Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

While I worked and Lydia entertained we were waltzing like the wind down to ruin. No use to cry, "Ho! great gods! Hilloa! you're wanted here!" On we went.

Worrying over pecuniary affairs gradually sapped my mind. To lose one's eyes or all one's relations, or to be bitten by a mad dog, will not unhinge the brain so completely as pecuniary anxiety. My paragraphs, spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my post on the Times. I became the collector on commission of certain rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicago tenements should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none; therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in Nathan's service.

One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you. At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is well."

In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English traveller—"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something—who had a long, silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.

That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never hit a clam?" asked he.

"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.

"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about in livery-rigs everywhere—sure sign of prosperity."

"Your people are not out," I said.

"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."

"They can't get work," said I.

"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: that I know" said the old man.

"Some are sick."

"They are well enough to walk three miles to a brewery after a free drink."

"Some are too young to work."

"Hah! what's the use of having a parcel of young ones to be poor relations to the rest of the world?" asked he.

"Some are positively starving," said I.

"What of that? You have to let them starve. Five hundred thousand starved in India last year, a country overrun with sacred snakes and animals of all sorts that they might have eaten. Three millions starved in China, and they tore up their English railway, the only thing that could save them. What are you going to do about it? Starving! Bet they are wallowing in the theatre every night," said Nathan.

"The theatre with Lawrence Barrett! I wish they might see anything so elevating. Perhaps Othello might make some impression on them, such a stupendous temperance lecture it is!" I groaned.

"If you would leave the theatre alone you wouldn't be quite so short as you are now," asserted Uncle Nate, almost popping open with contempt.

"'Short,' man! 'Short' in your throat!" shouted I, forgetting myself.

"Yes, short; and it's my opinion you've shorted me in this business."

I could not kick our uncle out of his premises, so I got out myself, not to return; and I left in debt to him as well as to the rest of the world. I went homeward. Though it was August, a cold wind blew from the lake, whipping the large, flapping leaves of the castor-bean plants in the front yards to rags. I quaffed the lake in the wet wind. "No wonder," I thought, "we're three parts water: our world is." A young fellow on the street-car platform smoked a cigar that smelled like pigweed, cabbage-stalks and other garden rubbish burning, and made me sick. He enjoyed it, though: in fact, all, including the street-car driver himself, were on that day more than usually engaged in the intense enjoyment of being Chicagoans. All but me, miserable. The very windows and pavements of our streets, being clean and cold, sent a chill to my bones.

When I reached home Lydia was pinning on her habergeon, her neck-armor of ribbons and lace, before the mirror. "What is this?" I asked, pointing to the suspicious note, still pinned to the cushion.

"That's the note that has to be found in my room in the play of Lost in London," she answered, turning the great lamps of her eyes on mine.

As I had nothing to say to this, I went and lay down on the sofa before the parlor-fire. Though a grate in January is a poor affair—I never knew any human being who really depended on one in winter to speak in praise of it—on a cool August day it is delicious. I fell into a warm doze before the fire, then into a series of agreeable naps. When Lydia said supper was ready I did not want any, and at bedtime I was too stiff to move easily.

After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing. Luxurious indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar—a satisfaction in seeing the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,

  While day sank or mounted higher,  The light, aërial gallery, golden railed,  Burn like a fringe of fire

on some remote palace of the city. These and other sensations of malarial fever occupied me for a while. In half dreams I then enjoyed the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned. Light diet and keeping quiet—which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this fever—cured me. I came forth looking like a swairth, one of those words marked "obs." in the dictionary—means phantom of a person about to die. It ought to be revived; so here goes—swairth.

Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.

I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind: I had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made up.

"Well, Lydia," said I, "you wanted to manage: you were bound to wear the breeches. As you make your pants, so you must sit in them."

"You awful man!" said she.

"Now I will manage," said I.

"Indeed! Nothing would please me better," said she.

"I will sell our house and all that's in it, and get out of debt," said I.

"You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags," she exclaimed.

"We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting Class. I shall be of the first class. As to clothes, they are despicable," I replied.

"People who despise clothes can't get any."

"Well, I've done all I'm going to do toward developing the West, which consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see."

When an able woman submits she submits completely. Lydia put our house in order. I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale. I have not been a paragraphist for nothing: the sale was a success. I paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my future poor. I started in again on the Times' city force. To board I hate: it's a chicken's life—roosting on a perch, coming down to eat and then going back to roost. So I got a little domicile in "The Patch." When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been scrubbed emit peculiar odors.

"It smells poor-folksy here," says Lydia.

"All the better!" say I.

                         —MARY DEAN.

SHORT STUDIES IN THE PICTURESQUE

Although our American climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests, in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland landscape seem tame in comparison. The rapid changes of temperature in summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge, irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented towers and "looming bastions fringed with fire."

  Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,    Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,  Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain    And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.

The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged study. I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature. Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape, "hatchelled" on the sky in minute lines and limnings. Now the sky looks like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there through tender masses of silver frosting. The skies of the New England coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies of the interior. I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I once witnessed in the Ohio Valley. It lasted but a few moments, but what a spectacle! The setting sun was throwing his golden light over the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron. All along the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantasmagoria of splendor, "the magic-lantern of Nature"! What a rich contrast of color!—the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers. I felt assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in The Scarlet Letter and in Oldport Days can hardly be appreciated to the full by those who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast. Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled, grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is. It is a strange je ne sais quoi that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most enchanting and varied scenery—river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse, hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite.

A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again into its sinuous bed. This water was as fickle and wanton and many-mooded as a coquettish girl. Now its translucent glassy surface is unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored. I look out again, and the face of the water is working with rage under the lashing of the wind: at the same time its face seems white with fear, and its ghostly arms are tossing, now in defiance and now in piteous appeal. But now, as I gaze, the winds in their uncouth gambols tear a huge rent in the cloud-tent they had raised over the earth, and in the sweet blue beyond appears the calm and smiling face of the sun. Before its glance the wind-phantoms slink away in fear and the now quiet streamlet smiles through its tears.

The stiff formality and the ridiculous solemnity of the old Puritan times still linger about these secluded New England hamlets. But each winter a huge Christmas tree is set up in the church of the village I have mentioned, and loaded with presents. The winter I was there I went to see the distribution. Recollecting the delightful Christmas days of my own childhood, I was anticipating great pleasure. Of course I was going to look in on a scene of childish joy, of shouting and laughing, and eating of candy and pop-corn in unlimited quantities. Memories of the stories of Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers were floating through my mind as I crunched the crisp snow under my feet on my way to the church. I remembered the rapture of those Christmas mornings at home, when we children stole down stairs by candlelight to the warm room filled with the aromatic perfume of the Christmas tree, that stood there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus—Noah's arks, mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance. Ah, the memory of our childhood's hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up in our nets some magic colored fish? Well, I reached the church. The children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness. Another followed. "Very well, gentlemen," thought I, "but now please to retire and give up the field to these children." But no. The superintendent of the Sunday-school now advanced: the children marched up one by one, as their names were called, and received their presents from him. Some of them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked as if they were going to their execution. When all was done the meeting was dismissed!

Sauntering through the streets of this village, and making note of the quaint idiosyncrasies and irregularities of character and manner displayed by its humbler folk, I thought of the sentiment which Thoreau so exquisitely expresses in his Week: "The forms of beauty fall naturally around him who is in the performance of his proper work, as the curled shavings drop from the plane and borings cluster round the auger." Picturesqueness characterizes the New England white laborer, as it does the Southern black laborer: especially is this true of those who have emigrated from Europe when of adult age, and have been unable to lay aside the picturesque features of their Old-World life.

One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of this class: he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has ever been my fortune to meet. About dusk I found myself some distance away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells. A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky, that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and a kind of terror—that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always excites in the mind.

I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me, and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk, especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our long financial depression. However, I decided to go on. Several overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one of them. A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings. The cabin was considerably smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the overhanging bank of the river. No human being was visible at first. But presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior of the cabin. I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer and beard the old lion in his lair. But on his inviting me to come in I went up to the door. It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech that led him to say "Come in," for it would hardly have been possible to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting by a large rusty stove right over against the door. He placed a bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon. There was no window in the cabin. Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with straw which served as a bed.

And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard reached to the middle of his breast—

  His beard a foot before him, and his hair  A yard behind.

His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entrance might be had to the inner man. The eyes that looked out from this thicket of hair had not that hard, dangerous, angry look that experience of such persons had taught me to expect, but they expressed loneliness. He told of the high tides of the month of January in a certain year, when the water rose so as to enter his cabin and ponderous cakes of ice were knocking and grinding against its sides in the night. We talked of fish. He spoke of fyke-nets and drag-nets and warp-lines, and of eel-spearing through the ice. He took especial delight in telling me how the snow in winter was swept away from his door in a clean circle by the broom of some friendly wind. "It is the wind that does it," said he with touching naïveté. It almost seemed to the poor old man's lonely heart like a special favor on the part of the wind, like a tender feeling and relenting on the part of the icy-hearted winter wind for him in his solitude and sadness as he lay there cast out on the desolate shore of the world, deformed and shattered in health—

  Gleich einer Leiche  Die grollend ausgeworfen das Meer—  "Like a corpse which the bellowing sea  has cast out."

Strange life! O utter barrenness of existence! A pipe, a fire, fish, rags and a bed of straw. God pity thee! God pity thee, thou poor stricken deer! Take heart, man, take heart! Be brave, and dash away the bitter tear. Look up from the lowly cabin-door into the solemn night with its golden-burning stars, and even the loosened harp-strings of thy shattered old frame will vibrate and tremble to the eternal melodies that thrill through the mystic All: "God is in his heaven."

Dickens and Hawthorne have each written of canal-life in America, the one in a satirico-humorous way, the other sympathetically. People side with one or the other according as their disposition is active and restless or indolent and epicurean. I fight under the banner of Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a poetic mind, but was drawn from Nature, every bit of it.

The first and most novel sensation I experienced was that of the quiet and seemingly mysterious gliding movement of the boat. Ever and anon we passed through a lock. How strange and thrilling the feeling, to stand on the deck and see yourself slowly sinking into the great mossy box, and then to see the great valves of the lock slowly open, disclosing what seemed a new land and fresh vistas of green landscape! It was like the opening of the gates of the future (I pleased myself with fancying) to my triumphant progress. Gate after gate swung back its ponderous valves: I was Habib advancing from isle to isle of the enchanted sea. I uttered the word of power, and the huge unwieldy gates of opposition swung back with sullen and unwilling deference, compelled to respect the talisman I held. But hark! Hear the sweet notes of the supper-horn floating through the cool gloom of twilight as the tired reapers trudge home with their grain-cradles swung over their shoulders. Listen to the tinkling mule-bells on the tow-path, see the bright crimson tassels of the bridles, and the gayly-decorated boats, their cabin-roofs adorned with pots of herbs and flowers.

As we glide down the canal, ever and anon we see some empty returning boat (called "light boat" in the technical canal phrase) rounding a curve before us, It comes nearer: the horses walk the same tow-path: how are the boats to pass without confusion? Ah, the riddle is solved. Our captain (who holds the helm while the boy, his assistant, is down in the cabin preparing supper) calls out suddenly, at the last moment, "Whoa!" The well-trained horses instantly stop; the momentum of the boat carries it on; the rope slackens, disappears in the water, except at the two ends; the approaching horses step over it, and the approaching boat glides over it. When the approaching "light boat" has passed nearly or entirely over the rope our captain shouts to his horses to go on: the rope tightens, and all is as before.

The parts of the canal lying between the locks are called "levels." On long levels we could often see one or two boats far ahead of us and going in the same direction. Nothing could be prettier than the thin blue streamer of wood-smoke trailing out from the stovepipe of the cabin-roof against the bright green of the foliage along the banks. It told us the cheery news that the fragrant coffee or tea was a-making in the cozy little cabin below. And now, when supper is done, the captain brings up his guitar and plays sweet plaintive airs as we glide through the quiet evening shadows. Night deepens: the stars come out one by one, and are reflected in the smooth dark water below in dreamy, dusky splendor. We brush the dew from the heavy foliage as we pass along. Lithe alders and heavy vines trail in the cool flood, and the fresh evening air is filled with grateful harvest-scents and the perfume of unseen flowers. And now our pretty painted lamp-board is fixed in its place in the bow. The bright lamp throws its rich golden splendor before us. The lamp is hid from us by the board which holds it. We stand behind in the dark, and watch the overhanging sprays of foliage making strange, grotesque shadows that move fantastically and sport and clutch and writhe like wanton fiends, while the solid banks of foliage themselves, reflected in the water below, look, one fancies, like hanging gardens in the weird world to which the water is but a window, and far, far down upon whose dusky floor the flowers are golden stars.