Around The Tea-Table Part 15

When two young people start out on life together with nothing but a determination to succeed, avoiding the invasion of each other's idiosyncrasies, not carrying the candle near the gunpowder, sympathetic with each other's employment, willing to live on small means till they get large facilities, paying as they go, taking life here as a discipline, with four eyes watching its perils, and with four hands fighting its battles, whatever others may say or do,--that is a royal marriage. It is so set down in the heavenly archives, and the orange blossoms shall wither on neither side the grave.

We deplore the fact that because of the fearful extravagances of modern society many of our best people conclude that they cannot possibly afford to marry.

We are getting a fearful crop of old bachelors. They swarm around us. They go through life lopsided. Half dressed, they sit round cold mornings, all a-s.h.i.+ver, sewing on b.u.t.tons and darning socks, and then go down to a long boarding-house table which is bounded on the north and south and east and west by the Great Sahara Desert. We do not pity them at all. May all their b.u.t.tons be off to-morrow morning! Why do they not set up a plain home of their own and come into the ark two and two?

The supporting of a wife is looked upon as a great horror. Why, dear friends, with right and healthy notions of time and eternity it is very easy to support a wife if she be of the kind worth supporting. If she be educated into false notions of refinement and have "young ladies'

inst.i.tutes" piled on her head till she be imbecile, you will never be able to support her. Everything depends on whether you take for your wife a woman or a doll-baby. Our opinion is that three-fourths the successful men of the day owe much of their prosperity to the wife's help. The load of life is so heavy it takes a team of two to draw it. The s.h.i.+p wants not only a captain, but a first mate. Society to-day, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, very much needs more royal marriages.

CHAPTER L.

THREE VISITS.

Yesterday was Sat.u.r.day to you, but it was Sunday to me. In other words, it was a day of rest. We cannot always be working. If you drive along in a deep rut, and then try to turn off, you are very apt to break the shafts. A skillful driver is careful not to get into a deep rut. You cannot always be keeping on in the same way. We must have times of leisure and recreation.

A great deal of Christian work amounts to nothing, from the fact that it is not prefaced and appendixed by recreation. Better take hold of a hammer and give one strong stroke and lay it down than to be all the time so f.a.gged out that we cannot move the hammer.

Well, yesterday being a day of rest to me, I made three visits in New York.

The first was to the Tombs--an inst.i.tution seemingly full now, a man or woman or boy at every wicket. A great congregation of burglars, thieves, pickpockets and murderers. For the most part, they are the clumsy villains of society; the nimble, spry ones get out of the way, and are not caught.

There are those who are agile as well as depraved in that dark place.

Stokes, representing the aristocracy of crime; Foster, the democracy of sin; and Rozensweig, the brute. Each cell a commentary upon the Scripture pa.s.sage, "The way of the transgressor is hard."

I was amazed to see that the youth are in the majority in that building. I said to the turnkey: "What a pity it is that that bright fellow is in here!" "Oh," he says, "these bright fellows keep us busy." I talked some with the boys, and they laughed; but there was a catch in the guffaw, as though the laughter on its way had stumbled over a groan. It was not a deep laugh and a laugh all over, as boys generally do when they are merry. These boys have had no chance. They have been in the school of crime all their days, and are now only taking their degree of "M.V."--master of villainy.

G.o.d hasten the time when our Sabbath-schools, instead of being flower-pots for a few choice children, shall gather up the peris.h.i.+ng rabble outside, like Ralph Wells' school in New York, and Father Hawley's school in Hartford, and John Wanamaker's school in Philadelphia! There is not much chance in our fas.h.i.+onable Sunday-schools for a boy out at the elbows. Many of our schools pride themselves on being gilt-edged; and when-we go out to fulfill the Saviour's command, "Feed my lambs," we look out chiefly for white fleeces. I like that school the best, which, in addition to the glorious gospel, carries soap and fine-tooth combs. G.o.d save the dying children of the street! I saw a child in the Tombs four years of age, and said, "What in the world can this little child be doing here?" They told me the father had been arrested and the child had to go with him. Allegory, parable, prophecy: "Where the father goes the child goes." Father inside the grates, and son outside waiting to get in.

All through the corridors of that prison I saw Scripture pa.s.sages: "I am the way of life;" "Believe in the Lord, and thou shalt be saved;" and like pa.s.sages. Who placed them there? The turnkey? No. The sheriff? No. They are marks left by the city missionary and Christian philanthropist in recognition of that gospel by which the world is to be regenerated or never saved at all.

I wish they would get some other name for that--the Tombs--for it is the cleanest prison I ever saw. But the great want of that prison and of all others is suns.h.i.+ne. G.o.d's light is a purifier. You cannot expect reformation where you brood over a man with perpetual midnight. Oh that some Howard or Elizabeth Fry would cry through all the dungeons of the earth, "Let there be light!" I never heard of anybody being brought to G.o.d or reformed through darkness. G.o.d Himself is light, and that which is most like G.o.d is most healthful and pure.

Saddened by this awful wreck of men and morals, we came along the corridors where the wives stood weeping at the wicket-door of their husbands, and parents over their lost children. It was a very sad place. There were some men I was surprised to find there--men whom I had seen in other places, in holy places, in consecrated places.

We came out into the sunlight after that, and found ourselves very soon in the art-gallery at Twenty-third street. That was my second visit. Mr.

Kensett, the great artist, recently died, and six hundred and fifty of his pictures are now on exhibition. In contrast with the dark prison scene, how beautiful the canvas! Mr. Kensett had an irresistible way of calling trees and rocks and waters into his pictures. He only beckoned and they came.

Once come, he pinioned them for ever. Why, that man could paint a breeze on the water, so it almost wet your face with the spray. So restful are his pictures you feel after seeing them as though for half a day you had been sprawled under a tree in July weather, summered through and through.

Thirty of such pictures he painted each year in one hundred and twenty days, and then died--quickly and unwarned, dropping his magician's wand, to be picked up never. I wondered if he was ready, and if the G.o.d whom he had often met amid the moss on the sea-cliffs and in the offing was the G.o.d who pardoned sin and by His grace saves painter and boor. The Lord bless the unappreciated artists; they do a glorious work for G.o.d and the world, but for the most part live in penury, and the brightest color on their palette is crimson with their own blood.

May the time hasten when the Frenchmen who put on canvas their Cupids poorly clad, and the Germans who hang up homely Dutch babies in the arms of the Virgin Mary and call them Madonnas, shall be overruled by the artists who, like Kensett, make their canvas a psalm of praise to the Lord of the winds and the waters!

I stepped across the way into the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation of New York, with its reading-rooms and library and gymnasium and bath-rooms, all means of grace--a place that proposes to charm young men from places of sin by making religion attractive. It is a palace for the Lord--the pride of New York, or ought to be; I do not believe it really is, but it ought to be. It is fifty churches with its arms of Christian usefulness stretched out toward the young men.

If a young man come in mentally worn out, it gives him dumb-bells, parallel bars and a bowling-alley with no rum at either end of it. If physically worsted, it rests him amid pictures and books and newspapers. If a young man come in wanting something for the soul, there are the Bible-cla.s.ses, prayer-meetings and preaching of the gospel.

Religion wears no monk's cowl in that place, no hair s.h.i.+rt, no spiked sandals, but the floor and the ceiling and the lounges and the tables and the cheerful attendants seem to say: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."

I never saw a more beautiful scene in any public building than on one of these bright sofas, fit for any parlor in New York, where lay a weary, plain, exhausted man resting--sound asleep.

Another triumph of Christianity that building is--a Christianity that is erecting lighthouses on all the coasts, and planting its batteries on every hill-top, and spreading its banquets all the world over.

Well, with these reflections I started for Brooklyn. It was just after six o'clock, and tired New York was going home. Street cars and ferries all crowded. Going home! Some to bright places; to be lovingly greeted and warmed and fed and rested. Others to places dark and uncomely; but as I sat down in my own home I could not help thinking of the three spectacles. I had seen during the day Sin, in its shame; Art, in its beauty; Religion, in its work of love. G.o.d give repentance to the first, wider appreciation to the second, and universal conquest to the third!

CHAPTER LI.

MANAHACHTANIENKS.

We should like to tell so many of our readers as have survived the p.r.o.nunciation of the above word that the Indians first called the site on which New York was built Manahachtanienks. The translation of it is, "The place where they all got drunk." Most uncomplimentary t.i.tle; We are glad that it has been changed; for though New York has several thousand unlicensed grogshops, we consider the name inappropriate, although, if intemperance continues to increase as rapidly for the next hundred years as during the last twenty years, the time will come when New York may appropriately take its old Indian nomenclature.

Old-time New York is being rapidly forgotten, and it may be well to revive some historical facts. At an expense of three thousand dollars a year men with guide-book in hand go through the pyramids of Egypt and the picture-galleries of Rome and the ruins of Pompeii, when they have never seen the strange and historical scenes at home.

We advise the people who live in Brooklyn, Jersey City and up-town New York to go on an exploration.

Go to No. 1 Broadway and remember that George Was.h.i.+ngton and Lord Cornwallis once lived there.

Go to the United States Treasury, on Wall Street, and remember that in front of it used to stand a pillory and a whipping-post.

In a building that stood where the United States Treasury stands, General Was.h.i.+ngton was installed as President. In the open balcony he stood with silver buckles and powdered hair, in dress of dark silk velvet. (People in those days dressed more than we moderns. Think of James Buchanan or General Grant inaugurated with hair and shoes fixed up like that!)

Go to the corner of Pearl and Broad streets, and remember that was the scene of Was.h.i.+ngton's farewell to the officers with whom he had been so long a.s.sociated.

Go to Ca.n.a.l street, and remember it was so called because it once was literally a ca.n.a.l.

The electric telegraph was born in the steeple of the old Dutch Church, now the New York post-office--that is, Benjamin Franklin made there his first experiments in electricity. When the other denominations charge the Dutch Church with being slow, they do not know that the world got its lightning out of one of its church steeples.

Was.h.i.+ngton Irving was born in William street, halfway between John and Fulton. "Knickerbocker" was considered very saucy; but if any man ever had a right to say mirthful things about New York, it was Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, who was born there. At the corner of Varick and Charlton streets was a house in which Was.h.i.+ngton, John Adams and Aaron Burr resided.

George Whitefield preached at the corner of Beekman and Na.s.sau streets.

But why particularize, when there is not a block or a house on the great thoroughfare which has not been the scene of a tragedy, a fortune ruined, a reputation sacrificed, an agony suffered or a soul lost?

CHAPTER LII.

A DIP IN THE SEA.

Shakespeare has been fiercely mauled by the critics for confusion of metaphor in speaking of taking up "arms against a sea of troubles." The smart fellows say, How could a man take "arms against a sea?" In other words, it is not possible to shoot the Pacific Ocean. But what Shakespeare suggests is, this jocund morning, being done all around the coast from Florida to Newfoundland, especial regiments going out from Cape May, Long Branch, East Hampton, Newport and Nahant; ten thousand bathers, with hands thrown into the air, "taking up arms against the sea." But the old giant has only to roll over once on his bed of seaweed, and all this attacking host are flung prostrate upon the beach.

The sensation of sea-bathing is about the same everywhere. First you have the work of putting on the appropriate dress, sometimes wet and chill from the previous bathing. You get into the garments cautiously, touching them at as few points as possible, your face askew, and with a swift draft of breath through your front teeth, punctuating the final lodgment of each sleeve and fold with a spasmodic "Oh!" Then, having placed your watch where no villainous straggler may be induced to examine it to see whether he can get to the depot in time for the next train, you issue forth ingloriously, your head down in consciousness that you are cutting a sorry figure before the world. Barefoot as a mendicant, your hair disheveled in the wind, the stripes of your clothes strongly suggestive of Sing Sing, your appearance a caricature of humankind, you wander up and down the beach a creature that the land is evidently trying to shake off and the sea is unwilling to take.