The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees Part 12

"... It rains very hard every day, but to-day I have been more quiet, and our darling has been so good, I have taken so much pleasure in being with him. When he smiles in his sleep, how it makes my heart beat! He has grown fat and very fair, and begins to play and spring. You will have much pleasure in seeing him again. He sends you many kisses. He bends his head toward me when he asks a kiss."

Both Madame Ossoli and her husband were very fearful as they embarked on the fated s.h.i.+p which was to take them to America. He had been cautioned by one who had told his fortune when a boy to beware of the sea, and his wife had long cherished a superst.i.tion that the year 1850 would be a marked epoch in her life. It is remarkable that in writing to a friend of her fear Madame Ossoli said: "I pray that if we are lost it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together."

They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, on the _Elizabeth_, a new merchant vessel, which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune soon began. The captain sickened and died of malignant smallpox, and after his burial at sea and a week's detention at Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the dread disease and was restored with difficulty. Yet a worse fate was to follow.

At noon of July 18, while they were off the coast of New Jersey, there was a gale, followed by a hurricane, which dashed the s.h.i.+p on that Fire Island Beach which has engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret Fuller and her husband were drowned with their child. The bodies of the parents were never recovered, but that of little Angelo was buried in a seaman's chest among the sandhills, from which it was later disinterred and brought to our own Mount Auburn by the relatives who had never seen the baby in life.

And there to-day in a little green grave rests the child of this great woman's great love.

THE OLD MANSE AND SOME OF ITS MOSSES

"The Old Manse," writes Hawthorne, in his charming introduction to the quaint stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse", "had never been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to a.s.sume the priestly character. It is awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written here!... Here it was, too, that Emerson wrote 'Nature;' for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the a.s.syrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moon-rise from the summit of our eastern hill."

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD MANSE, CONCORD, Ma.s.s.]

Emerson's residence in the Old Manse is to be accounted for by the fact that his grandfather was its first inhabitant. And it was while living there with his mother and kindred, before his second marriage in 1835, that he produced "Nature."

It is to the parson, the Reverend William Emerson, that we owe one of the most valuable Revolutionary doc.u.ments that have come down to us.

Soon after the young minister came to the old Manse (which was then the New Manse), he had occasion to make in his almanac this stirring entry:

"This morning, between one and two o'clock, we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to the number of eight hundred, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge, near to Inman's farm, and were at Lexington meeting-house half an hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and (as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was brought us first by Doctor Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walks and fences, arrived at Concord, at the time above mentioned; when several posts were immediately dispatched that, returning, confirmed the account of the regulars' arrival at Lexington and that they were on their way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company was preparing to receive them in the town. Captain Minot, who commanded them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.

"Scarcely had we formed before we saw the British troops at the distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing toward us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their numbers, but others, more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be equal to the enemy's by recruits from the neighbouring towns, that were continually coming in to our a.s.sistance. Accordingly we retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed sixty barrels flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the town-house, destroyed five hundred pounds of b.a.l.l.s, set a guard of one hundred men at the North Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Colonel Barrett, where they were in the expectation of finding a quant.i.ty of warlike stores. But these were happily secured just before their arrival, by transportation into the woods and other by-places.

"In the meantime the guard sent by the enemy to secure the pa.s.s at the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here be observed, by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the king's troops, as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet them.

"For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,--sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In the meantime, a party of our men (one hundred and fifty), took the back way through the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences, and buildings, ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat."[12]

Here ends the important chronicle, the best first-hand account we have of the battle of Concord. But for this alone the first resident of the Old Manse deserves our memory and thanks.

Mr. Emerson was succeeded at the Manse by a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar who left behind him a reputation for learning and sanct.i.ty which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most learned woman in the little Concord circle which Hawthorne soon after his marriage came to join.

Few New England villages have retained so much of the charm and peacefulness of country life as has Concord, and few dwellings in Concord have to-day so nearly the aspect they presented fifty years ago as does the Manse, where Hawthorne pa.s.sed three of the happiest years of his life.

In the "American Note-Book," there is a charming description of the pleasure the romancer and his young wife experienced in renovating and refurnis.h.i.+ng the old parsonage which, at the time of their going into it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been s.h.i.+veringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moons.h.i.+ne that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of ma.n.u.script discourses that stood in the garret.

"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.

"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour--although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning.

Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without wages."

The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given over to the Hawthorne pots and pans--in which the great Hawthorne himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"--the ghosts came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh pa.s.sed pleasant hours in the little parlour, Th.o.r.eau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the Concord circle.

Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and once when his wife was absent he resolved to pa.s.s the whole term of her visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With Th.o.r.eau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours they spent together boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Th.o.r.eau was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.

Of the beauties of the Concord River Hawthorne has written a few sentences that will live while the silver stream continues to flow: "It comes creeping softly through the mid-most privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet, while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hus.h.i.+ng one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the cl.u.s.tering foliage...."

Concerning the visitors attracted to Concord by the great original thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom look upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet are simply bores of a very intense character." A bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of flesh and blood," people, he humourously comments, who had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of metaphysical intercourse with the great philosopher.

It was while on the way home from his friend Emerson's one day that Hawthorne had that encounter with Margaret Fuller about which it is so pleasant to read because it serves to take away the taste of other less complimentary allusions to this lady to be found in Hawthorne's works:

"After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange t.i.tle which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that n.o.body had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man pa.s.sed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has pa.s.sed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy."

Nothing that Hawthorne has ever written of Concord is more to be cherished to-day than this description of a happy afternoon pa.s.sed by him in Sleepy Hollow talking with Margaret Fuller of "matters of high and low philosophy." For there are few parts of Concord to which visitors go more religiously than to the still old cemetery, where on the hill by Ridge Path Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, with the grave of Th.o.r.eau just behind him, and the grave of Emerson, his philosopher-friend, on the opposite side of the way. A great pine stands at the head of Hawthorne's last resting-place, and a huge unhewn block of pink marble is his formal monument.

Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it stands, be the romancer's most intimate relic, for it was here that he lived as a happy bridegroom, and here that his first child was born. And from this ancient dwelling it was that he drew the inspiration for what is perhaps the most curious book of tales in all American literature, a book of which another American master of prose[13] has said, "Hawthorne here did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country; another Wizard of the North, he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history, and summoned the great dead again to live and move among us."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: "Historic Towns of New England." G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote 13: Henry James.]

SALEM'S CHINESE G.o.d

Of the romantic figures which grace the history of New England in the nineteenth century, none is to be compared in dash and in all those other qualities that captivate the imagination with the figure of Frederick Townsend Ward, the Salem boy who won a generals.h.i.+p in the Chinese military service, suppressed the Tai-Ping rebellion, organised the "Ever-Victorious Army"--for whose exploits "Chinese" Gordon always gets credit in history--and died fighting at Ning Po for a nation of which he had become one, a fair daughter of which he had married, and by which he is to-day wors.h.i.+pped as a G.o.d. Very far certainly did this soldier of fortune wander in the thirty short years of his life from the peaceful red-brick Townsend mansion (now, alas! a steam bread bakery), at the corner of Derby and Carleton Streets, Salem, in which, in 1831, he was born.

This house was built by Ward's grandfather, Townsend, and during Frederick's boyhood was a charming place of the comfortable colonial sort, to which was joined a big, rambling, old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, and from the upper windows of which there was to be had a fascinating view of the broad-stretching sea. To the sea it was, therefore, that the lad naturally turned when, after ending his education at the Salem High School, he was unable to gain admission to the military academy at West Point and follow the soldier career in which it had always been his ambition to s.h.i.+ne. He s.h.i.+pped before the mast on an American vessel sailing from New York. Apparently even the hards.h.i.+ps of such a common sailor's lot could not dampen his ardour for adventure, for he made a number of voyages.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOWNSEND HOUSE, SALEM, Ma.s.s.]

At the outbreak of the Crimean war young Ward was in France, and, thinking that his long-looked for opportunity had come, he entered the French army for service against the Russians. Enlisting as a private, he soon, through the influence of friends, rose to be a lieutenant; but, becoming embroiled in a quarrel with his superior officer, he resigned his commission and returned to New York, without having seen service either in Russia or Turkey.

The next few years of the young man's life were pa.s.sed as a s.h.i.+p broker in New York City, but this work-a-day career soon became too humdrum, and he looked about for something that promised more adventures. He had not to look far. Colonel William Walker and his filibusters were about to start on the celebrated expedition against Nicaragua, and with them Ward determined to cast in his lot. Through the trial by fire which awaited the ill-fated expedition, he pa.s.sed unhurt, and escaping by some means or other its fatal termination, returned to New York.

California next attracted his attention, but here he met with no better success, and after a hand-to-mouth existence of a few months he turned again to seafaring life, and s.h.i.+pped for China as the mate of an American vessel. His arrival at Shanghai in 1859 was most opportune, for there the chance for which he had been longing awaited him.

The great Tai-Ping rebellion, that half-Christian, wholly fanatical uprising which devastated many flouris.h.i.+ng provinces, had, at this time, attained alarming proportions. Ching w.a.n.g, with a host of blood-crazed rebels, had swept over the country in the vicinity of Shanghai with fire and sword, and at the time of Ward's arrival these fanatics were within eighteen miles of the city.

The Chinese merchants had appealed in vain to the foreign consuls for a.s.sistance. The imperial government had made no plans for the preservation of Shanghai. So the wealthy merchants, fearing for their stores, resolved to take the matter into their own hands, and after a consultation of many days, offered a reward of two hundred thousand dollars to any body of foreigners who should drive the Tai-Pings from the city of Sungkiang.

Salem's soldier of fortune, Frederick T. Ward, responded at once to the opportunity thus offered. He accepted in June, 1860, the offer of Ta Kee, the mandarin at the head of the merchant body, and in less than a week--such was the magnetism of the man--had raised a body of one hundred foreign sailors, and, with an American by the name of Henry Burgevine as his lieutenant, had set out for Sungkiang. The men in Ward's company were desperadoes, for the most part, but they were no match, of course, for the twelve thousand Tai-Pings. This Ward realised as soon as the skirmis.h.i.+ng advance had been made, and he returned to Shanghai for reinforcements.

From the Chinese imperial troops he obtained men to garrison whatever courts the foreign legation might capture, an arrangement which left the adventurers free to go wherever their action could be most effective.

Thus reinforced, Ward once more set out for Sungkiang. Even on this occasion his men were outnumbered one hundred to one, but, such was the desperation of the attacking force, the rebels were driven like sheep to the slaughter, and the defeat of the Tai-Pings was overwhelming. It was during this battle, it is interesting to know, that the term "foreign devils" first found place in the Chinese vocabulary.

The promised reward was forthwith presented to the gifted American soldier, and immediately Ward accepted a second commission against the rebels at Singpo. The Tai-Pings of this city were under the leaders.h.i.+p of a renegade Englishman named Savage, and the fighting was fast and furious. Ward and his men performed many feats of valour, and actually scaled the city wall, thirty feet in height, to fight like demons upon its top. But it was without avail. With heavy losses, they were driven back.