offered in any arriving
horse-car will serve your purpose. At nearly every
corner of the street up which it climbs stands an
experienced suburban, who darts out upon the car,
and seizes a vacant place in it. Presently all the
places are taken, and before we reach Temple Street,
where helpless groups of women are gathered to
avail themselves of the first seats vacated, an alert
citizen is stationed before each passenger who is to
retire at the summons, "Please pass out forrad."
When this is heard in Bowdoin Square, we rise and
push forward, knuckling one another's backs in our
eagerness, and perhaps glancing behind us at the tu-
mult within. Not only are all our places occupied,
but the aisle is left fiill of passengers precariously
supporting themselves by the straps in the roof. The
rear platform is stormed and carried by a party with
bundles; the driver is instantly surrounded by an-
other detachment ; and as the car moves away from
the office, the platform steps are filled.

" Is it possible," I asked myself, when I had
written as far as this in the present noble history,
" that I am not exaggerating ? It can't be that this
and the other enormities I have been describing are
of daily occurrence in Boston. Let me go verify,
at least, my picture of the evening horse-car." So

Br HORSE-CAB TO BOSTON. Ill

I take my way to Bowdoin Square, and in the con-
scientious spirit of modem inquiry, I get aboard the
first car that comes up. Like every other car, it is
meant to seat twenty passengers. It does this, and
besides it carries in the aisle and on the platform
forty passengers standing. The air is what you may
imagine, if you know that not only is the place so
indecently crowded, but that in the centre of the car
are two adopted citizens, far gone in drink, who have
the aspect and the smell of having passed the day in
an ash-heap. These citizens being quite helpless
themselves, are supported by the public, and repose
in singular comfort upon all the passengers near
them; I, myself, contribute an aching back to the
common charity, and a genteelly dressed young lady
takes one of them from time to time on her knee. But
they are comparatively an ornament to society tiU the
conductor objects to the amount they offer him for
fere ; for after that they wish to fight him during the
journey, and invite him at short intervals to step out
and be shown what manner of men they are. The
conductor passes it off for a joke, and so it is, and a
very good one.

In that unhappy mass it would be an audacious
spirit who should say of any particular arm or leg,
" It is mine," and all the breath is in common.
Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery;
but we discover our error when the conductor
squeezes a tortuous path through us, and collects the
money for our transportation. I never can teU, dur-

112 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

ing the performance of this feat, whether he or the
passengers are more to be pitied.

The people who are thus indecorously huddled and
jammed together, without regard to age or sex, other-
wise lead lives of at least comfort, and a good half of
them cherish themselves in every physical way with
miparalleled zeal. They are handsomely clothed;
they are delicately neat in linen ; they eat well, or, if
not well, as well as their cooks will let them, and at
all events expensively ; they house in dwellings ap-
pointed in a manner undreamt of elsewhere in the
world, — dwellings wherein furnaces make a sum-
mer-heat, where fountains of hot and cold water flow
at a touch, where light is created or quenched by the
turning of a key, where all is luxurious upholstery,
and magical ministry to real or fancied needs. They
carry the same tastes with them to their places of
business ; and when they " attend divine service,"
it is with the understanding that God is to receive
them in a richly carpeted house, deliciously warmed
and perfectly ventilated, where they may adore Him
at their ease upon cushioned seats, — secured seats.
Yet these spoiled children of comfort, when they ride
to or from business or church, fail to assert rights
that the benighted Cockney, who never heard of our
plumbing and registers, or even the oppressed Paris-
ian, who is believed not to change his linen from
one revolution to another, having paid for, enjoys.
When they enter the "fiiU" horse-car, they find
themselves in a place inexorable as the grave to

BY HOESE-CAB TO BOSTON. 113

their greenbacks, where not only is their adventi-
tious consequence stripped from them, but the cour-
tesies of life are impossible, the inherent dignity of
the person is denied, and they are reduced below the
level of the most uncomfortable nations of the Old
World. The philosopher accustomed to draw con-
solation from the sufferings of his richer fellow-men,
and to infer an overruling Providence from their dis-
graces, might well bless Heaven for the spectacle of
such degradation, if his thanksgiving were not pre-
vented by his knowledge that this is quite voluntary.
And now consider that on every car leaving the city
at this time the scene is much the same ; reflect that
the horror is enacting, not only in Boston, but in
New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chi-
cago, Cincinnati, — wherever the horse-car, that
tinkles well-nigh round the Continent, is known ;
remember that the same victims are thus daily sacri-
ficed, without an effort to right themselves : and
then you will be^n to realize — dimly and imper-
fectly, of course — the unfathomable meekness of the
American character. The "ftdl" horse-car is a
prodigy whose likeness is absolutely unknown else-
where, since the Neapolitan gig went out ; and I
suppose it will be incredible to the future in our own
country. When 1 see such a horse-car as I have
sketched move away from its station, I feel that it is
something not only emblematic and interpretative,
but monumental ; and I know that when art becomes
truly national, the overloaded horse-car will be cele-
brated in painting and sculpture. And in after ages,

114 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

when the oblique-eyed, swarthy American of that
time, pausing before some commemorative bronze or
historical picture of our epoch, contemplates this
stupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope he
will be able to philosophize more satisfactorily than
we can now, concerning the mystery of our strength
as a nation and our weakness as a public.

A DAY'S PLEASURE.

I. — The Morning.

They were not a large family, and their pursuits
and habits were very simple ; yet the summer was
lapsing toward the first pathos of autumn before they
found themselves all in such case as to be able to
take the day's pleasure they had planned so long.
They had agreed often and often that nothing could
be more charming than an excursion down the Har-
bor, either to Gloucester, or to Nahant, or to Nan-
tasket Beach, or to Hull and Hingham, or to any
point within the fatal bound beyond which is seasick-
ness. They had studied the steamboat advertise-
ments, day after day, for a long time, without mak-
ing up their minds which of these charming excur-
sions would be the most delightftil ; and when they
had at last fixed upon one and chosen some day for
it, that day was sure to be heralded by a long train
of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather that was
simply impossible. Besides, in the suburbs, you are
apt to sleep late, unless the solitary ice-wagon of the
neighborhood makes a very uncommon rumbling in
going by ; and I believe that the excursion was sev-
eral times postponed by the tardy return of the pleas-
urers fi-om dreamland, which, after all, is not the

116 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

worst resort, or the least interesting — or profitable,
for the matter of that. But at last the great day
came, — a blameless Thursday alike removed from
the cares of washing and ironing days, and from the
fatigues with which every week closes. One of the
family chose dehberately to stay at home ; but the se-
verest scrutiny could not detect a hindrance in the
health or circumstances of any of the rest, and the
weather was delicious. Everything, in fact, was so
fair and so full of promise, that they could almost fancy
a calamity of some sort hanging over its perfection,
and possibly bred of it ; for I suppose that we never
have anything made perfectly easy for us without a
certain reluctance and foreboding. That morning
they all got up so early that they had time to waste
over breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for Bos-
ton ; and they naturally wasted so much of it that
they reached the station only in season for the 8.00.
But there is a difierence between reaching the sta-
tion and quietly taking the cars, especially if one of
your company has been left at home, hoping to cut
across and take the cars at a station which they reach
some minutes later, and you, the head of the party,
are obliged, at a loss of breath and personal comfort
and dignity, to run down to that station and see that
the belated member has arrived there, and then
hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with
their accompanying hand-bags and wraps and sun-
umbrellas, into some compact shape for removal into
the cars, during the very scant minute that the train
stops at Charlesbridge. Then when you are all

A day's pleasure. Ill

aboard, and the tardy member has been duly taken
up at the next station, and you would be glad to
spend the time in looking about on the familiar vari- .
ety of life which every car presents in every train on
every road in this vast American world, you are op-
pressed and distracted by the cares which must at-
tend the pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly
beset him the more deeply he plunges into enjoy-
ment.

I can learn very little from the note-book of the
friend whose adventures I am relating in regard to
the scenery of Somerville, and the region gener-
ally through which the raib-oad passes between
Charlesbridge and Boston ; but so much knowledge
of it may be safely assumed on the part of the reader
as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of describ-
ing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque,
and that I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader
shares, in anything like salt meadows and all spaces
subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or left bare
with their saturated grasses by its going down. I
think, also, there is something fine in the many-
roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of Chelsea (if it is
Chelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and
there is a pretty stone church on a hill-side there
which has the good fortune, so rare with modem
architecture and so common with the old, of seeming
a natural outgrowth of the spot where it stands, and
which is as purely an object of aesthetic interest to
me, who know nothing of its sect or doctrine, as any
church in a picture could be ; and there is, also, the

118 SDBUEBAN SKETCHES.

Marine Hospital on the heights (if it is the Marine
Hospital), from which I hope the inmates can hehold
the ocean, and exult in whatever misery keeps them
ashore.

But let me not so hasten over this part of my
friend's journey as to omit all mention of the amphib-
ious Irish houses which stand about on the low lands
along the railroad-sides, and which you half expect
to see plunge into the tidal mud of the neighborhood,
with a series of hoarse croaks, as the train ap-
proaches. Perhaps twenty-four trains pass those
houses every twenty-four hours, and it is a wonder
that the inhabitants keep their interest in them, or
have leisure to bestow upon any of them. Yet, as
you dash along so bravely, you can see that you ar-
rest the occupations of all these villagers as by a kind
of enchantment ; the children pause and turn their
heads toward you from their mud-pies (to the produc-
tion of which there is literally no limit in that re-
gion) ; the matron rests one parboiled hand on hejr
hip, letting the other still linger listlessly upon the
wash-board, while she lifts her eyes from the suds to
look at you ; the boys, who all summer long are for-
ever just going into the water or just coming out of
it, cease their buttoning or unbuttoning ; the baby,
which has been run after and caught and suitably
posed, turns its anguished eyes upon you, where also
falls the mother's gaze, while her descending palm is
arrested in mid air. I forbear to comment upon the
surprising populousness of these villages, where, in
obedience to all the laws of health, the inhabitants

A day's pleasuee. 119

ought to be wasting miserably away, but where they
flourish in spite of them. Even Accident here seems
to be robbed of half her malevolence ; and that baby
(who will presently be chastised with terrific uproar)
passes an infancy of intrepid enjoyment amidst the
local -perils, and is no more affected by the engines
.and the cars than by so many fretful hens with their
attendant broods of chickens.

When sometimes I long for the excitement and
variety of travel, which, for no merit of mine, I knew
in other days, I reproach myself, and silence all my
repinings with some such question as, Where could
you find more variety or greater excitement than
abounds in and near the Fitchburg Depot when a
train arrives ? And to tell the truth, there is some-
thing very inspiring in the fine eagerness with which
all the passengers rise as soon as the locomotive be-
gins to slow, and huddle forward to the door, in their
impatience to get out; while the suppressed vehe-
mence of the hackmen is also thrilling in its way, not
to mention the instant clamor of the baggage-men as
they read and repeat the numbers of the checks in
strident tones. It would be ever so interesting to
depict all these people, but it would require volumes
for the work, and I reluctantly let them all pass out
without a word, — all but that sweet young blonde
who arrives by most trains, and who, putting up her
eye-glass with a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers
round among the bearded faces, with little tender
looks of hope and trepidation, for the face which she
wants, and which presently bursts through the circle

120 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

of Strange visages. The owner of the face then hur-
ries forward to meet that sweet blonde, who gives
him a little drooping hand as if it were a delicate
flower she laid in his ; there is a brief mutual hesita-
tion long enough merely for an electrical thrill to
run from heart to heart through the clasping hands,
and then he stoops toward her, and distractingly
kisses her. And I say that there is no law of con-
science or propriety worthy the name of law — bar-
barity, absurdity, call it rather — to prevent any one
from availing himself of that providential near-sight-
edness, and beatifying himself upon those lips, —
nothing to prevent it but that young fellow, whom
one might not, of course, care to provoke.

Among the people who now rush forward and
heap themselves into the two horse-cars and one
omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise fore-
thought for the public comfort to accommodate the
train-load of two hundred passengers, I always note
a type that is both pleasing and interesting to me.
It is a lady just passing middle life ; from her kindly
eyes the envious crow, whose footprints are just
traceable at their comers, has not yet drunk the
brightness, but she looks just a thought sadly, if very
serenely, from them. I know nothing in the world
of her ; I may have seen her twice or a hundred
times, but I must always be making bits of romances
about her. That is she in faultless gray, with the
neat leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the
first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely hands,
which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some

A day's pleasure. 121

sort of gauntlets. She can be easy and dignified,
my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our
horse-cars, where people are for the most part packed
like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or
fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I choose
to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm-
shaded New England town of five or ten thousand
people, where I choose to think she lives. From a
vague horticultural association with those gauntlets,
as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she
loves flowers, and gardens a good deal with her own.
hands, and keeps house-plants in the winter, and of
course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor vulgar,,
makes me believe her fortunes modest and not re-
cent ; her gentle face has just so much intellectual
character as it is good to see in a woman's face ; I
suspect that she reads pretty regularly the new
poems and histories, and I know that she is the life
and soul of the local book-club. Is she married, or
widowed, or one of the superfluous forty thousand ?
That is what I never can tell. But I think that
most probably she is married, and that her husband
is very much in business, and does not share so
much as he respects her tastes. I have no particular
reason for thinking that she has no children now,
and that the sorrow for the one she lost so long ago
has become only a pensive silence, which, however,

a long summer twilight can yet deepen to tears

Upon my word ! Am I then one to give way to
this sort of thing ? Madam, I ask pardon. I have
no right to be sentimentalizing you. Yet your face

122 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

is one to make people dream kind things of you,
and I cannot keep my reveries away from it.

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous
history which I have proposed to write, and leave
my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of a
fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look with-
out pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at
this stage of their joyous enterprise. At the best,
the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous
embarrassments : a package of shawls and parasols
and umbrellas and India-rubbers, however neatly
made up at first, quickly degenerates into a shapeless
mass, which has finally to be carried with as great
tenderness as an ailing child ; and the lunch is pretty
sure to overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about
you in paper parcels ; while the bottle of claret, that
bulges the side of one of the bags, and

" That will show itself without,"

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea,
gives a crushing touch of disreputabOity to the whole
affair. Add to this the fact that but half the party
have seats, and that the others have to sway and
totter about the car in that sudden contact with all
varieties of fellow-men, to which we are accustomed
in the cars, and you must allow that these poor
merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when
this part of their day's pleasure is over. They are
so plainly bent upon a sail down the Harbor, that
before they leave the car they become objects of
public interest, and are at last made to give some
account of themselves.

A day's pleasdee. 123

" Going for a sail, I presume ? " says a person
hitherto in conversation with the conductor. " Well,
I wouldn't mind a sail myself to-day."

" Yes," answers the head of the party, " going to
Gloucester."

" Guess not," says, very coldly and decidedly,
one of the passengers, who is reading that morning's
"Advertiser ; " and when the subject of this surmise
looks at him for explanations, he adds, " The City
Council has chartered the boat for to-day."

Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay
and bitterness, and upbraid the City Council, and
wonder why last night's " Transcript " said nothing
about its oppressive action, and generally bewail
their fate. But at last they resolve to go some-
where, and, being set down, they make up their
warring minds upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat
leaves the wharf nearest them ; and so they hurry
away to India Wharf, amidst barrels and bales and
boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string-
teams passing before them at every crossing.

" At any rate," says the leader of the expedition,
" we shall see the Gardens of Maolis, — those en-
chanted gardens which have fairly been advertised
into my dreams, and where I've been told," he
continues, with an effort to make the prospect an
attractive one, yet not without a sense of the meagre-
ness of the materials, "they have a grotto and a
wooden buU."

Of course, there is no reason in nature why a
wooden bull should be more pleasing than a flesh-

124 SXIBURBAN SKETCHES.

and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage the com
pany, and they set off again with renewed speed,
and at last reach India Wharf in time to see the
Nahant steamer packed full of excursionists, with a
crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It does
not look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute
or two their spirits sink so low, that if they should
see the wooden bull step out of a grotto on the deck
of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them.
At that instant they think, with a surprising single-
ness, of Nantasket Beach, and the bright colors in
which the Gardens of Maolis but now appeared fade
away, and they seem to see themselves sauntering
along the beautiful shore, while the white-crested
breakers crash upon the sand, and run up

" In tendei-cnrving lines of creamy spray,"

quite to the feet of that lotus-eating party.

"Nahant is all rocks," says the leader to Aunt
Mehssa, who hears him with a sweet and tranquil
patience, and who would enjoy or suffer anything
with the same expression; "and as you've never
yet seen the open sea, it's fortunate that we go to
Nantasket, for, of course, a beach is more character-
istic. But now the object is to get there. The boat
will be starting in a few moments, and I doubt
whether we can walk it. How far is it," he asks,
turning toward a respectable-looking man, " to Liv-
erpool Wharf?"

" Well, it's consid'able ways," says the man, smil-
ing.

A day's pleasure. 125

" Then we must take a hack," says the pleasurer
to his party. " Come on."

" I've got a hack," observes the man, in a casual
way, as if the fact might possibly interest.

" O, you have, have you ? Well, then, put us
into it, and drive to Liverpool Wharf; and hurry."

Either the distance was less than the hackman
fancied, or else he drove thither with unheard-of
speed, for two minutes later he set them down on
Liverpool Wharf. But swiftly as they had come
the steamer had been even more prompt, and she
now turned toward them a beautiful wake, as she
pushed farther and farther out into the harbor.

The hackman took his two dollars for his four
passengers, and was rapidly mounting his box, —
probably to avoid idle reproaches. " Wait ! " said
the chief pleasurer. Then, " When does the next
boat leave ? " he asked of the agent, who had
emerged with a compassionate face from the waiting-
rooms on the wharf.

" At half past two."

" And it's now five minutes past nine," moaned
the merrymakers.

" Why, I'll tell you what you can do," said the
agent ; " you can go to Hingham by the Old Colony
cars, and so come back by the Hull and Hingham
boat."

" That's it ! " chorused his listeners, " we'll go ; "
and " Now," said their spokesman to the driver,
" I dare say you didn't know that Liverpool Wharf
was so near ; but I don't think you've earned your

126 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

money, and you ought to take us on to the Old
Colony Depot for half-fares at the most."

The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters
and shreds of conscience were flapping uncomfortably
about his otherwise dismantled spirit. Then he
seemed to think of his wife and family, for he put
on the air of a man who had already made great
sacrifices, and " I couldn't, really, I couldn't afford
it," said he ; and as the victims turned from him in
disgust, he chirruped to his horses and drove off.

" Well," said the pleasurers, " we won't give it
up. We will have our day's pleasure after all.
But what can we do to kill five hours and a half?
It's miles away from everything, and, besides, there's
nothing even if we were there." At this image of
their remoteness and the inherent desolation of Bos-
ton they could not suppress some sighs, and in the
mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-
room, which opened on the farther side upon the
water, and sat contentedly down on one of the
benches ; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolu-
tion, followed, and thus, without debate, it was.
settled that they should wait there till the boat left.
The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could
to alleviate the situation : he gave them each the
advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed
upon a card, and then he went away.

All this prospect of waiting would do well enough
for the ladies of the party, but there is an impatience
in the masculine fibre which does not brook the no-
tion of such prolonged repose ; and the leader of the

A day's pleasure. 127

excursion presently pretended an important errand
up town, — nothing less, in fact, than to buy a
tumbler out of which to drink their claret on the
beach. A holiday is never like any other day to the
man who takes it, and a festive halo seemed to en-
wrap the excursionist as he pushed on through the
busy streets in the cool shadow of the vast granite
palaces wherein the genius of business loves to house
itself in this money-making land, and inhaled the
odors of great heaps of leather and spices and dry
goods as he passed the open doorways, — odors that
mixed pleasantly with the smell of the freshly
watered streets. When he stepped into a crockery
store to make his purchase a sense of pleasure-taking
did not fail him, and he fell naturally into talk with
the clerk about the weather and such pastoral topics.
Even when he reached the establishment where his
own business days were passed some glamour seemed
to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disen-
chanted eye all things were as they were on all
other dullish days of summer, even to the accus-
tomed bore leaning up against his favorite desk and
transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme.
Yet to the gaze of this pleasure-taker all was subtly
changed, and he shook hands right and left as he
entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his
effiision. He had merely come to get some news-
papers to help pass away the long moments on the
wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried
back thither to hear what had happened during his
absence.

128 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

It seemed that there had hardly ever been such
an eventful period in the lives of the family before,
and he listened to a minute account of it from Cousin
Lucy. " You know, Frank," says she, " that Sallie's
one idea in life is to keep the baby from getting the
whooping-cough, and I declare that these premises
have done nothing but reecho with the most dolo-
rous whoops ever since you've been gone, so that at
times, in my fear that Sallie would think I'd been
careless about the boy, I've been ready to throw
myself into the water, and nothing 's prevented me
but the doubt whether it wouldn't be better to
throw in the whoopers instead."

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan
and sad through all its dirt, came and stood in the
doorway nearest the baby, and in another instant
she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had
meant to have his scalp next it could not have been
more dreadful. Then she subsided into a deep and
pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to the victims
of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable.
But her outburst had set at work the mysterious
machinery of half a dozen other whooping-coughers
lurking about the building, and all unseen they
wound themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in
the utter silence which followed left one to think
they had died at the climax.

" Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory,
this place," cries Cousin Lucy in a desperation.
" Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor little
dreadftd object you," she continues, turning upon

A day's pleasure. 129

the only visible operative in the establishment.
"Here, take this ; " and she bribes her with a bit of
sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along
the edge of the wharf. " That's been another of
their projects for driving me wild," says Cousin
Lucy, — " trying to take their own lives in a hun-
dred ways before my face and eyes. Why will their
mothers let them come here to play? "

Really,' they were very melancholy little figures,
and might have gone near to make one sad, even if
they had not been constantly imperilling their lives.
Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much
matter about the scantiness of their clothing, but
their squalor was depressing, it seemed, even to
themselves, for they were a moumfid-looking set of
children, and in their dangerous sports trifled silently
and almost gloomily with death. There were none
of them above eight or nine years of age, and most
of them had the care of smaller brothers, or even
babes in arms, whom they were thus early inuring
to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed
in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling
up in the legs and arms could make small enough,
and the incorrigible too-bigness of which rendered
the favorite amusements still more hazardous from
their liability to trip and entangle the wearers. The
little girls had on each a sohtary garment, which
hung about her gaunt person with antique severity
of outline ; while the babies were multitudinously
swathed in whatever fragments of dress could be
tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faces were

9

130 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their
distractions among the coal-heaps and cord-wood
constantly added to the variety and advantage of
these effects.

"Whvdo their mothers let them come here?"
muses Frank aloud. " Why, because it's so safe,
Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to
be playing upon the sUls of fourth-floor windows, and
here they're out of the way and can't hurt them-
selves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park, —
their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their
Cascine. And look at their gloomy httle faces !
Aren't they taking their pleasure in the spirit of the
very highest fashion ? I was at Newport last sum-
mer, and saw the famous driving on the Avenue in
those pony phaetons, dog-carts, and tubs, and three-
story carriages with a pair of footmen perching like
storks upon each gable, and I assure you that all
those ornate and costly phantasms (it seems to me
now like a sad, sweet vision) had just the expression
of these poor children. We're taking a day's pleas-
ure ourselves, cousin, but nobody would know it from
our looks. And has nothing but whooping-cough
happened since I've been gone ? "

" Yes, we seem to be so cut ofiF from every-day
associations that I've imagined myself a sort of tour-
ist, and I've been to that Catholic church over yon-
der, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels ;
but I found it locked up, and so I trudged back with-
out a sight of the masterpieces. But what's the rea-
son that all the shops hereabouts have nothing but

A day's pleasure. 131

luxuries for sale? The windows are perfect tropics
of oranges, and lemons, and belated bananas, and to-
bacco, and peanuts."

" Well, the poor really seem to use more of those
luxuries than anybody else. I don't blame them. I
shouldn't care for the necessaries of life myself, if I
found them so hard to get."

"When I came back here," says Cousin Lucy,
without heeding these flippant and heartless words,
" I found an old gentleman who has something to do
with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part
of his business, and told me nearly the whole history
of his life. Isn't it nice of them, keeping an Autobi-
ographer ? It makes the time pass so swiftly when
you're waiting. This old gentleman was born —
who'd ever think it? — up there in Pearl Street,
where those pitiless big granite stores are now ; and,
I don't know why, but the idea of any human baby
being born in Pearl Street seemed to me one of the
saddest things I'd ever heard of."

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse
and the baby, who had got into one of their period-
ical difficulties, and her interlocutor turned to Aunt
MeUssa.

" I think, Franklin," says Aunt Melissa, " that it
was wrong to let that nurse come and bring the
baby."

" Yes, I know. Aunty, you have those old-estab-
lished ideas, and they're very right," answers her
nephew ; " but just consider how much she enjoys
it, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of
this charming excursion ! "

132 SUBUKBAN SKETCHES.

Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat looking
thoughtfully out upon the bay. " I presume you
think the excursion is a failure," she said, after a
while ; " but I've been enjoying every minute of the
time here. Of course, I've never seen the open sea,
and I don't know about it, but I feel here just as if
1 were spending a day at the seaside."

" WeU," said her nephew, " I shouldn't call this
exactly a watering-place. It lacks the splendor and
gayety of Newport, in a certain degree, and it hasn't
the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The surf isn't
very fine, nor the beach particularly adapted to bath-
ing ; and yet, I must confess, the outlook from here
is as lovely as anything one need have."

And to teU the truth, it was very pretty and in-
teresting. The landward environment was as com-
monplace and mean as it could be : a yardful of dis-
mal sheds for coaJ and lumber, and shanties for
offices, with each office its safe and its desk, its
whittled arm-chair and its spittoon, its fly that shooed
not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane,
which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic
eye, it never would have mistaken for the unblem-
ished daylight. Outside of this yard was the usual
wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and
carts and fleet express-wagons, its building up and
pulling down, its discomfort and clamor of every sort,
and its shops for the sale, not only of those luxuries
which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic re-
freshments as lemon-pie and hulled-com.

When, however, you turned your thoughts and

A day's pleasure. 13S

eyes away from this aspect of it, and looked out upon
the water, the neighborhood gloriously retrieved it-
self. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased ; there
its beauty and grace abounded. A light breeze ruf-
fled the face of the bay, and the innumerable little
sail-boats that dotted it took the sim and wind upon
their wings, which they dipped almost into the spar-
kle of the water, and flew lightly hither and thither
like gulls that loved the brine too well to rise wholly
from it ; larger ships, farther or nearer, puffed or
shrank their sails as they came and went on the er-
rands of commerce, but always moved as if bent
upon some dreamy affair of pleasure ; the steam-
boats that shot vehemently across their tranquil
courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, but
not more substantial ; yonder, a black sea-going
steamer passed out between the far-off islands, and
at last left in the sky above those reveries of fortifica-
tion, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a
memory of battle ; to the right, on some line of rail-
road, long-plumed trains arrived and departed like
pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern ;
even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction,
seemed to have no malice in the blows which, after
a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, and one understood
that it was mere conventional violence like that of
a Punch to his baby.

" Why, what a lotus-eating life this is ! " said
Frank, at last. "Aunt Melissa, I don't wonder
you think it's like the seaside. It's a great deal bet-
ter than»the seaside. And now, just as we've en-

134 STJBUKBAN SKETCHES.

tered into the spirit of it, the time's up for the ' Rose
Standish' to come and bear us from its delights.
When wUl the boat be in? " he asked of the Auto-
biographer, whom Lucy had pointed out to him.

" Well, she's ben in half an hour, now. There she
lays, just outside the - John Romer.' "

There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure-
takers had been so lost in the rapture of waiting and
the beauty of the scene as never to have noticed her
arrival.

II. — The ArTERNooN.

It is noticeable how many people there are in the
world that seem bent always upon the same purpose
of amusement or business as one's self. If you keep
quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all
your neighbors and acquaintance hard at it too ; if
you go on a journey, choose what train you will, the
cars are filled with travellers in your direction. You
take a day's pleasure, and everybody abandons his
usual occupation to crowd upon your boat, whether
it is to Gloucester, or Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach
you go. It is very hard to believe that, from what-
ever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the
great sum of it presses forward as before : that busi-
ness is carried on though you are idle, that men
amuse themselves though you toil, that every train
is as crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre
or the church fills its boxes or pews without you per-
fectly well. I suppose it would not be quite agree-
able to believe all this; the opposite illusion is far
more flattering ; for if each one of us did not take
the world with him now at every turn, should he not
have to leave it behind him when he died ? And
that, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor
is the fact quite conceivable, though ever so many
myriads in so many milli"n years ])f>-vp. ■proved it.

136 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

When our friends first went aboard the "Rose
Standish"that day they were almost the sole passen-
gers, and they had a feeling of ownership and privacy
which was pleasant enough in its way, hut which
they lost afterwards ; though to lose it was also pleas-
ant, for enjoyment no more likes to be solitary than
sin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and I dare
say would hardly exist if it could not be committed
in company. The preacher, indeed, little knows the
comfortable sensation we have in being called fellow-
sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt
each makes of his neighbor's hard-heartedness.

Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely
transgression till that day, when in the silence of the
little cabin he took the bottle of claret from the hand-
bag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with it.
"I think, Aunt Melissa," he said, "we had better
lunch now, for it's a quarter past two, and we shall
not get to the beach before four. Let's improvise a
beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can
stand for the breakers. Now, this is truly like New-
port and Nahant," he added, after the little arrange-
ment was complete ; and he was about to strip away
the bottle's jacket of .brown paper, when a lady much
wrapped up came in, and, reclining upon one of the
opposite seats, began to take them all in with a severe
serenity of gaze that made them feel for a moment
like a party of low foreigners, — like a set of German
atheists, say. Frank kept on the bottle's paper jacket,
and as the single tumbler of the party circled from
mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the

A day's pleasube. 137

honest drink the false air of a medicinal potion oi
some sort; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping it, no
one could have put his hand on his heart and sworn
it was not elderberry wine, at the worst. In spite
of these efforts, they all knew that they had suffered
a hjDpeless loss of repute ; yet after the loss was
confessed, I am not sure that they were not the gayer
and happier through this " freedom of a broken law."
At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, and
when they had put back the fragments of the feast
into the bags, they went forward to the bow of the
boat, to get good places for seeing the various people
as they came aboard, and for an outlook upon the
bay when the boat should start.

I suppose that these were not very remarkable
people, and that nothing but the indomitable interest
our friends took in the human race could have
enabled them to feel any concern in their com-
panions. It was, no doubt, just such a company as
goes down to Nantasket Beach every pleasant day in
summer. Certain ones among them were distin-
guishable as sojourners at the beach, by an air of
familiarity with the business of getting there, an
indifference to the prospect, and an indefinable touch
of superiority. These read their newspapers in
quiet corners, or, if they were not of the newspaper
sex, made themselves comfortable in the cabins, and
looked about them at the other passengers with
looks of lazy surprise, and just a hint of scorn for
their interest in the boat's departure. Our day's
pleasurers took it that the lady ^rhose steady gaze

138 STJBUEBAN SKETCHES.

had reduced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb
of shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, in
one of the beach hotels. A few other passengers
were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and
were eager to see all that the boat or the voyage
offered of novelty. There were clerks and men who
had book-keeping written in a neat mercantile hand
upon their faces, and who had evidently been given
that afternoon for a breathing-time ; and there were
strangers who were goins; down to the beach for the
sake of the charming view of the harbor which the
trip afforded. Here and there were people who
were not to be classed with any certainty, — as a pale
young man, handsome in his undesirable way, who
looked like a steamboat pantry boy not yet risen to
bo bar-tender, but rapidly rising, and who sat care-
fully balanced upon the railing of the boat, chatting
with two young girls, who heard his broad sallies with
continual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments
with that prompt up-and-coming manner which is so
large a part of non-humorous humor, as Mr. Lowell
calls it, and now and then pulled and pushed each
other. It was a scene worth study, for in no other
country could anything so bad have been without
being vastly worse ; but here it was evident that
there was nothing worse than you saw ; and, indeed,
these persons formed a sort of reHef to the other
passengers, who were nearly all monotonously well-
behaved. Amongst a few there seemed to be
acquaintance, but the far greater part were unknown
to one another, and there were no words wasted by

A day's pleasuee. 139

any one. I believe the English traveller who has.
taxed our nation with inquisitiveness for half a cen-
tury is at last beginning to find out that we do not
ask questions because we have the still more vicious
custom of not opening our mouths at all when with
strangers.

It was a good hour after our friends got aboai'd
before the boat left her moorings, and then it was
not without some secret dreads of sea-sickness that
Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between
her and the familiar wharf-house, where she now
seemed to have spent so large a part of her life.
But the multitude 'of really charming and interesting
objects that presently fell imder her eye soon dis-
tracted her from those gloomy thoughts.

There is always a shabbiness about the wharves
of seaports ; but I must own that as soon as you get
a reasonable distance from them in Boston, they turn
wholly beautiful. They no longer present that impos-
ing array of mighty ships which they could show in
the days of Consul Plancus, when the commerce of
the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks are
stiU filled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if
there is not that wilderness of spars and rigging which
you see at New York, let us believe that there is an
aspect of selection and refinement in the scene, so
that one should describe it, not as a forest, but, less
conventionally, as a gentleman's park of masts. The
steamships of many coastwise freight lines gloom,
with their black, capacious hulks, among the lighter
sailing-craft, and among the white, green-shuttered

140 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

passenger-boats ; and behind them those desperate
and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their sag-
ging roofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably
with the shipping; and then growing up from all
rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and
spire, and dome, — a fair and noble sight, indeed^
and one not surpassed for a certain quiet and cleanly
beauty by any that I know.

Our friends lingered long upon this pretty pros-
pect, and, as inland people of light heart and easy
fancy will, the ladies made imagined voyages in each
of the more notable vessels they passed, — all cheap
and safe trips, occupying half a second apiece. Then
they came forward to the bow, that they might not
lose any part of the harbor's beauty and variety, and
informed themselves of the names of each of the
fortressed islands as they passed, and forgot them,
being passed, so that to this day Aunt Melissa has
the Fort Warren rebel prisoners languishing in Fort
Independence. But they made sure of the air of
soft repose that hung about each, of that exquisite
military neatness which distinguishes them, and which
went to Aunt Melissa's housekeeping heart, of the
green, thick turf covering the escarpments, of the
great guns loafing on the crests of the ramparts and
looking out over the water sleepily, of the sentries
pacing slowly up and down with their gleaming
muskets.

" I never see one of those fellows," says Cousin
Frank, "without setting him to the music of that
saddest and subtlest of Heine's poems. You know
it, Lucy ; " and he repeats : —

A day's pleasxjbe. 141

" Mein Herz, mein Herz is traaiig,
Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai ;
Icb stebe gelehnt an der Linde,
Hoch auf der alten Bastei.

" Am alten grauen Thurme

Ein Schilderhauschen steht ;
£in rothgerSckter Bursche
Dort auf und nieder geht.

" £r spielt mit seiner Flinte,
Sie funkelt im Sonnenroth,
Er priisentirt, and schultert, —
Ich nollt', er schiisse mich todt."

" O ! " says Cousin Lucy, either because the
poignant melancholy of the sentiment has suddenly
pierced her, or because she does not quite under-
stand the German, — you never can tell about
women. While Frank smiles down upon her in
this amiable doubt, their party is approached by the
tipsy man who has been making the excursion so
merry for the other passengers, in spite of the fact
that there is very much to make one sad in him.
He is an old man, sweltering in rusty black, a two
days' gray beard, and a narrow-brimmed, livid silk
hat, set well back upon the nape of his neck. He
explains to our friends, as he does to every one
whose acquaintance he makes, that he was in former
days a seafaring man, and that he has brought his
two little grandsons here to show them something
about a ship ; and the poor old soul helplessly satur-
ates his phrase with the rankest profanity. The
boys are somewhat amused by their grandsire's state,
being no doubt fanuhar with it ; but a very grim-

142 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

looking old lady who sits against the pilot-house, and
keeps a sharp eye upon all three, and who is also
doubtless familiar with the unhappy spectacle, seems
not to find it a joke. Her stout matronly umbrella
trembles in her hand when her husband draws near,
and her eye flashes ; but he gives her as wide a
berth as he can, returning her glare with a propi-
tiatory drunken smile and a wink to the passengers to
let them into the fun. In fact, he is foil of humor
in his tipsy way, and one after another falls the prey
of his free sarcasm, which does not spare the boat or
any feature of the excursion. He holds for a long
time, by swiftly successive stories of his seafaring
days, a veiy quiet gentleman, who dares neither
laugh too loudly nor show indifference for fear of
rouging that terrible wit at his expense, and finds his
account in looking down at his boots.

" Well, sir," says the deplorable old sinner, " we
was forty days out from Liverpool, with a cargo of
salt and iron, and we got caught on the Banks in a
calm. ' Cap'n,' says I, ♦- 1 'us sec'n' mate, — ' 's
they any man aboard this ship knows how to pray ? '
' No,' says the cap'n ; ' blast yer prayers ! ] ' Well,'
says I, ' cap'n, I'm no hand at all to pray, but I'm
goin' to see if prayin' won't git us out 'n this.' And
I down on my knees, and I made a first-class prayer ;
and a breeze sprung up in a minute and carried us
smack into Boston."

At this bit of truculent burlesque the quiet man
made a bold push, and walked away with a some-
what sickened face, and as no one now intervened

A day's PLEASDBE. 143

between them, the inebriate laid a familiar hand
upon Cousin Frank's collar, and said with a wink at
his late listener : " Looks like a lerigious man, don't
he ? I guess I give him a good dose, if he does
think himself the head-deacon, of this boat." And
he went on to state his ideas of religion, from which
it seemed that he was a person of the most advanced
thinking, and believed in nothing worth mentioning.

It is perhaps no worse for an Infidel to be drunk
than a Christian, but my friend foimd this tipsy blas-
phemer's case so revolting, that he went to the
hand-bag, took out the empty claret-bottle, and seek-
ing a solitary comer of the boat, cast the bottle into
the water, and felt a thrill of uncommon self-approval
as this scapegoat of all the wine at his grocer's
bobbed off upon the little waves. " Besides, it saves
carrying the bottle home," he thought, not without
a half-conscious reserve, that if his penitence were
ever too much for him, he could easily abandon it.
And without the reflection that the gate is always
open behind him, who could consent to enter upon
any course of perfect behavior ? If good resolutions
could not be broken, who would ever have the cour-
age to form them ? Would it not be intolerable to
be made as good as we ought to be ? Then, admir-
able reader, thank Heaven even for your lapses,
since it is so wholesome and saving to be well
ashamed of yourself, from time to time.

" What an outrage," said Cousin Frank, in the
glow of virtue, as he rejoined the ladies, " that that
tipsy, rascal should be allowed to go on with his

144 STJBUEBAN SKETCHES.

ribaldry. He seems to pervade the whole boat, and
to subject everybody to his sway. He's a perfect
despot to us helpless sober people, — I wouldn't
openly disagree with him on any account. We
ought to send a Round Robin to the captain, and
ask him to put that rehgious liberal in irons during
the rest of the voyage."

In the mean time, however, the object of his
indignation had used up all the conversible material
in that, part of the boat, and had deviously started
for the other end. The elderly woman with the
umbrella rose and followed him, somewhat wearily,
and with a sadness that appeared more in her move-
ment than in her face ; and as the two went down
the cabin, did the comica.1 affair look, after all, some-
thing like tragedy ? My reader, who expects a little
novelty in tragedy, and not these stale and common
effects, will never think so.

" You'll not pretend, Frank," says Lucy, " that
in such an intellectual place as Boston a crowd as
large as this can be got together, and no distin-
guished literary people in it. I know there are some
notables aboard : do point them out to me. Pretty
near everybody has a literary look."

" Why, that's what we call our Boston look.
Cousin Lucy. You needn't have written anything
to have it, — it's as general as tubercular consump-
tion, and is the effect of our universal culture and
habits of reading. I heard a New-Yorker say once
that if you went into a comer grocery in Boston to
buy a codfish, the man would ask you how you.

A day's pleasuke. 145

liked ' Lucille,' whilst he was tying it up. No, no ;
you mustn't be taken in by that literary look ; I'm
afraid the real hterary men don't always have it.
But I do see a literary man aboard yonder," he
added, craning his neck to one side, and then fur-
tively pointing, — " the most literary man I ever
knew, one of the most literary men that ever lived.
His whole existence is really bound up in books ; he
never talks of anything else, and never thinks of
anything else, I believe. Look at him, — what kind
and pleasant eyes he's got ! There, he sees me ! "
cries Cousin Frank, with a pleasurable excitement.
" How d'ye do ? " he calls out.

" O Cousin Frank, introduce us," sighs Lucy.

" Not I ! He wouldn't thank me. He doesn't
care for pretty girls outside of books ; he'd be afraid
of 'em ; he's the bashfullest man alive, and all his
heroines are fifty years old, at the least. But before
I go any further, tell me solemnly, Lucy, you're not
interviewing me ? You're not going to write it to
a New York newspaper ? No ? Well, I think it's
best to ask, always. Our friend there — he's every-
body's friend, if you mean nobody's enemy, by that,
not .even his own — is really what I say, — the most
literary man I ever knew. He loves all epochs and
phases of literature, but his passion is the Charles
Lamb period and all Lamb's friends. He loves
them as if they were living men ; and Lamb would
have loved him if he could have known him. He
speaks rapidly, and rather indistinctly, and when
you meet him and say Good day, and you suppose he
10

146 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

answers with something about the weather, ten to
one he 's asking you what you think of Hazlitt's
essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh Hunt's Itahan Po-
ets, or Lamb's roast pig, or Barry Cornwall's songs.
He couldn't get by a bookstall without stopping —
for half an hour, at any rate. He knows just when
all the new books in town are to be published, and
when each bookseller is to get his invoice of old
English books. He has no particular address, but
if you leave your card for him at any bookstore in
Boston, he 's sure to get it within two days ; and in
the summer-time you're apt to meet him on these
excursions. Of course, he writes about books, and
very tastefully and modestly ; there's hardly any of
the brand-new immortal English poets, who die oiF
so rapidly, but has had a good word from him ; but
his heart is with the older fellows, from Chaucer
down ; and, after the Charles Lamb epoch, I don't
know whether he loves better the Elizabethan age
or that of Queen Anne. Think of him making me
stop the other day at a bookstall, and read through
an essay out of the " Spectator ! " I did it all for
love of him, though money couldn't have persuaded
me that I had time ; and I'm always telling him lies,
and pretending to be as well acquainted as he is with
authors I hardly know by name, — he seems so
fondly to expect it. He's really almost a disem-
bodied spirit as concerns most mundane interests;
his soul is in literature, as a lover's in his mistress's
beauty ; and in the next world, where, as the Swe-
denborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appear

A day's pleasuee. 147

like the things they most resemhle in disposition, as
doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm
sure that I shall see his true and kindly soul in the
guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across
his back in old English text, Tom. J."

While our friends talked and looked about them,
a sudden change had come over the brightness and
warmth of the day ; the blue heaven had turned a
chilly gray, and the water looked harsh and cold.
Now, too, they noted that they were drawing near a
wooden pier built into the water, and that they had
been winding about in a crooked channel between
muddy shallows, and that their course was overrun
with long, disheveled sea-weed. The shawls had
been unstrapped, and the ladies made comfortable in
them.

" Ho for the beach ! " cried Cousin Frank, with a
vehement show of enthusiasm. " Now, then. Aunt
Melissa, prepare for the great enjoyment of the day.
In a few moments we shall be of the elves

' That on the sand with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back.'

Come ! we shall have three hours on the beach, and
that will bring us well into the cool of the evening,
and we, can return by the last boat."

"As to the cool of the evening," said Aunt
Melissa, " I don't know. It's quite cool enough for
comfort at present, and I'm sure that anything more
wouldn't be wholesome. What's become of our
beautiful weather ? " she asked, deeply plotting tc
gain time.

148 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

• " It 's one of our Boston peculiarities, not to say
merits," answered Frank, "which you must have
noticed already, that we can get rid of a fine day
sooner than any other region. While you're saying
how lovely it is, a subtle change is wrought, and
under skies still blue and a sun still warm the keen
spirit of the east wind pierces every nerve, and all
the fine weather within you is chilled and extin-
guished. The gray atmosphere follows, but the day
first languishes in yourself. But for this, life in
Boston would be insupportably perfect, if this is
indeed a drawback. You'd find Bostonians to de-
fend it, I dare say. But this isn't a regular east
wind to-day ; it's merely our nearness to the sea."

" I think, Franklin," said Aunt Melissa, " that we
won't go down to the beach this afternoon," as if
she had been there yesterday, and would go to-mor-
row. " It 's too late in the day ; and it wouldn't be
good for the child, I'm sure."

" Well, aunty, it was you determined us to wait
for the boat, and it 's your right to say whether we
shall leave it or not. I'm very willing not to go
ashore. I always find that, after working up to an
object with great efibrt, it 's surpassingly sweet to
leave it unaccompHshed at last. Then it remains
forever in the region of the ideal, amongst thq songs
that never were sung, the pictures that never were
painted. Why, in fact, should we force this pleas-
ure ? We've eaten our lunch, we've lost the warm
heart of the day ; why should we poorly drag over
to that damp and sullen beach, where we should find

A day's pleasuee. 149

three hours very long, when by going back now we
can keep intact that glorious image of a day by the
sea which we've been cherishing aU summer ? You're
right, Aunt Melissa ; we won't go ashore ; we will
stay here, and respect our illusions."

At heart, perhaps, Lucy did not quite like this
retreat ; it was not in harmony with the youthful
spirit of her sex, but she' reflected that she could
come again, — beneficent cheat of Another Time,
how much thou sparest us in our over-worked, over-
enjoyed world ! — she was very comfortable where
jshe was, in a seat commanding a perfect view for the
return trip ; and she submitted without a murmur.
Besides, now that the boat had drawn up to the pier,
and discharged part of her passengers, and was wait-
ing to take on others, Lucy was interested in a mass
of fluttering dresses and wide-rimmed straw hats
that drew down toward the "Rose Standish," and
gracefully thronged the pier, and prettily hesitated
about, and finally came aboard with laughter and
little false cries of terror, attended through all by the
New England disproportion of that sex which is so
foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic party
which had been spending the day upon the beach, as
each of the ladies showed in her face, where, if the
roses upon her cheeks were somewhat obscured by
the imbrowning seaside sun, a bright pink had been
compensatingly bestowed upon the point of her nose.
A mysterious quiet fell upon them all when they
were got aboard and had taken conspicuous places,
which was accounted for presently when a loud shout

150 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

was heard from the shore, and a man beside an am-
bulant photographic machine was seen wildly waving
his hat. It is impossible to resist a temptation of
this kind, and our party all yielded, and posed them-
selves in striking and characteristic attitudes, — even
Aunt Melissa sharing the ambition to appear in a
picture which she should never see, and the nurse
coming out strong from the abeyance in which she
had been held, and lifting the baby high into the air
for a good hkeness. The frantic gesticulator on the
shore gave an impressive wave with both hands, took
the cap from the instrument, turned his back, as pho-
tographers always do, with that air of hiding their
tears, for the brief space that seems so long, and
then clapped on the cap again, while a great sigh of
relief went up from the whole boat-load of passen-
gers. They were taken.

But the interval had been a luckless one for the
" Rose Standish," and when she stirred her wheels,
clouds of mud rose to the top of the water, and
there was no responsive movement of the boat. She
was aground in the falling tide.

" There seems a pretty fair prospect of our spend-
ing some time here, after all," said Frank, while the
ladies, who had reluctantly given up the idea of stay-
ing, were now in a quiver of impatience to be off.
The picnic was shifted from side to side ; the engine
groaned and tugged. Captain Miles Standish and his
crew bestirred themselves vigorously, and at last the
boat swung loose, and strode down the sea-weedy
channels ; while our friends, who had already done

A day's pleasube. 151

the great sights of the harbor, now settled themselves
to the enjoyment of its minor traits and beauties.
Here and there they passed small parties on the
shore, which, with their yachts anchored near, or
their boats drawn up from the water, were cooking
an out-door meal by a fire that burned bright red
upon the sands in the late afternoon air. In such
cases, people willingly indulge themselves in salut-
ing whatever craft goes by, and the ladies of these
small picnics, as they sat round the fires, kept up
a great waving of handkerchiefs, and sometimes
cheered the " Rose Standish," though I believe the
Bostonians are ordinarily not a demonstrative race.
Of course the large picnic on board fluttered multi-
tudinous handkerchiefs in response, both to these
people ashore and to those who hailed them irom
vessels which they met. They did not refuse the
politeness even to the passengers on a rival boat
when she passed them, though at heart they must
have felt some natural pangs at being passed. The
water was peopled everywhere by all sorts of sail
lagging slowly homeward in the light evening breeze ;
and on some of the larger vessels there were family
groups to be seen, and a graceful smoke, suggestive
of supper, curled from the cook's galley. I suppose
these ships were chiefly coasting craft, of one kind
or another, come from the Provinces at farthest ; but
to the ignorance and the fancy of our friends, they
arrived from all remote and romantic parts of the
world, — from India, from China, and from the South
Seas, with cargoes of spices and gums and tropical

152 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

fruits ; ajid I see no reason why one should ever
deny himself the easy pleasure they felt in painting
the unknown in such hvely hues. The truth is, a
strange ship, if you will let her, always brings you
precious freight, always arrives from Wonderland
under the command of Captain Sinbad. How like a
beautiful sprite she looks afar off, as if she came from
some finer and fairer world than ours ! Nay, we wiU
not go out to meet her ; we will not go on board ;
Captain Sinbad shall bring us the invoice of gold-
dust, slaves, and rocs' eggs to-night, and we will
have some of the eggs for breakfast ; or if he never
comes, are we not just as rich ? But I think these
friends of ours got a yet keener pleasure out of the
spectacle of a large and stately ship, that with all
sails spread moved silently and steadily out toward
the open sea. It is yet grander and sweeter to sail
toward the unknown than to come from it; and
eveiy vessel that leaves port has this destination, and
will bear you thither if you will.

" It may be that the gulf shall wash ns down ;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew,"

absently murmured Lucy, looking on this beautiful
apparition.

" But I can't help thinking of Ulysses' cabin-boy,
yonder," said Cousin Frank, after a pause ; " can
you. Aunt Melissa ? "

"I don't understand what you're talking about,
Franklin," answered Aunt Melissa, somewhat se-
verely.

A day's pleasure. 153

" Why, I mean that there is a poor wretch of a
boy on board there, who's run away, and whose
heart must be aching just now at the thought of the
home he has left. I hope Ulysses will be good to
him, and not swear at him for a day or two, or
knock him about with a belaying-pin. Just about
this time his" mother, up in the country, is getting
ready his supper, and wondering what's become of
him, and torturing herself with hopes that break one
by one ; and to-night when she goes up to his empty
room, having tried to persuade herself that the tru-
ant's come back and climbed in at the window " —

" Why, Franklin, this isn't true, is it ? " asks
Aunt Melissa.

" Well, no, let's pray Heaven it isn't, in this case.
It's been true often enough to be false for once."

" What a great, ugly, black object a ship is ! " said
Cousin Lucy.

Slowly the city rose up against the distance,
sharpening all its outlines, and filling in all its famil-
iar details, — like a fact which one dreams is a
dream, and which, as the mists of sleep break away,
shows itself for reality.

The air grows closer and warmer, — it is the
breath of the hot and toil-worn land.

The boat makes her way up through the shipping,
seeks her landing, and presently rubs herself afiec-
tionately against the wharf. The passengers quickly
disperse themselves upon shore, dismissed each with
an appropriate sarcasm by the tipsy man, who has
had the means of keeping himself drunk throughout,

154 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

and who now looks to the discharge of the boat's
cargo.

As our friends leave the wharf-house behind them,
and straggle uneasily, and very conscious of sun-
burn, up the now silent length of Pearl Street to
seek the nearest horse-cars, they are aware of a
curious fidgeting of the nurse, who flies from one
side of the pavement to the other and violently shifts
the baby from one arm to the other.

"What's the matter? "asks Frank; but before
the nurse can answer, " Thim little divils," he per-
ceives that the whooping-coughers of the morning
have taken the occasion to reneiw a pleasant ac-
quaintance, and are surrounding the baby and nurse
with an atmosphere of whooping-cough.

" I say, friends ! we can't stand this, you know,'.'
says the anxious father. " We must part some time,
and this is a favorable moment. Now I'll give you all
this, if you don't come another step ! " and he emp-
ties out to them, from the hand-bags he carries,
the fragments of lunch which the frugal mind of
Aunt Melissa had caused her to store there. Upon
these the whooping-coughers hurl themselves in* a
body, and are soon left round the comer. Yet they
would have been no disgrace to our party, whose
appearance was now most disreputable : Frank and
Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls dragging from their
arms, the former loaded down with hand-bags and
the latter with India-rubbers ; Aunt Melissa came
next under a burden of bloated umbrellas ; the nurse
last, with her hat awry, and the baby a caricature of

A day's pleasuee. 155

its morning trimness, in her embrace. A day's
pleasure is so demoralizing, that no party can stana
it, and come out neat and orderly.

" Cousin Frank," asked Lucy, awiully, " what if
we should meet the Mayflowers now ? " — the May-
flowers being a very ancient and noble Boston family
whose acquaintance was the great pride and terror
of our friends' lives.

"I should cut them dead," said Frank, and
scarcely spoke again till his party cfragged slowly up
the steps of their minute suburban villa.

At the door his wife met them with a troubled and
anxious face.

" Calamities ? " asked Frank, desperately.

" O, calamities upon calamities ! We've got a
Igst child in the kitchen," answered Mrs. Sallie.

" O good heavens ! " cried her husband. " Adieu,
my dreams of repose, so desirable after the quantity
of active enjoyment I've had 1 Well, where is the
lost child? "

III. — The EvEinNG.

"Where is the lost child?" repeats Frank, des-
perately. " Where have you got him ? "

" In the kitchen."

" Why in the kitchen ? "

" How's baby ? " demands Mrs. Sallie, with the
incoherent suddenness of her sex, and running half-
way down the steps to meet the nurse. " Um, irni,
um-m-m-m," sounds, which may stand for smothered
kisses of rapture and thanksgiving that baby is not a
lost child. " Has he been good, Lucy ? Take him
off and give him some cocoa, Mrs. O'Gonegal," she
adds in her business-like way, and with a little push
to the combined nurse and baby, while Lucy
answers, " O beautiful ! " and from that moment,
being warned through all her being by something in
the other's tone, casts aside the matronly manner
which she has worn during the day, and lapses into
the comfortable irresponsibility of young-ladyhood.

" What kind of a time did you have ? "

" Splendid ! " answers Lucy. " Delightfiil, I
think," she adds, as if she thought others might not
think so.

"I suppose you found Gloucester a quaint old
place."

A day's pleasure. 157

" O," says Frank, " we didn't go to Gloucester ;
" we found that the City Fathers had chartered the
boat for the day, so we thought we'd go to Nahant."

" Then you've seen your favorite G.ardens of
Maolis ! What in the world are they like '? "

" Well ; we didn't see the Gardens of Maolis ;
the Nahant boat was so crowded that we couldn't
think of going on her, and so we decided we'd drive
over to the Liverpool Wharf and go down to Nan-
tasket Beach."

" That was nice. I'm so glad on Aunt MeHssa's
account. It 's much better to see the ocean from a
long beach than from those Nahant rocks."

" That's what I said. But, you know, when we
got to the wharf the boat had just left."

" You dofbt mean it ! Well, then, what under
the canopy did you do ? "

"Why, we sat down in the wharf-house, and
waited from nine o'clock till half-past two for the
next boat."

" Well, I'm glad you didn't back out, at any rate.
You did show pluck, you poor things ! I hope you
enjoyed the beach after you did get there."

"Why," says Frank, looking down, "we never
got there."

" Never got there ! " gasps Mrs. Sallie. " Didn't
you go down on the afternoon boat ? "

" Yes."

" Why didn't you get to the beach, then ? "

" We didn't go ashore."

" Well, that's Vke you, Frank."

158 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

" It 's a great deal more like Aunt Melissa," an-
swers Frank. " The air felt so raw and chilly by
the time we reached the pier, that she declared the
baby would perish if it was taken to the beach.
Besides, nothing would persuade her that Nantasket
Beach was at all different from Liverpool Wharf."

" Never mind, never mind ! " says Mrs. SalUe.
" I don't wish to hear anything more. That's your
idea of a day's pleasure, is it ? I call it a day's dis-
grace, a day's miserable giving-up. There, go in,
go in ; I'm ashjimed of you all. Don't let the
neighbors see you, for pity's sake. — We keep him
in the kitchen," she continues, recurring to Frank's
long-unanswered question concerning the lost child,
" because he prefers it as being the room nearest to
the closet where the cookies are. He 's taken ad-
vantage of our sympathies to refuse everything but
cookies."

" I suppose that's one of the rights of lost child-
hood," comments Frank, languidly ; " there's no
law that can compel him to touch even cracker."

" Well, you'd better go down and see what you
can make of him. He's driven us all wild."

So Frank descends to the region now redolent of
the preparing tea, and finds upon a chair, in the
middle of the kitchen floor, a very forlorn little fig-
ure of a boy, mutely munching a sweet-cake, while
now and then a tear steals down his cheeks and
moistens the grimy traces of former tears. He and
baby are, in the mean time regarding each other with
a steadfast glare, the cook and the nurse supporting
baby in this rite of hospitahty.

A day's pleasure. 159

•' Well, my little man," says his host, " how did
you get here ? "

The little man, perhaps because he is heartily sick
of the question, is somewhat slow to answer that
there was a fire ; and that he ran after the steamer ;
and a girl found him and brought him up here.

" And that's all the blessed thing you can get out
of him," says cook ; and the lost boy looks as if he
felt cook to be perfectly right.

In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the house-
hold to wash him and brush him, he is still a dread-
fully travel-stained little boy, and he is powdered in
every secret crease and wrinkle by that dust of old
Charlesbridge, of which we always speak with an
air of affected disgust, and a feeling of iU-concealed
pride in an abomination so strikingly and peculiarly
our own. He looks very much as if he had been
following fire-engines about the streets of our learned
and pulverous suburb ever since he could walk, and
he certainly seems to feel himself in trouble to a
certain degree ; but there is easily imaginable in his
bearing a conviction that after all the chief care is
with others, and that, though unhappy, he is not
responsible. The principal victim of his sorrows is
also penetrated by this opinion, and aftsr gazing
forlornly upon him for a while, asks mechanically,
" What's your name ? "

" Freddy," is the laconic answer.

" Freddy — ? " trying with an artful inflection to
lead him on to his surname.

" Freddy," decidedly and conclusively.

160 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

" O, bless me ! What's the name of the street
your papa lives on ? "

This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and he
takes a bite of sweet-cake in sign that he does not
think of solving it. Frank looks at him gloomily for
a moment, and then determines that he can grapple
with the diiBculty more successfully after he has had
tea. " Send up the supper, Bridget. I think, my
dear," he says, after they have sat down, " we'd
better all question our lost child when we've fin-
ished."

So, when they have finished, they have him up in
the sitting-room, and the inquisition begins.

" Now, Freddy," his host says, with a cheerful air
of lifelong friendship and confidence, " you know
that everybody has got two names. Of course your
first name is Freddy, and it 's a very pretty name.
WeU, I want you to think real hard, and then tell
me what your other name is, so I can take you back
to your mamma."

At this allusion the child looks round on the circle
of eager and compassionate faces, and begins to shed
tears and to wring all hearts.

" What's your name ? " asks Frank, cheerfully, —
" your other name, you know ? "

" Freddy," sobbed the forlorn creature.

" O good heaven ! this'U never do," groaned the
chief inquisitor. " Now, Freddy, try not to cry.
What is your papa's name, — Mr. — ? " with the
leading inflection as before.

" Papa," says Freddy.

A day's pleasure. 161

" O, that'll never do I Not Mr. Papa? "

" Yes," persists Freddy.

" But, Freddy," interposes Mrs. Sallie, as her
husband falls back baffled, " when ladies come to see
your mamma, what do they call her? Mrs. — ?"
adopting Frank's alluring inflection.

"Mrs. Mamma," answers Freddy, confirmed in
his error by this course ; and a secret dismay pos-
sesses his questioners. They skirmish about him
with every sort of query ; they try to entrap him into
some kind of revelation by apparently irrelevant
remarks ; they plan ambuscades and surprises ; but
Freddy looks vigilantly round upon them, and guards
his personal history from every approach, and seems
in every way so to have the b^st of it, that it is
almost exasperating.

" Kindness has proved fiitile," observes Frank,
" and I think we ought as a last resort, before yield-
ing ourselves to despair, to use intimidation. Now,
Fred," he says, with sudden and terrible severity,
" what's your father's name ? "

The hapless little soul is really moved to an efFort
of memory by this, and blubbers out something that
proves in the end to resemble the family name,
though for the present it is merely a puzzle of unin-
telligible sounds."

" Blackman ? " cries Aunt Melissa, catching des-
perately at these sounds.

On this, all the man and brother is roused in
Freddy's bosom, and he roars fiercely, " No I he
ain't a black man ! He's white ! "
11

162 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

" I give it up," says Frank, who has been looking
for his hat. " I'm afraid we can't make anything
out of him ; and I'll have to go and report the case
to the police. But, put him to bed, do, SaUie ; he'^
dropping with sleep."

So he went out, of course supported morally by a
sense of duty, but I am afraid also by a sense of ad-
venture in some degree. It is not every day that,
in so quiet a place as Charlesbridge, you can have a
lost child cast upon your sympathies ; and I believe
that when an appeal is not really agonisdng, we like
so well to have our sympathies touched, we favorites
of the prosperous commonplace, that most of us
would enter eagerly into a pathetic case of this kind,
even after a day's pleasure. Such was certainly the
mood of my friend, and he unconsciously prepared
himself for an equal interest on the part of the
pohce ; but this was an error. The police heard his
statement with all proper attention, and wrote it in
ftiU upon the station-slate, but they showed no feel-
ing whatever, and behaved as if they valued a lost
child no more than a child snug at home in his own
crib. They said that no doubt his parents would be
asking at the police-stations for him during the night,
and, as if my friend would otherwise have thought
of putting him into the street, they suggested that
he should just keep the lost child till he was sent for.
Modestly enough Frank proposed that they should
make some inquiry for his parents, and was answered
by the question whether they could take a man off his
beat for that purpose ; and remembering that beats in

A day's pleasure, 16iS

Charlesbridge were of such vastness that during his
whole residence there he had never yet seen a police-
man on his street, he was obliged to own to himself
that his proposal was absurd. He felt the need of
reinstating himself by something more sensible, and
so he said he thought he would go down to the Port
and leave word at the station there ; and the police
tacitly assenting to this he went.

I who have sometimes hinted that the Square is
not a centre of gayety, or a scene of the greatest
activity by day, feel it right to say that it has some
modest charms of its own on a summer's night, about
the hour when Frank passed through it, when the
post-ofiBce has just been shut, and when the differ-
ent groups that haunt the place in front of the clos-
ing shops have dwindled to the loungers fit though
few who wiU keep it well into the night, and may
there be found, by the passenger on the last horse-
car out from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social
silence, and honorably attended by the policeman
whose favored beat is in that neighborhood. They
seem a feature of the bygone village life of Charles-
bridge, and accord pleasantly with the town-pump
and the public horse-trough, and the noble elm
that by night droops its boughs so pensively, and
probably dreams of its happy younger days when
there were no canker-worms " in the world. Some-
times this choice company sits on the curbing that
goes round the terrace at the ehn-tree's foot, and
then I envy every soul in it, — so tranquil it seems,
80 cool, so 'careless, so morrowless. I cannot see the

164 SUBDBBAN SKETCHES.

faces of that luxurious society, but there I imagine
is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who
resorts thither much by day, and makes a strange
kind of jest of his own, with a flicker of humor upon
his sightless fece, and a faith that others less unkindlj
treated by nature will be able to see the point appar-
ently not always discernible to himself. Late at
night I have a fancy that the darkness puts him on
an equality with other wits, and that he enjoys his
own brilliancy as well as any one.

At the Port station Frank was pleased and soothed
by the tranquil air of the poUceman, who sat in his
shirt-sleeves outside the door, and seemed to an-
nounce, by his attitude of final disoccupation, that
crimes and misdemeanors were no more. This
officer at once showed a desirable interest in the
case. He put on his blue coat that he might listen
to the whole story in a proper figure, and then he
took down the main points on the slate, and said that
they would send word round to the other stations
in the city, and the boy's parents could hardly help
hearing of him that night.

Returned home, Frank gave his news, and then
he and Mrs. Sallie went up to look at the lost child
as he slept. The sumptuous diet to which he had
confined himself, fi-om the first seemed to agree with
him perfectly, for he slept unbrokenly, and appar-
ently without a consciousness of his woes. On a chair
lay his clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap ; they
were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong his
wanderings had done them, and they showed a

A day's pleasxjee. 16£

motherly care here and there, which it was not easy
to look at with composure. The spectators of his sleep
both thought of the curious chance that had thrown
this little one into their charge, and considered that
he was almost as completely a gift of the Unknown as
if he had been following a steamer in another planet,
and had thence dropped into their yard. His help-
lessness in accounting for himself was as afiectin'g as
that of the sublimest metaphysician ; and no learned
man, no superior intellect, no subtle inquirer among
us lost children of the divine, forgotten home, could
have been less able to say how or whence he came
to be just where he found himself. We wander
away and away ; the dust of the road-side gathers
upon us ; and when some strange shelter receives us,
we lie down to our sleep, inarticulate, and haunted
with dreams of memory, or the memory of dreams,
knowing scarcely more of the past than of the fu-
ture.

" What a strange world ! " sighed Mrs. SaUie ;
and then, as this was a mood far too speculative for
her, she recalled herself to practical life suddenly.
" If we should have to- adopt this child, Frank " —

" Why, bless my soul, we're not obliged to adopt
him ! Even a lost child can't demand that."

" We shall adopt him, if they don't come for him.
And now, I want to know " (Mrs. SaUie spoke as if
the adoption had been effected) " whether we shall
give him our name, or some other ? "

"Well, I don't know. It's the first child I've
ever adopted," said Frank ; " and upon my word, I

166 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

.can't say whetlier you have to give him a new name
or not. In fe,ct, if I'd thought of this affair of a
name, I'd never have adopted him. It 's the greatest
part of the burden, and if his feither will only come
for him, I'll give him up without a murmur."

In the interval that followed the proposal of this
alarming difficulty, and while he sat and waited
vaguely for whatever should be going to happen
next, Frank was not able to repress a sense of per-
sonal resentment towards the little vagrant sleeping
so carelessly there, though at the bottom of his
heart there was all imaginable tenderness for him.
In the fantastic character which, to his weariness,
the day's pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordi-
nary unkindness of fate that this lost child should
have been kept in reserve for him after all the rest ;
and he liad so small consciousness of bestowing
shelter and charity, and so profound a feeling of
haying himself been turned out of house and home
by some surprising and potent agency, that if the
lost child had been a regiment of Fenians billeted
upon him, it could not have oppressed him more.
While he remained perplexed in this perverse senti-
ment of invasion and dispossession, "Hark!" said
Mrs. Sallie, "what's that?"

It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on the
walk in front of the house, and a low, hoarse whis-
pering.

" I don't know," said Frank, " but from the kind
of pleasure I've got out of it so far, I should say
that this holiday was capable of an earthquake be
fore midniffht.'"

A day's pleasure. 167

" Listen ! "

They listened, as they must, and heard the outer
darkness rehearse a raucous (Halogue between an
unseen Bill and Jim, who were the more terrible
to the imagination from being so realistically named,
and who seemed to have in charge some nameless
third person, a mute actor in the invisible scene.
There was doubt, which he uttered, in the mind of
Jim, whether they could get this silent comrade
along much farther without carrying him ; and there
was a growling assent from Bill that he was pretty
far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim had
better go for the wagon ; then there were quick, re-
treating steps ; and then there was a profound silence,
in which the audience of this strange drama sat
thrilled and speechless. The eflFect was not less
dreadftd when there rose a dull sound, as of a help-
less body nibbing against the fence, and at last
lowered heavily to the ground.

" O ! " cried Mrs. Sallie. " Do go out and help.
He's dying ! "

But even as she spoke the noise of wheels was
heard. A wagon stopped before the door; there
came a tugging and lifting, with a sound as of
crunching gravel, and then a " There ! " of great
relief.

" Frank ! " said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, " if
you don't go out and help those men, I'll never for-
give you."

Really, the drama had grown very impressive ; it
was a mystery, to say the least ; and so it must re

168 STJBURBAN SKETCHES.

main forever, for when Frank, infected at last by Mrs.
Sallie's faith in tragedy, opened the door and oiFereA
his tardy services, the wagon was driven rapidly
away without reply. They never learned what it
had all been; and I think that if one actually
honors mysteries, it is best not to look into them.
How much finer, after all, if you have such a thing
as this happen before your door at midnight, not to
throw any light upon it ! Then your probable tipsy
man cannot be proved other than a tragical presence,
which you can match with any inscrutable creation
of fiction ; and if you should ever come to write a
romance, as one is very liable to do in this age, there
is your unknown, a figure of strange and fearful
interest, made to your hand, and capable of being
used, in or out of the body, with a very gloomy
effect.

While our friends yet trembled with this sensation,
quick steps ascended to their door, and then fol-
lowed a sharp, anxious tug at the bell.

" Ah I " cried Frank, prophetically, " here's the
father of our adopted son ; " and he opened the
door.

The gentleman who appeared there could scarcely
frame the question to which Frank replied so cheer-
fully : " O yes ; he's here, and snug in bed, and fast
asleep. Come up-stairs and look at him. Better let
him be till morning, and then come after him," he
added, as they looked down a moment on the little
sleeper.

" O no, I couldn't," said the father, con eoepreS'

A day's pleasure. 169

sione; and then he told how he had heard of the
child's whereabouts at the Port station, and had
hurried to get him, and how his mother did not
know he was found yet, and was almost wild about
him. They had no idea how he had got lost, and
his own blind story was the only tale of his adven-
ture that ever became known.

By this time his father had got the child partly
awake, and the two men were dressing him in men's
clumsy fashion ; and finally they gave it up, and
rolled him in a shawl. The father lifted the slight
burden, and two small arms fell about his neck. The
weary child slept again.

" How has he behaved ? " asked the father.

" Like a little hero," said Frank, " but he's been a
cormorant for cookies. I think it right to tell you,
in case he shouldn't be very brilliant to-morrow,
that he wouldn't eat a bit of anything else."

The father said he was the life of their house ;
and Frank said he knew how that was, — that he had
a life of the house of his own ; and then the father
thanked him very simply and touchingly, and with
the decent New England self-restraint, which is
doubtless so much better than any sort of efiusion.
"Say good-night to the gentleman, Freddy," he
said at the door ; and Freddy with closed eyes mur-
mured a good-night from far within the land of
dreams, and then was borne away to the house out
of which the life had wandered with his little feet.

" I don't know, SaUie," said Frank, when he had
given all the eagerly demanded particulars about the

170 StTBUBBAN SKETCHES.

child's father, — "I don't know whether I should
want many such holidays as this, in the course of the
summer. On the whole, I think I'd better over-
work myself and not take any relaxation, if I mean
to live long. And yet I'm not sure that the day 's
been altogether a failure, though all our purposes Oi
enjoyment have miscarried. I didn't plan to find a
lost child here, when I got home, and I'm afraid I
haven't had always the most Christian feeling towards
him ; but he's really the saving grace of the adair ;
and if this were a little comedy I had been playing,
I should turn him to account with the jaded audi-
ence, and advancing to the foot-lights, should say,
with my hand on my waistcoat, and a neat bow, that
although every hope of the day had been disap-
pointed, and nothing I had meant to do had been
done, yet the man who had ended at midnight by
restoring a lost child to the arms of its father, must
own that, in spite of adverse fortune, he had enjoyed
A Day's Pleasure."

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE.

It was long past the twilight hour, which has
been already mentioned as so oppressive in suburban
places, and it was even too late for visitors, when
a resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a Con-
tributor to the magazines, was startled by a ring at
his door. As any thoughtful person would have done
upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance
in his mind, speculating whether it were such or such
a one, and dismissing the whole list of improbabili-
ties, before he laid down the book he was reading,
and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he
was rewarded by the apparition of an utter stranger
on his threshold, — a gaunt figure of forlorn and
curious smartness towering far above him, that jerked
him a nod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford Uved
there. The face which the lamp-light revealed was
remarkable for a harsh two days' growth of beard,
and a single bloodshot eye ; yet it was not otherwise
a sinister countenance, and there was something in
the strange presence that appealed and touched.
The contributor, revolving the facts vaguely in his
mind, was not sure, after all, that it was not the
man's clothes rather than his expression that soft-
ened him toward the rugged visage : they were so
tragically cheap, and the misery of helpless needle-

172 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

women, and the poverty and ignorance of the pur-
chaser, were so apparent in their shabby newness, of
which they appeared still conscious enough to have
led the way to the very window, in the Semitic
quarter of the city, where they had lain ticketed,
" This nobby suit for $15."

But the stranger's manner put both his face and
his clothes out of mind, and claimed a deeper inter-
est when, being answered that the person for whom
he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips
hard together, and sighed heavily.

" They told me," he said, in a hopeless way,
" that he lived on this street, and I've been to every
other house. I'm very anxious to find him, Cap'n,"

— the contributor, of course, had no claim to the
title with which he was thus decorated, — " for I've
a daughter living with him, and I want to see her ;
I've just got home from a two years' voyage, and "

— there was a struggle of the Adam's-apple in the
man's gaunt throat — "I find she's about aU there is
lefb of my family."

How complex is every human motive ! This con-
tributor had been lately thinking, whenever he
turned the pages of some foolish traveller, — some
empty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where
all sensation was long ago exhausted, and the oxygen
has perished from every sentiment, so has it been
breathed and breathed again, — that nowadays the
wise adventurer sat down beside his own register
and waited for incidents to seek him out. It seemed
to him that the cultivation of a patient and receptive

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 173

spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the
occurrence of all manner of surprising facts within
the range of one's own personal knowledge ; that
not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies
and the genii, and all the people of romance, who
had but to be hospitably treated in order to develop
the deepest interest of fiction, and to become the
characters of plots so ingenious that the most cun-
ning invention were poor beside them. I myself am
not so confident of this, and would rather trust Mr.
Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any
chance combination of events. But I should be
afraid to say how much his pride in the character of
the stranger's sorrows, as proof of the correctness of
his theory, prevailed with the contributor to ask him
to come in and sit down ; though I hope that some
abstract impulse of humanity, some compassionate
and miselfish care for the man's misfortunes as mis-
fortunes, was not wholly wanting. Indeed, the help-
less simphcity with which he had confided his case
might have touched a harder heart. " Thank you,"
said the poor fellow, after a moment's hesita,tion.
*'I believe I wiU come in. I've been on foot all
day, and after such a long voyage it makes a man
dreadfully sore to walk about so much. Perhaps
you can think of a Mr. Hapford living somewhere in
the neighborhood."

He sat down, and, after a pondering' silence, in
which he had remained with his head fallen upon
his breast, " My name is Jonathan Tinker," he said,
with the unaffected air which had already impressed

174 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

the contributor, and as if he felt that some form of
introduction was necessary, "and the girl that I
want to find is Julia Tinker." Then he added, r=i-
suming the eventM personal history which the
listener exulted, while he regretted, to hear : " You
see, I shipped first to Liverpool, and there I heard
from my family ; and then I shipped again for Hong-
Kong, and after that I never heard a word : I seemed
to miss the letters everywhere. This morning, at
four o'clock, I left my ship as soon as she had hauled
into the dock, and hurried up home. The house
was shut, and not a soul in it ; and I didn't know
what to do, and I sat down on the doorstep to wait
till the neighbors woke up, to ask them what had
become of my family. And the first one come out
he told me my wife had been dead a year and a half,
and the baby I'd never seen, with her ; and one of
my boys was dead ; and he didn't know where the
rest of the children was, but he'd heard two of the
little ones was with a family in the city."

The man mentioned these' things with the half-
apologetic air observable in a certain kind of Amer-
icans when some accident obliges them to confess the
infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask
your sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own
risk, with a chance of having' it thrown back upon
your hands. The contributor assumed the risk so
far as to say, " Pretty rough ! " when the stranger
paused ; and perhaps these homely words were best
suited to reach the homely heart. The man's quiv-
ering lips closed hard agam, a kind of spasm passed

A ROMANCE OF BEAL LIFE. 175

over his dark face, and then two very small drops of
brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks. This
demonstration, into which he had been surprised,
seemed to stand for the passion of tears into which
the emotional races fall at such times. He opened
his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on : —

" I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city,
and at last I found the children. I'd been gone so
long they didn't know me, and somehow I thought
the people they were with weren't over-glad I'd
turned up. Finally the oldest child told me that
Julia was living with a Mr. Hapford on this street,
and I started out here to-night to look her up. If I
can find her, I'm all right. I can get the family to-
gether, then, and start new."

" It seems rather odd," mused the listener aloud,
" that the neighbors let them break up so, and that
they should all scatter as they did."

" Well, it ain't so curious as it seems, Cap'n.
There was money for them at the owners', all the
time ; I'd left part of my wages when I sailed ; but
they didn't know how to get at it, and what could
a parcel of children do ? Julia 's a good girl, and
when I find her I'm all right."

The writer could only repeat that there was no
Mr. Hapford living on that street, and never had
been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be such a
person in the neighborhood ; and they would go out
together, and ask at some of the houses about. But
the stranger must first take a glass of wine ; for he
looked used up.

176 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested
that he did not want to give so much trouble, but
took the glass, and, as he put it to his lips, said for-
mally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, " I
hope I may have the opportunity of returning the
compliment." The contributor thanked him ; though,
as he thought of all the circumstances of the case,
and considered the cost at which the stranger had
come to enjoy his pohteness, he felt little eagerness
to secure the return of the compliment at the same
price, and added, with the consequence of another
set phrase, " Not at ajl." But the thought had made
him the more anxious to befriend the luckless soul
fortune had cast in his way ; and so the two sallied
out together, and rang door-bells wherever lights
were still seen burning in the windows, and asked
the astonished people who answered their summons
whether any Mr. Hapford were known to hve in the
neighborhood.

And although the search for this gentleman proved
vain, the contributor could not feel that an expedi-
tion which set familiar objects in such novel lights
was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately
jito the cares and anxieties of his protSffS, thait at
times he felt himself in some inexphcable sort a ship-
mate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally a
partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all
things which takes place, within doors and vvdthout,
about midnight may have helped to cast this doubt
upon his identity ; — he seemed to be visiting now
for the first time the streets and neighborhoods near-

A BOMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 177

est his own, and his feet stumbled over the accus-
tomed walks. In his quality of houseless wanderer,
and — so • far as appeared to others — possibly
worthless vagabond, he also got a new^and instruc-
tive effect upon the faces which, in his real character,
he knew so well by their looks of neighborly greet-
ing; and it is his belief that the first hospitable
prompting of the human heart is to shut the door in
the eyes of homeless strangers who present them-
selves after eleven o'clock. By that time the ser-
vants are all abed, and the gentleman of the house
answers the bell, and looks out with a loath and be-
wildered face, which gradually changes to one of
suspicion, and of wonder as to what those fellows
can possibly want of him, till at last the prevailing
expression is one of contrite desire to atone for the
first reluctance by any sort of service. The con-
tributor professes to have observed these changing
phases in the visages of those whom he that night
called from their dreams, or arrested in the act of
going to bed; and he drew the conclusion — very
proper for his imaginable connection with the garrot-
ing and other adventurous brotherhoods — that the
most flattering moment for knocking on the head
people who answer a late ring at night is either in
their first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-
abandonment to their better impulses. It does not
seem to have occurred to him that he would himself
have been a much more favorable subject for the
predatory arts that any of his neighbors, if his ship-
mate, the unknown companion of his researches for

12

178 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the
faith of the gaunt giant upon which he reposed was^
good, and the contributor continued to wander about
with him in*perfect safety. Not a soul among those
they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford, — fer
less of a JuUa Tinker Hving with him. But they all
listened to the contributor's explanation with interest
and eventual sympathy ; and in truth, — briefly told,
with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan
Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing
like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his gro-
tesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow
cast there by the lamphght, — it was a story which
could hardly fail to awaken pity.

At last, after ringing several bells where there
were no lights, in the mere wantonness of good-will,
and going away before they could be answered (it
would be entertaining to know what dreams they
caused the sleepers within), there seemed to be
nothing for it but to give up the search till morning,,
and go to the main street and wait for the last horse-
car to the city.

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan
Tinker, being plied with a few leading questions,
told in hints and scraps the story of his hard life,
which was at present that of a second mate, and had
been that of a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the
mast. The second mate's place he held to be the
hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars
more than the men, and you did not rank with the
officers ; you took your meals alone, and in every-

A KOMANCE OF HEAL LIFE. 179

thing you belonged by yourself. The men did not
respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you
awfully before the passengers. The hardest captain
that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with was Captain
Gooding of the Cape. It had got to be so that no
man would ship second mate under Captain Good-
ing ; and Jonathan Tinker was with him only one
voyage. When he had been home awhile, he saw
an advertisement for a second mate, and he went
round to the owners'. They }iad kept it secret who
the captain was ; but there was Captain Gooding in
the owners' office. " Why, here's the man, now,
that I want for a second mate," said he, when Jona-
than Tinker entered ; " he knows me." — " Captain
Gooding, I know you 'most too well to want to sail
under you," answered Jonathan. " I might go if I
hadn't been with you one voyage too many already."

" And then the men ! " said Jonathan, " the men
coming aboard drunk, and having to be pounded
sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on the
second mate ! Why, there isn't an inch of me
that hasn't been cut over or smashed into a jell.
I've had three ribs broken ; I've got a scar from a
knife on my cheek; and I've been stabbed bad
enough, half a dozen times, to lay me up."

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the
notion of so much misery and such various mutila-
tion were too grotesque not to be amusing. " Well,
what can you do ? " he went on. " If you don't
strike, the men think you're afraid of them ; and so
you have to begin hard and go on hard. I always

180 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

tell a man, ' Now, my man, I always begin with a
man the way I mean to keep on. You do your duty
and you're all right. But if you don't ' — Well,
the men ain't Americans any more, — Dutch, Span-
iards, Chinese, Portuguee, — and it ain't like abusing
a white man."

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible
tyranny which we all know exists on shipboard ; and
his hstener respected him the more that, though he
had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too
honest not to own it.

Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did
not know what else to do. When he was younger,
he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet there
was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be
captain. He used to hope for that once, but not
now ; though he thought he could navigate a ship.
Only let him get his family together again, and he
would — yes, he would — try to do something ashore.

No car had yet come in sight, and so the con-
tributor suggested that they should walk to the car-
office, and look in the "Directory," which is kept
there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it
had already been arranged that they should renew
their acquaintance on the morrow. Jonathan Tinker,
when they had reached the office, heard with con-
stitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford,
for whom he inquired was not in the " Directory."
" Never mind," said the other ; " come round to my
house in the morning. We'll find him yet." So they
parted with a shake of the hand, the second mate say-

A ROMANCE OF BEAL LIFE. 181

ing that he believed he should go down to the vessel
and sleep aboard, — if he could sleep, — and murmur-
ing at the last moment the hope of returning the
compliment, while the other walked homeward, weary
as to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy for Jona-
than Tinker, very elate in spirit. The truth is, —
and however disgraceftd to human nature, let the
truth still be told, — he had recurred to his primal
satisfaction in the man as calamity capable of being
used for such and such literary ends, and, while he
pitied him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real life
quite as striking and complete as anything in fiction.
It was literature made to his hand. Nothing could
be better, he mused ; and once, more he passed the
details of the story in review, and beheld all those
pictures which the poor fellow's artless words had so
vividly conjured up : he saw him leaping ashore in
the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled
into the dock, and making his way, with his vague
sea-legs unaccustomed to the pavements, up through
the silent and empty city streets ; he imagined the
tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's
home must have caused in him, and the benumbing
shock of finding it blind and deaf to all his appeals ;
he saw him sitting down upon what had been his
own threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered
patience till the neighbors should be awake, while
the noises of the streets gradually arose, and the
wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk-
man and the ice-man came and went, and the wait-
ing figure began to be stared at, and to challenge the

182 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

curiosity of the passing policeman ; he fancied the
opening of the neighbor's door, and the slow, cold
understanding of the case ; the manner, whatever it
was, in which the sailor was told that one year be-
fore his wife had died, with her babe, and that his
children were scattered, none knew where. As the
contributor dwelt pityingly upon these things, but at
the same time estimated their aesthetic value one by
one, he drew near the head of his street, and found
himself a few paces behind a boy slouching onward
through the night, to whom he called out, adventur-
ously, and with no real hope of information, —

" Do you happen to know anybody on this street
by the name of Hapford?"

" Why no, not in this town," said the boy; but
he added that there was a street of the same name
in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a" Hap-
ford living on it.

" By Jove I " thought the contributor, " this is
more like literature than ever ; " and he hardly
knew whether to be more provoked at his own stu-
pidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in
the next village, or delighted at the element of fatal-
ity which the fact introduced into the story ; for
Tinker, according to his own account, must have
landed from the cars a few rods from the very door
he was -seeking, and so walked fai'ther and farther
from it every moment. He thought the case so
curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy, who,
however he might have been inwardly affected, was
sufficiently true to the national traditions not tc

A ROMANCE OP REAL LIFE. 183

make the smallest conceivable outward sign of con-
cern in it.

At home, however, the contributor related his
adventures and the story of Tinker's life, adding the
fact that he had just found out where Mr. Hapford
lived. " It was the only touch wanting," said he ;
" the whole thing is now perfect."

" It's too perfect," was answered from a sad enthu-
siasm. " Don't speak of it ! I can't take it in."

" But the question is," said the contributor, peni-
tently taking himself to task for forgetting the hero
of these excellent misfortunes in his delight at their
perfection, " how am I to sleep to-night, thinking of
that poor soul's suspense and uncertainty ? Never
mind, — I'll be up early, and run over and make
sure that it is Tinker's Hapford, before he gets out
here," and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would
it not be a justifiable coup de thSdtre to fetch his
daughter here, and let her answer his ring at the
door when he comes in the morning ? "

This plan was discouraged. " No, no ; let them
meet in their own way. Just take him to Hapford's
house and leave him."

" Very well. But he's too good a character to
lose sight of. He's got to come back here and tell
us what he intends to do."

The birds, next morning, not having had the sec-
ond mate on their minds either as an unhappy man
or a most fortunate episode, but having slept long
and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way
in the way-side trees; and the sweetness of thefa

184 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES.

notes made the contributor's heart light as he
climbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford's door.

The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or
sixteen, whom lie knew at a glance for the second
mate's daughter, but of whom, for form's sake, he
asked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living
there." •

" My name's Julia Tinker," answered the maid,
who had rather a disappointing face.

" Well," said the contributor, " your father's got
back from his Hong-Kong voyage."

" Hong-Kong voyage ? " echoed the girl, with a
stare of helpless inquiry, but no other visible emo-
tion.

" Yes. He had never heard of yoyr mother's
death. He came home yesterday morning, and was
looking for you all day."

Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute ;
and the other was puzzled at the want of feeling
shown, which he could not account for even as a na-
tional trait. " Perhaps there's some mistake," he
said.

" There must be," answered Julia : " my father
hasn't been to sea for a good many years. My
father," she added, with a diffidence indescribably
mingled with a sense of distinction, — " my father's
in State's Prison. What kind of looking man was
this ? "

The contributor mechanically described him.

Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh.
" Yes, it 's him, sure enough." And then, as if the

A BOMANCE OF REAL UFE. 185

joke were too good to keep : " Miss Hapford, Miss
Hapford, father's got out. Do come here ! " she
called into a back room.

When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell back,
and, having deftly caught a fly on the door-post,
occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while she
listened to the conversation of the others.

" It 's all true enough," said Mrs. Hapford, when
the writer had recounted the moving story of Jona-
than Tinker, " so far as the death of his wife and
baby goes. But he hasin't been to sea for a good
many years, and he must have just come out of
State's Prison, where he was put for bigamy.
There's always two sides to a story, 'you know ; but
they say it broke his first wife's heart, and she died.
His friends don't want him to find his children, and
this girl especially."

" He's found his children in the city," said the
contributor, gloomily, being at a loss what to do or
say, in view of the wreck of his romance.

" O, he's found 'em has he ? " cried Juha, with
heightened amusement. " Then he'll have me next,
if I don't pack and go."

" I'm very, very sorry," said the contributor, se-
cretly resolved never to do another good deed, no
matter how temptingly the opportunity presented
itself. "But you may depend he won't find out
from me where you are. Of course I had no earthly
reason for supposing his story was not true."

" Of course," said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford;
mingling a drop of honey with the gaJl in the con-
tributor's soul, " you only did your duty."

186 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

And indeed, as lie turned away lie did not fee
altogether witliout compensation. However Jona-
than Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a man, he
had even risen as literature. The episode which
had appeared so perfect in its pathetic phases did not
seem less finished as a farce ; and this person, to
whom all things of every-day life presented them-
selves in periods more or less rounded, and capable
of use as facts or illustrations, could not but rejoice
in these new incidents, as dramatically fashioned as
the rest. It occurred to him that, wrought into a
story, even better use might be made of the facts
now than before, for they had developed questions
of character and of human nature which could not
fiiil to interest. The more he pondered upon his
acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fasci-
nating the erring mariner became, in his complex
truth and falsehood, his deUcately blending shades of
artifice and naivete. He must, it was felt, have be-
lieved to a certain point in his own inventions : nay,
starting with that groundwork of truth, — the feet
that his wife was really dead, and that he had not
seen his family for two years, — why should he not
place implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it ?
It was probable that he felt a real sorrow for her
loss, and that he found a fantastic consolation in de-
picting the circumstances of her death so that they
should look like his inevitable misfortunes rather
than his faults. He might well have repented his
offense during those two years of prison ; and why
should he not now cast their dreariness and shame

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 187

out of his memory, and replace them with the free-
dom and adventure of a two years' voyage to China,
— so probahle, in all respects, that the fact should
appear an impossible nightmare? In the experi-
ences of his life he had abundant material to furnish
forth the facts of such a voyage, and in the weari-
ness arid lassitude that should follow a day's walking
equally after a two years' voyage and two years'
imprisonment, he had as much physical proof in
favor of one hypothesis as the other. It was doubt-
less true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his
house at dawn, and sat down on the threshold of his
ruined home ; and perhaps he felt the desire he had
expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of be-
ginning life anew ; and it may have cost him a veri-
table pang when he found that his little ones did not
know him. All the sentiments of the situation were
such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth
of its own inventions ; and as he heard these contin-
ually repeated_by the contributor in their search for
Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an objective
force and repute scarcely to be resisted. At the
same time, there were touches of nature throughout
Jonathan Tinker's narrative which could not fail to
take the faith of another. The contributor, in re-
viewing it, thought it particularly charming that his
mariner had not overdrawn himself,, or attempted to
paint his character otherwise than as it probably was ;
that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to
be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, with-
out the gloss of regret or the pretenses to refine-

188 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

ment that might be pleasing to the supposed philan-
thropist with whom he had fallen in. Captain
Gooding was of course a true portrait; and there
was nothing in Jonathan Tinker's statement of the
relations of a second mate to his superiors and his
inferiors which did not agree perfectly with what the
contributor had just read in " Two Years before the
Mast," — a book which had possibly cast its glamour
upon the adventure. He admired also the just and
perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved
husband and father, — those occasional escapes from
the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetful-
ness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom,
which every one has observed in this poor, crazy
human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which
it would have been hard to simidate. But, above
all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagi-
nation given by the second mate when, at parting,
he said he believed he would go down and sleep on
board the vessel. In view of this, the State's
Prison theory almost appeared a malign and foolish
scandal.

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the
second mate wholly answerable for beginning his
life again with the imposture he had practiced ?
The contributor had either so fallen in love with the
literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he
would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had
touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the
affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a
pathos which, though very different from that of its

A BOMANCE OF SEAL LIFE. 189

first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowing with
what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor,' he (repre-
senting Society in its attitude toward convicted Er-
ror) would have met the fact had it been owned to
him at first, he had not virtue enough to condemn
the illusory stranger, who must have been helpless to
make at once evident any repentance he felt or good
purpose he cherished. Was it not one of the saddest
consequences of the man's past, — a dark necessity
of misdoing, — that, even with the best will in the
world to retrieve himself, his first endeavor must
involve a wrong? Might he not, indeed, be con-
sidered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable
impulses ? I can see clearly enough where the con-
tributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also
understand how one accustomed to value realities
only as they resembled fables should be won with
such pensive sophistry ; and I can certainly sympa-
thize with his feeling that the mariner's failure to
reappear according to appointment added its final
and most agreeable charm to the whole afiair, and
completed the mystery from which the man emerged
and which swallowed him up again.

SCENE.

On that loveliest autumn morning, the swollen
tide had spread over all the russet levels, and
gleamed in the sunlight a mile away. As the con-
tributor moved onward down the street, luminous
on either hand with crimsoning and yellowing ma-
ples, he was so filled with the tender serenity of
the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of
small Irish houses standing miserably about on the
flats ankle deep, as it were, in little pools of the tide,
or to be aware at first, of a strange stir of people
upon the streets : a fluttering to and fi-o and lively
encounter and separation of groups of bareheaded
women, ' a flying of children through the broken
fences of the neighborhood, and across the vacant
lots on which the insulted sign-boards forbade them
to trespass ; a sluggish movement of men through
all, and a pause of difierent vehicles along the side-
walks. When a sense of these facts had penetrated
his enjoyment, he asked a matron whose snowy arms,
freshly taken from the wash-tub, were folded across
a mighty chest, " What is the matter ? "

" A girl drowned herself, sir-r-r, over there on the
flats, last Saturday, and they're looking for her."

" It was the best thing she could do," said another
matron grimly.

SCEXE. 191

Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to
patching himself up a romantic story for the suicide,
after the pitifiil fashion of this fiction-ridden age,
when we must relate everything we see to something
we have read. He was the less to blame for it, he-
cause he could not help it ; but certainly h^ is not to
be praised for his associations with the tragic fact
brought to his notice. Nothing could have been
more trite or obvious, and he felt his intellectual
poverty so keenly that he might almost have believed
his discomfort a sympathy for the girl who had
drowned herself last Saturday. But of course, this
could not be, for he had but lately been thinking
what a very tiresome figure to the imagination the
Fallen Woman had become. As a fact of Chris-
tian, civilization, she was a spectacle to wring one's
heart, he owned ; but he wished she were well out
of the romances, and it really seemed a fatality
that she should be the principal personage of this
little scene. The preparation for it, whatever it
was to be, was so deliberate, and the reality had so
slight relation to the French roofs and modem im-
provements of the comfortable Charlesbridge which
he knew, that he could not consider himself other
than as a spectator awaiting some entertainment,
with a faint inclination to be critical.

In the mean time there passed through the mot-
ley crowd, not so much a cry as a sensation of
" They've found her, they've found her I " and then
the one terrible picturesque fact, " She was stand-
ing upright ! "

192 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES,

Upon this there was wilder and wilder clamor
among the people, dropping by degrees and almost
dying away, before a flight of boys came down the
street with the tidings, " They are bringing her —
bringing her in a wagon."

The contributor knew that she whom they were
bringing in the wagon, had had the poetry of love
to her dismal and otherwise squalid death ; but the
history was of fancy, not of fact in his mind. Of
course, he reflected, her lot must have been obscure
and hard ; the aspect of those concerned about her
death implied that. But of her hopes and her fears,
who could tell him anything ? To be sure he could
imagine the lovers, and how they first met, and
where, and who he was that was doomed to work
her shame and death ; but here his fancy came upon
something coarse and common : a man of her own
race and grade, handsome after tliat manner of
beauty which is so much more hateful than ugliness
is ; or, worse still, another kind of man whose deceit
must have been subtler and wickeder ; but whatever
the person, a presence defiant of sympathy or even
interest, and simply horrible. Then there were the
details of the affair, in great degree common to all
love affairs, and not varying so widely in any con-
dition of life ; for the passion which is so rich and
infinite to those within its charm, is apt to seem a
little tedious and monotonous in its character, and
poor in resources to the cold looker-on.

Then, finally, there was the crazy purpose and its
fulfillment : the headlong plunge from bank or

SCENE. 193

bridge; the eddy, and the bubbles on the current
that calmed itself above the suicide ; the tide that
rose and stretched itself abroad in the sunshine,
carrying hither and thither the burden with which it
knew not what to do ; the arrest, as by some ghastly
caprice of fate, of the dead girl, in that upright pos-
ture, in which she should meet the quest for her, as
it were defiantly.

And now they were bringing her in a wagon.

Involuntarily all stood aside, and waited till the
funeral car, which they saw, should come up toward
them through the long vista of the maple-shaded
street, a noiseless riot stirring the legs and arms of
the boys into frantic demonstration, while the women
remained quiet with arms folded or akimbo. Before
and behind the wagon, driven slowly, went a guard
of ragged urchins, while on the raised seat above sat
two Americans, unperturbed by anything, and con-
cerned merely with the business of the afiair.

The vehicle was a grocer's cart which had per-
haps been pressed into the service; and inevitably
the contributor thought of Zenobia, and of Miles
Coverdale's belief that if she could have foreboded
all the pogUmortem ugliness and grotesqueness of
suicide, she never would have drowned herself.
This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas of
the effect that her death was to make, her convic-
tion that it was to wring one heart, at least, and to
strike awe and pity to every other ; and her woman's
soul must have been shocked from death could she
13

194 SUBDBBAN SKETCHES.

have known in what a ghastly comedy the body she
put off was to play a part.

In the bottom of the cart lay something long and
straight and terrible, covered with a red shawl that
drooped over the end of the wagon; and on this
thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had
delivered their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee
and tea. As the cart jolted through their lines, the
boys could no longer be restrained ; they broke out
with wild yells, and danced madly about it, while
the red shawl hanging from the rigid feet nodded to
their frantic mirth ; and the sun dropped its light
through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded
flats.

JUBILEE DAYS.

I BELIEVE I have no good reason for including
among these suburban sketches my recollections of
the Peace Jubilee, celebrated by a monster musical
entertainment at Boston, in June, 1869 ; and I
do not know if it wiU serve as excuse for their
intrusion to say that the exhibition was not urban
in character, and that I attended it in a feeling of
curiosity and amusement which the Bostonians did
not seem to feel, and which I suspect was a strictly
suburban if not rural sentiment.

I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse-
car drew near the Long Bridge, and we saw the Col-
iseum spectral through the rain, that Boston was
going to show people representing other parts of the
country her Notion of weather. I looked forward
to a forenoon of clammy warmth, and an afternoon
of clammy cold and of east wind, with a misty night-
fall soaking men to the bones. But the day really
turned out well enough ; it was showery, but not
shrewish, and it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if
content with the opening ceremonies of the Great
Peace Jubilee.

The city, as we entered it, gave due token of ex-
citement, and we felt the celebration even in the

196 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

air, which had a holiday quality very different from
that of ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the
decorous streets, and the trim pathways of the Com-
mon and the Public Garden, and flowed in an orderly
course towards the vast edifice on the Back Bay, pre-
senting the interesting points which always distinguish
a crowd come to town from a city crowd. You get so
used to the Boston face and the Boston dress, that a
coat from New York or a visage from Chicago is at
once conspicuous to you ; and in these people there
was not only this strangeness, but the different oddi-
ties that lurk in out-of-way comers of society every-
where had started suddenly into notice. Long-haired
men, popularly supposed to have perished with the
institution of slavery, appeared before me, and men
with various causes and manias looking from their
wild eyes confronted each other, let alone such
charlatans as had clothed themselves quaintly or
grotesquely to add a charm to the virtue of what-
ever nostrum they peddled. It was, however, for
the most part, a remarkably well-dressed crowd ;
and therein it probably differed more than in any
other respect from the crowd which a holiday would
have assembled in former times. There was little
rusticity to be noted anywhere, and the uncouthness
which has already disappeared from the national face
seemed to be passing from the national wardrobe.
Nearly all the visitors seemed to be Americans, but
neither the Yankee type nor the Hoosier was to be
found. They were apparently very happy, too ; the
ancestral solemnity of the race that amuses itself

JUBILEE DAYS. 197

sadly was not to be seen in them, and, if they were
not making it a duty to be gay, they were really
taking their pleasure in a cheerful spirit.

There was, in fact, something in the sight of the
Coliseum, as we approached it, which was a sufficient
cause of elation to whoever is buoyed up by the
flutter of bright flags, and the movement in and
about holiday booths, as I think we all are apt to be.
One may not have the stomach of happier days for
the swing or the whirhgig ; he may not drink soda-
water intemperately ; pop-corn may not tempt him,
nor tropical fruits allure ; but he beholds them with-
out gloom, — nay, a gi'in inevitably lights up his
countenance at the sight of a great show of these
amusements and refreshments. And a^ny Bostonian
might have felt proud that morning that his city did
not hide the light of her mercantile merit under a
bushel, but blazoned it about on the booths and walls
in every variety of printed and painted advertise-
ment. To the mere aesthetic observer, these vast
placards gave the delight of brilliant color, and
blended prettily enough in effect with the flags ; and
at first glance I received quite as much pleasure
from the frescoes that advised me where to buy my
summer clothing, as from any bunting I saw.

I had the good fortune on the morning of tliis first
Jubilee day to view the interior of the Coliseum
when there was scarcely anybody there, — a trifle
of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thou-
sand other people scattered about over the wide
expanses of parquet and galleries. The decorations

198 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that
love gayety of color ; and the interior was certainly
magnificent, with those long lines of white and hlue
drapery roofing the balconies, the slim, lofty columns
festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms
of the States decking the fronts of the galleries, and
the arabesques of painted musUn everywhere. I do
not know that my taste concerned itself with the
decorations, or that I have any taste in such things ;
but I testify that these tints and draperies gave no
small part of the comfort of being where all things
conspired for one's pleasure. The airy amplitude
of the building, the perfect order and the perfect
freedom of movement, the ease of access and exit,
the completeness of the arrangements that in the
afternoon gave aU of us thirty thousand spectators a
chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to
hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal
favors by every one. These minor particulars, in
fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying your-
self, when the vast hive swarmed with humanily,
and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass.

It was rumored in the morning that the cere-
monies were to begin with prayer by a hundred
ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the
exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till
the last speech was being made by a gentleman
whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom I
suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of
twenty thousand people in his vicinity, but who,was
to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand, a

JUBILEE DAYS. 199

voice merely. One word only I caught, and I
report it here that posterity may know as much as
we thirty thousand contemporaries did of

THE president's SPEECH.

. . . . (^sensation.') . . .
. (^cheers.') . . . refinement
. . . (jfreat applause.')

I do not know if I shall he ahle to give an idea of
the immensity of this scene ; but if such a reader as
has the dimensions of the Coliseum accurately fixed
in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all that
interminable array of benching in the parquet and
the galleries and the slopes at either end of the edi-
fice with human heads, showing here crowns, there
occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have
some notion of the spectacle as we beheld it from
the northern hill-side. Some thousands of heads
nearest were recognizable as attached by the usual
neck to the customary human body, but for the rest,
we seemed to have entered a world of cherubim.
Especially did the multitudinous singers seated far
opposite encourage this illusion ; and their fluttering
fens and handkerchiefs wonderfiilly mocked the
movement of those cravat-like pinions which the
fency attributed to them. They rose or sank at the
wave of the director's baton ; and still looked like
an innumerable flock of cherubs drifting over some
slopes of Paradise, or settling upon it, — if cherubs
ean settle.

200 SUBTJBBAN SKETCHES.

The immensity was quite as striking to the mind
as to the eye, and an absolute democracy was appre-
ciable in it. Not only did all artificial distinctions
cease, but those of nature were practically obliter-
ated, and you felt for once the full meaning of unan-
imity. No one was at a disadvantage ; one was as
wise, as good, as handsome as another. In most
public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search
of the vanity of female beauty, and rests upon some
lovely visage, or pretty figure ; but here it seemed to
matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-look-
ing ; and one might have been perfectly ascetic
without self-denial. A blue eye or a black, — what
of it ? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort
of walking-dress or that, — you might note the
difference casually in a few hundred around you ;
but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and
chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impres-
sion in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of
loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman.
For the time, one would have been preposterously
conceited to have felt his Httleness in that crowd ;
you never thought of yourself in an individual
capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an
army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling
the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way,
but unable to distinguish your sensations from those
of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you
and your unimportant row of people, you could
scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but
might have found it disagreeable as a shock to that

JUBILEE DAYS. 201

great body of humanity. Recall, then, how aston-
ished you were to be recognized by some one, and
to have your hand shaken in your individual charac-
ter of Smith. "Smith? My dear What's-your-
name, I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part
of an enormous emotion ! "

It was as difficult to distribute the various facts of
the whole effect, as to identify one's self. I had only
a public and general consciousness of the delight
given by the harmony of hues in the parquet below ;
and concerning the orchestra I had at first no dis-
tinct impression save of the three hundred and thirty
violin-bows held erect like standing wheat at one
motion of the director's wand, and then falling as if
with the next he swept them down. Afterwards
files of men with horns, and other files of men with
drums and cymbals, discovered themselves ; while far
above all, certain laborious figures pumped or groimd
vnth incessant obeisance at the apparatus supplying
the organ with wind.

What helped, more than anything else, to restore
you your dispersed and wandering individuality was
the singing of Parepa-Rosa, as she triumphed over
the harmonious rivalry of the orchestra. There wg,s
something in the generous amplitude and robust
cheerfulness of this great artist that accorded well with
the ideal of the occasion ; she was in herself a great
musical festival ; and one felt, as she floated down
the stage with her far-spreading white draperies, and
swept the audience a colossal courtesy, that here was
the embodied genius of the Jubilee. I do not trust

202 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

myself to speak particularly of her singing, for I
have the natural modesty of people who know noth-
ing about music, and I have not at command the
phraseology of those who pretend to understand it ;
but I say that her voice filled the whole edifice with
delicious melody, that it soothed and composed and
utterly enchanted, that, though two hundred Adolins
accompanied her, the greater sweetness of her note
prevailed over all, like a mighty will commanding
many. What a sublime ovation for her when a
hundred thousand hands thundered their acclaim !
A victorious general, an accepted lover, a successftd
young author, — these know a measure of bliss, I
dare say ; but in one throb, the singer's heart, as it
leaps in exultation at the loud delight of her applau-
sive thousands, must out-enjoy them all. Let me
lay these poor little artificial flowers of rhetoric at
the feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of grat-
itude and eloquent intention.

When Parepa (or Prepper, as I have heard her
name popularly pronounced) had sung, the revived
consciousness of an individual life rose in rebellion
against the oppression of that dominant vastness. In
fact, human nature can stand only so much of any
one thing. To a certain degree you accept and
conceive of facts truthfully, but beyond this a mere
fantasticality rules ; and having got enough of grand-
eur, the senses played themselves false. That array
of fluttering and tuning people on the southern slope
began to look minute, like the myriad heads assem-
bled in the infinitesimal photograph which you view

JUBILEE DATS. 203

through one of those little half-inch lorgnettes ; and
you had the satisfaction of knowing that to any lovely
infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than a
carpet-tack. The whole performance now seemed
to be worked by those tireless figures pumping at
the or^n, in obedience to signals from a very alert
figure on the platform below. The choral and
orchestral thousands sang and piped and played ;
and at a given point in the scena from Verdi, a hun-
dred fairies in red shirts marched down through the
sombre mass of puppets, and beat upon as many
invisible anvils.

This was the stroke of anti-climax ; and the droll
sound of those anvils, so far above all the voices and
instruments in its pitch, thoroughly disillusioned you
and restored you finally to your proper entity and
proportions. It was the great error of the great
Jubilee, and where almost everything else was noble
and impressive, — where the direction was faultless,
and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly con-
trolled as if they were the result of one volition, —
this anvil-beating was alone ignoble and discordant,
— trivial and huge merely. Not even the artillery
accompaniment, in which the cannon were made to
pronounce words of two syllables, was so bad.

The dimensions of this sketch bear so little pro-
portion to those of the Jubilee, that I must perforce
leave most of its features unnoticed ; but I wish to
express the sense of enjoyment which prevailed
(whenever the anvils were not beaten) over every
other feeling, even over wonder. To the ear as to

204 SUBUBBAK SKETCHES.

the eye it was a delight, and it was an assured suc-
cess in the popular affections from the performance
of the first piece. For my own part, if one pleasur-
able sensation, besides that received from Parepa's
singing, distinguished itself from the rest, it was thkt
given by the performance of the exquisite Coronation
March from Meyerbeer's " Prophet ; " but I say this
under protest of the pleasure taken in the choral
rendering of the " Star-Spangled Banner." Closely
allying themselves to these great raptures were the
minor joys of wandering freely about from point to
point, of receiving freeh sensations from the varying
lights and aspects in which the novel scene presented
itself with its strange fascinations, and of noting,
half consciously, the incessant movement of the
crowd as it revealed itself in changing effects of
color. Then the gay tumult of the fifteen minutes
of intermission between the parts, when all rose with
a susurrus of innumerable silks, and the thousands
of pretty singers fluttered about, and gossiped trem-
ulously and delightedly over the glory of the per-
formance, revealing themselves as charming feminine
personalities, each with her share in the difficulty
and the achievement, each with her pique or pride,
and each her something to tell her friend of the con-
duct, agreeable or displeasing, of some particular
him ! Even the quick dispersion of the mass at the
close was a marvel of orderliness and grace, as the
melting and separating parts, falling asunder, radi-
ated from the centre, and flowed and rippled rapidly
away, and lefi the great hall empty and bare at
last.

JUBILEE DATS. 205

And as you emerged from the building, what
bizarre and perverse feeling was that yon knew ?
Something as if all-out-doors were cramped and
small, and it were better to return to the freedom
and amplitude of the interior ?

On the second day, much that was wonderful in a
first experience of the festival was gone ; but though
the novelty had passed away, the cause for wonder
was even greater. If on the first day the crowd
was immense, it was now something which the im-
perfect state of the language will not permit me to
describe; perhaps awfvl will serve the purpose' as
well as any other word now in use. As you looked
round, from the centre of the building, on that rest-
less, fiinning, fluttering multitude, to right and left
and north and south, all comparisons and similitudes
abandoned you. If you were to write of the scene,
you felt that your effort, at the best, must be a meagre
sketch, suggesting something to those who had seen
the fact, but conveying no intelligible impression of
it to any one else. The galleries swarmed, the vast
slopes were packed, in the pampa-like parquet even
the aisles were half filled with chairs, while a cloud
of placeless wanderers moved ceaselessly on the bor-
ders of the mass under the balconies.

When that common-looking, uncommon Uttle man
whom we have called to rule over us entered the
house, and walked quietly down to his seat in the
centre of it, a wild, inarticulate clamor, like no other
noise in the world, swelled from every side, till
General Grant rose and showed himself, when it

206 SUBXIBBAN SKETCHES.

grew louder than ever, and then gradnlly subsided
into silence. Then a voice, which might be uttering
some mortal alarm, broke repeatedly across the still-
ness from one of the balconies, and a thousand glasses
were leveled in that direction, while everywhere else
the mass hushed itself with a mute sense of peril.
The capacity of such an assemblage for self-destruc-
tion was, in fact, but too evident. From fire, in an
edifice of which the sides could be knocked out in a
moment, there could have been Kttle danger ; the
fabric's strength had been perfectly tested the day
before, and its fall was not to be apprehended ; but
we had ourselves greatly to dread. A panic could
have been caused by any mad or wanton person, in
which thousands might have been instantly trampled
to death ; and it seemed long tUl that foohsh voice
was stilled, and the house lapsed back into tranquillity,
and the enjoyment of the music. In the performance
I recall nothing disagreeable, nothing that to my igno-
rance seemed imperfect, though I leave it to the wise
in music to say how far the great concert was a suc-
cess. I saw a flourish of the director's wand, and I
heard the voices or the instruments, or both, respond,
and I knew by my programme that I was enjoying an
unprecedented quantity of Haydn or Handel or Mey-
erbeer or Rossini or Mozart, afforded with an unques-
tionable precision and promptness ; but I own that I
liked better to stroll about the three-acre house, and
that for me the music was, at best, only one of the
joys of the festival.
There was good hearing outside for those that

JUBILEE DATS. 207

desired to listen to the music, with seats to let in
the surrounding tents and booths ; and there was
unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least
fifly thousand people seemed to have come to the
Jubilee with no other purpose than to gaze upon the
outside of the building. The crowd was incompara-
bly greater than that of the day before ; all the main
thoroughfares of the city roared with a tide of feet
that swept through the side streets, and swelled aim-
lessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured
out again over the pavements. The carriage-ways
were packed with every sort of vehicle, with foot-
passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with the
fragments of the military parade in honor of the
President, with infantry, with straggling cavalry-
men, with artillery. All the paths of the Common
and the Garden were filled, and near the Coliseum
the throngs densified on every side into an almost
impenetrable mass, that made the doors of the build-
ing difficult to approach and at times inaccessible.

The crowd diflFered from that of the first day
chiefly in size. There were more country faces and
country garbs to be seen, though it was still, on the
whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd,
with still very few but American visages. It seemed
to be also a very frugal-minded crowd, and to spend
little upon the refreshments and amusements pro-
vided for it. In these, oddly enough, there was
nothing of the march of mind to be observed ; they
were the refreshments and amusements of a former
generation. I think it would not be extravagant to

208 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

say that there were tons of pie for sale in a multitude
of booths, with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-ci*eam
in proportion ; but I doubt if there was a ton of pie
sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry was
quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem
to care much for oranges or bananas or peanuts, or
even pop-corn, — five cents a package and a prize in
each package. Many booths stood unlet, and in
others the pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their
proprietors, were in the enjoyment of a leisure which
would have been elegant if it had not been forced.
There was one shanty, not otherwise distinguished
from the rest, in which French soups were declared
to be for sale ; but these alien pottages seemed to be
no more favored than the most poisonous of our
national viands. But perhaps they were not French
soups, or perhaps the vicinage of the shanty was not
such as to impress a belief in their genuineness upon
people who like French soups. Let us not be too
easily disheartened by the popular neglect of them.
If the dating reformer who inscribed French soups
upon his sign will reappear ten years hence, we shall
all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished ; pie
must follow. Doubtless in the year 1900, the man-
agers of a Jubilee would even let the refreshment-
rooms within their Coliseum to a cook who would
offer the public something not so much worse than
the worst that could be found in the vilest shanty
restaurant on the ground. At the Jubilee, of which
I am writing, the unhappy person who went into the
Cohseum rooms to refresh himself was offered for

JUBILEE DATS. 209

coffee a salty and unctuous wash, in one of those
thick cups which are supposed to be proof against
the hard usage of " guests " and scullions in humble
eating-houses, and which are always so indescribably
nicked and cracked, and had pushed towards him a
bowl of veteran sugar, and a .tin spoon that had
never been cleaned in the world, while a yoimg per-
son stood by, and watched him, asking, " Have you
paid for that coffee ? "

The side-shows and the other amusements seemed
to have addressed themselves to the crowd with the
same mistaken notion of its character and require-
ments ; though I confess that I witnessed their neg-
lect with regret, whether from a feeling that they
were at least harmless, or an \inconscious sympathy
with any quite idle and unprofitable thmg. Those
rotary,' legless horses, on which children love to ride
in a perpetual sickening circle, — the type of > all our
effort, — were nearly always mounted ; but those
other whirligigs, or whatever the dreadful circles
with their swinging seats are called, were often so
empty that they must have been distressing, from
their want of balance, to the muscles as well as the
spirits of their proprietors. The society of monsters
was also generally shunned, and a cow with five legs
gave milk from the top of her back to an audience
of not more than six persons. The public apathy
had visibly wrought upon the temper of the gen-
tleman who lectured upon this gifted animal, and
he took inquiries in an ironical manner that con-
trasted disadvantageously with the philosophical
14

210 SUBTJBBAN SKETCHES.

sei-enity of the person who had a weighing-machine
outside, and whom I saw sitting in the chair and
weighing himself by the hour, with an expression of
profound enjoyment. Perhaps a man of less bulk
could not have entered so keenly into that simple
pleasure.

There was a large tent on the grounds for dramat-
ical entertainments, with six performances a day,
into which I was lured by a profusion of high-colored
posters, and some such announcement, as that the
beautiful serio-comic danseuse and world-renOwned
cloggist. Mile. Brown, would appear. About a
dozen people were assembled within, and we waited
a half-hour beyond the time announced for the cur-
tain to rise, during which the spectacle of a young man
in black broadcloth, eating a cocoa-nut with his pen-
knife, had a strange and painfiil fascination. At the
end of this half-hour, our number was increased to
eighteen, when the orchestra appeared, — a snare-
drummer and two buglers. These took their place
at the back of the tent ; the buglers, who were
Germans, blew seriously and industriously at their
horns ; but the native-bom citizen, who played the
drum, beat it very much at random, and in the mean
time smoked a cigar, while his humorous friend kept
time upon his shoulders by striking him there with a
cane. How long this might have lasted, I cannot
tell ; but, after another delay, I suddenly bethought
me whether it were not better not to see MUe.
Brown, after all ? I rose, and stole softly out be-
hind the rhythmic back of the drummer ; and the

JUBILEE DATS. 211

world-renowned cloggist is to me at this momeut
only a beautiful dream, — an aiiy shape fashioned
upon a hint supplied by the engraver of the posters.

What, then, did the public desire, if it would not
smile upon the swings, or monsters, or dramatic
amusements that had pleased so long? Was the
music, as it floated oiit &om the Coliseum, a suffi-
cient delight? Or did the crowd, averse to the
shows provided for it, crave something higher and
more intellectual, — Uke, for example, a course of
the Lowell Lectures ? Its general expression had
changed : it had no longer that entire gayety of the
first day, but had taken on something of the sarcastic
pathos with which we Americans bear most oppressive
and fatiguing things as a good joke. The dust was
blown about in clouds ; and here and there, sitting
upon the vacant steps that led up and down among
the booths, were dejected and motionless men and
women, passively gathering dust, and apparently
awaiting burial under the accumulating sand, — the
mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their
unsolved riddle, " Why did we come ? " At inter-
vals, the heavens shook out fierce, sudden showers
of rain, that scattered the surging masses, and sent
them flying impotently hither and thither for shelter
where no shelter was, only to gather again, and
move aimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro, like a
lost child.

So the multitude roared within and without the
Coliseum as I turned homeward ; and yet I found it
wandering with weary feet through the Garden, and

212 SDBUBBAN SKETCHES.

the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its
innumerable aching legs with me to the railroad
station, and, entering the train, stood up on them, —
having paid for the tickets with which the companies
professed to sell seats.

How still and cool and fresh it was at our subur-
ban station, when the train, speeding away with a
sardonic yell over the misery of the passengers yet
standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet
fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through
groups of little idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball,
with milch-goats here and there pastorally cropping
the herbage !

In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill
Day thunder by, with its cannons, and processions,
and speeches, and patriotic musical uproar, hearing
only through my open window the note of the birds
singing in a leafy coliseum across the street, and
making very fair music without an anvil among
them. " Ah, signer 1 " said one of my doorstep
acquaintance, who came next morning and played
me Captain Jenks, — the new air he has had added
to his instrument, — " never in my life, neither at
Torino, nor at Milano, nor even at Genoa, never did
I see such a crowd or hear such a noise, as at that
Colosseo yesterday. The carriages, the horses, the
feet ! And the dust, O Dio mio ! All those millions
of people were as white as so many millers ! "

On the afternoon of the fourth day the city looked
quite like the mill in which these millers had been
grinding ; and even those nnpromisingly elegant

JUBILEE DATS. 213

streets df the Back Bay showed mansions powdered
with dust enough for sentiment to strike root in, and
so soften them with its tender green against the time
when they shall he ruinous and sentiment shall swal-
low them up. The crowd had perceptihly dimin-
ished, but it was stm great, and on the Common it
was allured by a greater variety of recreations and
bargains than I had yet seen there. There were,
of course, all sorts of useful and instructive amuse-
ments, — at least a half-dozen telescopes, and as
many galvanic batteries, with numerous patented
inventions ; and I fancied that most of the peddlers
and charlatans addressed themselves to a utilitarian
spirit supposed to exist in us. A man that sold
whistles capable of reproducing exactly the notes of
the mocking-bird and the guinea-pig set forth the
durabiKty of the invention. " Now, you see this
whistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all rubber ; and
rubber, you know, enters into the composition of a
great many valuable articles. This whistle, then, is
entirely of rubber, — no worthless or flimsy material
that drops to pieces the moment you put it to your
lips," — as if it were not utterly desirable that it
should. " Now, I'll give you the mocking-bird,
gentlemen, and then I'll give you the guinea-pig,
upon this pure ^dia-rubber whistle." And he did
so with a great animation, — this young man with a
perfectly inteUigent and very handsome face. " Try
your strength, and renovate your system I " cried
the proprietor of a piston padded at one end and
working into a cylinder when you struck it a blow

214 SXIBUBBAN SKETCHES.

with your fist; and the owners of lung-testing
machines called upon you from every side to try
their consumption cure ; while the galvanic-battery
men sat still and mutely appealed with inscription?
attached to their cap- visors declaring that electriciiv
taken from their batteries would rid you of every ache
and pain known to suffering humanity. Yet they
were themselves as a class in a state of sad physical
disrepair, and one of them was the visible prey of
rheumatism which he might have sent flying from his
joints with a single shock. The only person whom
I saw improving his health with the battery was a
rosy-faced school-boy, who was taking ten cents'
worth of electricity ; and I hope it did not disagree
with his pop-corn and soda-water.

Farther on was a picturesque group of street-
musicians, — violinists and harpers ; a brother and
four sisters, by their looks, — who afforded almost
the only unpractical amusement to be enjoyed on
the Common, though not far from them was a blind
old negro, playing upon an accordion, and singing to
it in the faintest and thinnest of black voices, who
could hardly have profited any listener. No one
appeared to mind him, till a jolly Jack-tar with both
arms cut off, but dressed in full sailor's togs, lurched
heavily towards him. This mariner had got quite a
good effect of sea-legs by some means, and looked
rather drunker than a man with both arms ought to
be ; but he was very affectionate, and, putting his
face close to the other's, at once entered into talk
with the blind man, forming with him a picture curi-

JUBILEE DATS. 215

ously pathetic and grotesque. He was the only
tipsy person I saw during the Jubilee days, — if he
was tipsy, for after all they may have been real sea-
legs he had on.

If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was
greater in the Cohseum than on the second day ; and
matters h9,d settled there into regular working order.
The limits of individual liberty had been better
ascertained ; there was no longer any movement in
the aisles, but a constant passing to and fro, between
the pieces, in the promenades. The house presented,
as before, that appearance in which reality forsook
it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The
audience supported the notion of its unreaUty by
having exactly the character of the former audiences,
and impressed you, despite its restlessness and inces-
sant agitation, with the feeling that it had remained
there from the first day, and woidd always continue
there ; and it was only in wandering upon its bor-
ders through the promenades, that you regained
possession of facts concerning it. In no other way
was its vastness more observable than in the perfect
indifference of persons one to another. Each found
himself, as it were, in a solitude ; and, sequestered
in that wilderness of strangers, each was freed of his
bashfiilness and trepidation. Young people lounged
at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the
upper promenades ; and in this seclusion I saw such
betrayals of tenderness as melt the heart of the
traveller on our desolate railway trains, — Fellows
moving to and fro or standing, careless of other eyes.

216 STJBUBBAN SKETCHES.

with their arms around the waists of their Grirls.
These were, of course, people who had only attained
a certain grade of civilization, and were not charac-
teristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthy of notice
except as expressions of its unconsciousness. I
fancied that I saw a number of their class outside
listening to the address of the agent of a patent hni-
ment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neu-
ralgia and headache, — if used in the right spirit.
" For," said the orator, " we like to cure people who
treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say,
' What is there about that man ? — some magnetism
or electricity.' And the other day at New Britain,
Connecticut, a yoimg man he come up to the car-
riage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it
didn't have the least effect upon him." There
seemed reason in this, and it produced a visible sen-
sation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheep-
ishly at each other.

Why will the yoimg man with long hair force
himself at this point into a history, which is striving
to devote itself to graver interests ? There he stood
with the other people, gazing up at the gay line of
streamers on the summit of the Cohseura, and taking
in the Anvil Chorus with the rest, — a young man
well-enough dressed, and of a pretty sensible face,
with his long black locks falling from under his cyl-
inder hat, and covering his shoulders. What awful
spell was on him, obliging him to make that figure
before his fellow-creatures ? He had nothing to
sell ; he was not, apparently, an advertisement of

JUBILEE DAYS. 217

any kind. Was he in the performance of a vow ?
Was he in his right mind ? For shame ! a person
may wear his hair long if he will. But why not,
then, in a top-knot ? This young man's long hair
was not in keeping with his frock-coat and his cylin-
der hat, and he had not at all the excuse of the old
gentleman who sold salve in the costume of Wash-
ington's time ; one could not take pleasure in him as
i];i the negro advertiser, who paraded the grounds in
a costume compounded of a consular chapeau bras
and a fox-hunter's top-boots — the American diplo-
matic uniform of the future — and offered every one
a printed billet ; he had not even the attraction of
the cabalistic herald of Hunkidori. Who was he ?
what was he ? why was he ? The mind played for-
ever around these questions in a maze of hopeless
conjecture.

Had all those quacks and peddlers been bawling
ever since Tuesday to the same hsteners ? Had all
those swings and whirligigs incessantly performed
their rounds ? The cow that gave milk from the
top of her back, had she never changed her small
circle of admirers, or ceased her flow? And the
gentleman who sat in the chair of his own balance,
how much did he weigh by this time ? One could
scarcely rid one's self of the illusion of perpetuity
concerning these things, and I could not believe
that, if I went back to .the Coliseum grounds at any
ftiture time, I should not behold all that vast machin-
ery in motion.

It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil,

218 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

men pursuing the ordinary business of their lives,
and one was strangely rescued and consoled by the
spectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the brick-
layers at work on a first-class swell-front residence
in the very heart of the city of tents and booths.
Even the locomotive, being associated with quieter
days and scenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro
upon the Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic
sentiment in the listener, and sending its note,
ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar,
seemed to " babble of green fields." And at last
it wooed us away, and the Jubilee was again swal-
lowed up by night.

There was yet another Jubilee Day, on the morn-
ing of which the thousands of public-school children
clustered in gauzy pink and white in the place of the
mighty chorus, while the Coliseum swarmed once
more with people who listened to those shrill, sweet
pipes blending in unison ; but I leave the reader to
imagine what he will about it. A week later, after
all was over, I was minded to walk down towards the
Coliseum, and behold it in its desertion. The city
streets were restored to their wonted summer-after-
noon tranquillity ; the Public Garden presented its
customary phases of two people sitting under a tree
and talking intimately together on some theme of
commoli interest, —

" Beei, bees, was it your bydromel? " —

of the swans sailing in ftill view upon the little lake ;
of half a dozen idlers hanging upon the bridge to
look at them ; of children gayly dotting the paths

JUBILEE DAYS. 219

here and there ; and, to heighten the peacefdhiess
of the effect, a pretty, pale invalid lady sat, half in
shade and half in sun, reading in an easy-chair. Far
down the broad avenue a single horse-car tinkled
slowly ; on the steps of one of the mansions charm-
ing little girls stood in a picturesque group full of
the bright color which abormds in the lovely dresses
of this time. As I drew near the Coliseum, I could
perceive the desolation which ha.d fallen upon the
festival scene ; the white tents were gone ; the place
where the world-renowned cloggist gave her serio-
comic dances was as lonely and silent as the site of
Carthage ; in the middle distance two men were dis-
mantling a motionless whirligig ; the hut for the sale
of French soups was closed ; farther away, a solitary
policeman moved gloomily across the deserted spaces,
showing his dark-blue figure against the sky. The
vast fabric of the Coliseum reared itself, hushed and
deserted within and without ; and a boy in his shirt-
sleeves pressed his nose against one of the painted
window-panes in the vain effort to behold the noth-
ing inside. But sadder than this loneliness sur-
rounding the CoKseum, sadder than the festooned
and knotted banners that drooped funereally upon
its fa9ade, was the fact that some of those luckless
refreshment-saloons were still open, displaying viands
as little edible now as carnival confetti. It was as
if the proprietors, in an unavailing remorse, had con-
demned themselves to spend the rest of their days
there, and, slowly consuming their own cake and
pop-corn, washed down with their own soda-water
and lemonade, to perish of dyspepsia and despair.

FLITTING.

I WOULD not willingly repose upon the friendship
of a man whose local attachments are weak. I
should not demand of my intimate that he have a
yearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the
scenes of his own boyhood ; that is not in American
nature ; on the contrary, he is but a poor creature who
does not hate the village where he was bom ; yet a
sentunent for the place where one has lived two or
three years, the hotel where one has spent a week,
the sleeping car in which one has ridden from Al-
bany to Buffalo, — so much I should think it well to
exact from my friend in proof of that sensibility and
constancy without which true friendship does not
exist. So much I am ready to yield on my own
part to a friend's demand, and I profess to have all
the possible regrets for Benicia Street, now I have
left it. Over its deficiencies I cast a veil of decent
obHvion, and shall always try to look upon its worthy
and consoling aspects, which were far the more nu-
merous. It was never otherwise, I imagine, than an
ideal region in very great measure ; and if the read-
er whom I have sometimes seemed to direct thither,
should seek it out, he would hardly find my Benicia
Street by the city sign-board. Yet this is not wholly
because it was an ideal locality, but because much of

FLITTING. 221

its reality has now become merely historical, a portion
of the tragical poetry of the past. Many of the
vacant lots abutting upon Benicia and the intersect-
ing streets flourished up, during the four years we
knew itj into fresh-painted wooden houses, and the
time came to be when one might have looked in
vain for the abandoned hoop-skirts which used to
decorate the desirable building-sites. The lessening
pasturage also reduced the herds which formerly fed
in the vicinity, and at last we caught the tinkle
of the cow-bells only as the cattle were driven past
to remoter meadows. And one autumn afternoon
two laborers, hired by the city, came and threw up
an earthwork on the opposite side of the street,
which they said was a sidewalk, and would add to
the value of property in the neighborhood. Not
being dressed with coal-ashes, however, during the
winter, the sidewalk vanished next summer under
a growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values
with it, and it is now an even question whether this
monument of municipal grandeur will finally be held
by Art or resumed by Nature, — who indeed has a
perpetual motherly longing for her own, and may be
seen in all outlying and suburban places, pathetically
striving to steal back any neglected bits of ground
and conceal them under her skirts of tattered and
shabby verdure. But whatever is the event of this
contest, and whatever the other changes wrought in
the locality, it has not yet been quite stripped of
the characteristic charms which first took our hearts,
and which have been duly celebrated in these pages.

222 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

When the new house was chosen, we made prep-
arations to leave the old one, but preparations so grad-
ual, that, if we had cared much more than we did,
we might have suffered greatly by the prolongation
of the agony. We proposed to ourselves fo escape
the miseries of moving by transferring the contents
of one room at a time, and if we did not laugh incred-
ulously at people who said we had better have it
over at once and be done with it, it was because we
respected their feelings, and not because we believed
them. We took up one carpet after another ; one
wall after another we stripped of its pictures ; we
sent away all the books to begin with ; and by this
subtle and ingenious process, we reduced ourselves
to the discomfort of living in no house at all, as it
were, and of being at home in neither one place nor
the other. Yet the logic of our scheme remained
perfect ; and I do not regret its failure in practice, for
if we had been ever so loath to quit the old house, its
inhospitable barrenness would finally have hurried us
forth. In fact, does not life itself in some such fashion
dismantle its tenement until it is at last forced out
of the uninhabitable place ? Are not the poor little
comforts and pleasures and ornaments removed one
by one, till life, if it would be saved, must go too ?
We took a lesson from the teachings of mortality,
which are so rarely heeded, and we lingered over our
moving. We made the process so gradual, indeed,
that I do not feel myself all gone yet from the famil-
iar work-room, and for aught I can say, I still write
there ; and as to the guest-chamber, it is so densely

FLITTING, 223

peopled by those it has lodged that it will never quite
be emptied of them. Friends also are yet in the
habit of calling in the parlor, and talking with us ;
and will the children never come off the stairs?
Does life, our high exemplar, leave so much behind
as we did ? Is this what fills the world with ghosts?

In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt half so
much as the sight of the little girl packing her doll's
things for removal. The trousseaux of all those
elegant creatures, the wooden, the waxen, the bis-
cuit, the india-rubber, were carefully assorted, and
arranged in various small drawers and boxes ; their
house was thoughtfully put in order and locked for
transportation; their innumerable broken sets of
dishes were packed in paper and set out upon the
floor, a heart-breaking little basketful. Nothing real
in this world is so affecting as some image of real-
ity, and this travesty of our own flitting was almost
intolerable. I will not pretend to sentiment about
anything else, for everything else had in it the ele-
ment of self-support belonging to all actual 'afflic-
tions. When the day of moving finally came, and
the furniture wagon, which ought to have been only
a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up
at our door, our hearts were of a Neronian hardness.

" Were I Diogenes," says wrathful Charles Lamb
in one of his letters, " I would not move out of a
kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had noth-
ing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret."
I fancy this loathing of the transitionary state came
in great part fi:om the rude and elemental nature of

224 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

the means of moving in Lamb's day. In our own
time, in Charlesbridge at least, everything is so per-
fectly contrived, that it is in some ways a pleasant
excitement to move ; though I do not commend the
diversion to any but people of entire leisure, for it
cannot be denied that it is, at any rate, an interrup-
tion to work. But little is broken, little is defaced,
nothing is heedlessly outraged or put to shame. Of
course there are in every house certain objects of
comfort and even ornament which in a state of repose
derive a sort of dignity from being cracked, or
scratched, or organically debilitated, and give an
idea of ancestral possession and of long descent to
the actual owner ; and you must not hope that this
venerable quality will survive their public exposure
upon the fumitnre wagon. There it instantly per-
ishes, like the consequence of some country notable
huddled and hustled about in the graceless and igno-
rant tumult of a great city. To tell the truth, the
number of things that turn shabby under the ordeal
of moving strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty
to the heart which, loving all manner of makeshifts,
is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you
feel degraded by the spectacle of that forlomness,
and if you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak out
of association with it in the mind of the passer-by ;
you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exi-
gency obhges you to go back and forth between the
old house and the new, you seek . obscure by-ways
remote from the great street down which the wagon
flaunts your ruin and decay, and time your arrivals

PUTTING. 225

and departures so as to have the air of merely drop-
ping in at either place. This consoles you ; but it
deceives no one ; for the man who is moving is un-
mistakably stamped with transition.

Yet the momentary ecUpse of these things is not
the worst. It is momentary ; for if you will but
plant them in kindly comers and favorable exposures
of the new house, a mould of respectability will
gradually overspread them again, and they will once
more account for their presence by the air of having
been a long time in the family ; but there is danger
that in the first moments of mortification you wiU be
tempted to replace them with new and costly articles.
Even the best of the old things are nothing to boast
of in the hard, unpitying light to which they are
exposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of extrav-
agance is evoked in the least profuse. Because of
this fact alone I should not commend the diversion
of moving save to people of very ample means as
well as perfect leisure ; there are more reasons than
the misery of flitting why the dweller in the kilder-
kin should not covet the hogshead reeking of claret.

But the grosser misery of moving is, as I have
hinted, vastly mitigated by modem science, and what
remains of it one may use himself to with no tre-
mendous efibrt. I have found that in the dentist's
chair, — that ironically luxurious seat, cushioned in
satirical suggestion of impossible repose, — after a
certain initial period of clawing, filing, scraping, and
punching, one's nerves accommodate themselves to
the torment, and one takes almost an objective in-

15

226 STJBUBBAN SKETCHES.

terest in the operation of tooth-filling ; and in like ,
manner after two or three wagon-loads of your house-
hold stuff have passed down the public street, and
all your morbid associations with them have beeir
desecrated, you begin almost to like it. Yet I can-
not regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emo-
tion, and I do not counsel my reader to mount himself
upon the wagon and ride to and fro even once, for
afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will
grieve him.

Of course, I meant to imply by this that' moving
sometimes comes to an end, though it is not easy to
believe so while moving. The time really arrives
when you sit down in your new house, and amid
whatever disorder take your first meal there. This
meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea, that loathly
repast of butter and toast, and some kind of cake,
with which the soul of the early-dining American is
daily cast down between the hours of six and seven
in the evening; and instinctively you compare it with
the last meal you took in your old house, seeking in
vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than
that. At any rate that was not at all the meal which
the last meal in any house which has been a home
ought to be in fiict, and is in books. It was hurriedly
cooked; it was served upon fugitive and irregular
crockery ; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder,
with the professional movers waiting for the table
outside the dining-room. It ought to have been an
act of serious devotion ; it was nothing but an ex-
piation. It should have been a solemn commemo-

FLITTING. 227

ration of all past dinners in the place, an invocation
to their pleasant apparitions. But I, for mj part,
could not recall these at all, though now I think of
them with the requisite pathos, and I know they
were perfectly worthy of rememhrance. I salute
mournfully the companies that have sat down at
dinner there, for they are sadly scattered now ; some
beyond seas, some beyond the narrow gulf, so impass-
ably deeper to our longing and tenderness than the
seas. But more sadly still I hail the host himself,
and desire to know of him if literature was not
somehow a gayer science in those days, and if his
peculiar kind of drolling had not rather more heart
in it then. In an odd, not quite expressible fashion,
something of him seems dispersed abroad and per-
ished in the guests he loved. I trust, of course,
that all will be restored to him when he turns — as
every man past thirty feels he may when he likes,
and has the time — and resumes his youth. Or if
this feeling is only a part of the great tacit promise
of eternity, I am all the more certain of his getting
back his losses.

I say that now these apposite reflections occur to
me with a sufficient ease, but that upon the true
occasion for them they were absent. So, too, at
the first meal in the new house, there was none of
that desirable sense of setting up a family altar, but
a calamitous impression of irretrievable upheaval,
in honor of which sackcloth and ashes seemed the
only wear. Yet even the next day the Lares and
Penates had regained something of their wonted

228 SUBURBAN SKETCHES.

cheerftdness, and life had begun again with the first
breakfast. In &ct, I found myself already so firmly
established that, meeting the iiimiture cart which
had moved me the day before, I had the face to ask
the driver whom they were turning out of house and
home, as if my own flitting were a memory of the
far-off past.

Not that I think the professional mover expects to
be addressed in a joking mood. I have a fancy that
he cultivates a serious spirit himself, in which he
finds it easy to sympathize with any melancholy on
the part of the moving family. There is a slight
flavor of undertaking in his manner, which is
nevertheless fiill of a subdued firmness very consol-
ing and supporting; though the life that he leads
must be a troubled and uncheerfiil one, trying
alike to the muscles and the nerves. How often
must he have been charged by anxious and fluttered
ladies to be very carefiil of that basket of china, and
those vases ! How often must he have been vexed
by the ignorant terrors of gentlemen asking if he
thinks that the library-table, poised upon the top of
tiis load, will hold! His planning is not infalHble, and
when he breaks something uncommonly precious,
what does a man of his sensibihty do? Is the
demolition of old homes really distressing to him, or
is he inwardly buoyed up by hopes of other and bet-
ter homes for the people he moveS ? Can there be
any ideal of moving? Does he, perhaps, feel a pride
in an artftdly constructed load, and has he something
like an artist's pang in unloading it? Is there a

FLITTING. 229

choice in femilies to be moved, and are some worse
or better than others ? Next to the lawyer and the
doctor, it appears to me that the professional mover
holds the most confidential relations towards his fel-
low-men. He is let into all manner of little domestic
secrets and subterfiiges ; I dare say he knows where
half the people in town keep their skeleton, and
what manner of skeleton it is. As for me, when I
saw him making towards a certain closet door, I
planted myself firmly against it. He smiled intelli-
gence ; he knew the skeleton was there, and that it
would be carried to the new house after dark.

I began by saying that I shoidd wish my iriend to
have some sort of local attachment ; but I suppose
it must be owned that this sentiment, like pity, and
the modem love-passion, is a thing so largely pro-
duced by culture that nature seems to have little or
nothing to do with it. The first men were homeless
wanderers ; the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and shifted
their place to follow the pasturage, without a sigh ;
and for children — the pre-historic, the antique peo-
ple, of our day — moving is a rapture. The last
dinner in the old house, the first tea in the new, so
dolefiil to their elders, are partaken of by them with
joyous riot. Their shrill trebles echo gleeftiUy from
the naked walls and floors ; they race up and down
the carpetless stairs; they menace the dislocated
mirrors and crockery ; through all the chambers of
desolation they frolic with a gayety indomitable
save by bodily exhaustion. If the reader is of a
moving family, — and so he is as he is an Ameri-

230 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. '

can, — he can recall the zest he found during child-
hood in the moving which had for his elders —
poor victims of a factitious and conventional senti-
ment ! — only the salt and bitterness of tears. His
spirits never fell till the carpets were down ; no sor-
row touched him till order returned ; if Heaven so
blessed him that his bed was made upon the floor for
one night, the angels visited his dreams. Why,
then, is the mature soul, however sincere and hum-
ble, not only grieved but mortified by flitting?
Why cannot one move without feeling the great
public eye fixed in pitying contempt upon him ? This
sense of abasement seems to be something quite
inseparable from the act, which is often laudable,
and in every way wise and desirable ; and he whom
it has afflicted is the first to turn, after his own estab-
lishment, and look with scornful compassion upon
the overflowing furniture wagon as it passes. But
I imagine that Abraham's neighbors, when he struck
his tent, and packed his parlor and kitchen furniture
upon his camels, and started off with Mrs. Sarah
to seek a new camping-ground, did not smile at the
procession, or find it worthy of ridicule or lament.
Nor did Abraham, once settled, and reposing in the
cool of the evening at the door of his tent, gaze
sarcastically upon the moving of any of his brother
patriarchs.

To some such philosophical serenity we shall also
return, I suppose, when we have wisely theorized
life in our climate, and shall all have become nomads
once more, following June and October up and down

IXITTIN6. 231

and across the continent, and not suffering the full
malice of the winter and summer anjvrhere. But
as yet, the derision that attaches to moving attends
even the goer-out of town, and the man of many
trunks and a retinue of linen-suited womankind is a
pitiable and despicable object to all the other passen-
gers at the railroad station and on the steamboat
wharf.

This is but one of many ways in which mere
tradition oppresses us. I protest that as moving
is now managed in Charlesbridge, there is hardly
any reason why the master or mistress of the house-
hold should put hand to anything ; but it is a tradi-
tion that they shall dress themselves in their worst,
as for heavy work, and shall go about very shabby
for at least a day before and a day after the transi-
tion. It is a kind of sacrifice, I suppose, to a ven-
erable ideal ; and I would never be the first to omit
it. In others I observe that this vacant and cere-
monious zeal is in proportion to an incapacity to do
anything that happens really to be required ; and I
believe that the truly sage person would devote
moving-day to paying visits of ceremony in his finest
clothes.

As to the house which one has left, I think it
would be preferable to have it occupied as soon as
possible after one's flitting. Pilgrimages to the
iismanded shrine are certainly to be avoided by the
friend of cheerfulness. A day's absence and empti-
ness wholly change its character, though the famil-
iarity continues, with a ghastly difference, as in the

232 SUBUBBAN SKETCHES.

beloved face that the life has left. It is not at all
the vacant house it was when you came first to look
at it : for then hopes peopled it, and now memories.
In that golden prime you had long been boarding,
and any place in which you could keep house seemed
utterly desirable. How distinctly you recall that wet
day, or that fair day, on which you went through it
and decided that this should be the guest chamber
and that the family room, and what could be done
with the little back attic in a pinch ! The children
could play in the dining-room ; and to be sure the
parlor was rather small if you wanted to have com-
pany; but then, who would ever want to give a
party ? and besides, the pump in the kitchen was a
compensation for anything. How lightly the dumb
waiter ran up and down, —

" Qnal piuma al vento ! "

you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then esti-
mates of the number of yards of carpeting ; and
how you could easily save the cost from the differ-
ence between boarding and house-keeping. Adieu,
Mrs. Brown ! henceforth let your " desirable apart-
ments, en suite or single, furnished or unfiimished,
to gentlemen only ! " — this married pair is about to
escape forever from your extortions.

Well, if the years passed without making us sad-
der, should we be much the wiser for their going ?
Now you know, little couple, that there are extor-
tions in this wicked world beside Mrs. Brown's ; and
some other things. But if you go into the empty

FUTTIKG. 233

house that was lately your home, you will not, I be-
lieve, be haunted by these sordid disappointments,
for the place should evoke other regrets and medita-
tions. Truly, though the great fear has not come
upon you here, in this room you may have known
moments when it seemed very near, and when the '
quick, fevered breathings of the little one timed
your own heart-beats. To that door, with many
other missives of joy and pain, came haply the dis-
patch which hurried you off to face your greatest sor-
row — came by night, like a voice of God, speaking
and warning, and making all your work idle and
your aims foolish. These walls have answered, how
many times, to your laughter ; they have had friendly
ears for the trouble that seemed to grow by utter-
ance. Tou have sat upon the threshold so many
sTimmer days ; so many winter mornings you have
seen the snows drifted high about it ; so often your
step has been light and heavy upon it. There is
the study, where your magnificent performances
were planned, and your exceeding small performances
were achieved ; hither you hurried with the first crit-
icism of your first book, and read it with the rapture
that nothing but a love-letter and a favorable review
can awaken. Out there is the well-known humble
prospect, that was commonly but a vista into dream-
land ; on the other hand is the pretty grove, — its
/eaves now a little painted with the autumn, and fal-
tering to their fall.

Yes, the place must always be sacred, but pain-
fiiUy sacred ; and I say again one should not go near

234 SUBUBBAK SKETCHES.

it unless as a penance. If the reader will suffer me
the confidence, I will own that there is always a pang
in the past which is more than any pleasure it can
give, and I believe that he, if he were perfectly hon-
est, — as Heaven forbid I or any one should be, —
' would also confess as much. There is no house to
which one would return, having left it, though it
were the hogshead out of which one had moved into
a kilderkin ; for those associations whose perishing
leaves us free, and preserves to us what little youth
we have, were otherwise perpetuated to our burden
and bondage. Let some one else, who has also es-
caped from his past, have your old house ; he will
find it new and untroubled by memories, while you,
under another roof, enjoy a present that borders only
upon the friture.