The Wit and Humor of America Volume VIII Part 12

What troubles you, Yankee phantoms? What is all this chattering of bare gums?

Does the ague convulse your limbs? Do you mistake your crutches for fire-locks, and level them?

If you blind your eyes with tears, you will not see the President's marshal; If you groan such groans, you might balk the government cannon.

For shame, old maniacs! Bring down those tossed arms, and let your white hair be; Here gape your great grand-sons--their wives gaze at them from the windows, See how well dressed--see how orderly they conduct themselves.

Worse and worse! Can't you stand it? Are you retreating?

Is this hour with the living too dead for you?

Retreat then! Pell-mell!

To your graves! Back! back to the hills, old limpers!

I do not think you belong here, anyhow.

But there is one thing that belongs here--shall I tell you what it is, gentlemen of Boston?

I will whisper it to the Mayor--he shall send a committee to England; They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the royal vault--haste!

Dig out King George's coffin, unwrap him quick from the grave-clothes, box up his bones for a journey;

Find a swift Yankee clipper--here is freight for you, black-bellied clipper, Up with your anchor! shake out your sails! steer straight toward Boston bay.

Now call for the President's marshal again, bring put the government cannon, Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession, guard it with foot and dragoons.

This centre-piece for them: Look! all orderly citizens--look from the windows, women!

The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that will not stay, Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull.

You have got your revenge, old buster! The crown is come to its own, and more than its own.

Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan--you are a made man from this day; You are mighty cute--and here is one of your bargains.

THE CHIEF MATE

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

My first glimpse of Europe was the sh.o.r.e of Spain. Since we got into the Mediterranean, we have been becalmed for some days within easy view of it. All along are fine mountains, brown all day, and with a bloom on them at sunset like that of a ripe plum. Here and there at their feet little white towns are sprinkled along the edge of the water, like the grains of rice dropped by the princess in the story. Sometimes we see larger buildings on the mountain slopes, probably convents. I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall be, and am content.

Surely lat.i.tude and longitude never showed me any particular respect, that I should be over-scrupulous with them.

But after all, Nature, though she may be more beautiful, is nowhere so entertaining as in man, and the best thing I have seen and learned at sea is our Chief Mate. My first acquaintance with him was made over my knife, which he asked to look at, and, after a critical examination, handed back to me, saying, "I shouldn't wonder if that 'ere was a good piece o' stuff." Since then he has transferred a part of his regard for my knife to its owner. I like folks who like an honest bit of steel, and take no interest whatever in "your Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff."

There is always more than the average human nature in the man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. It is a manly metal, with no sordid a.s.sociations like gold and silver. My sailor fully came up to my expectation on further acquaintance. He might well be called an old salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen before I was born. He was not an American, but I should never have guessed it by his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects. Nor was he less Americanized in all his thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the ease with which our omnivorous country a.s.similates foreign matter, provided it be Protestant, for he was a man ere he became an American citizen. He used to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eyes. _How_ he saw I could never make out, though I had a theory that it was with his elbows. After he had taken me (or my knife) into his confidence, he took care that I should see whatever he deemed of interest to a landsman.

Without looking up, he would say, suddenly, "There's a whale blowin'

clearn up to win'ard," or, "Them's porpises to leeward: that means change o' wind." He is as impervious to cold as a polar bear, and paces the deck during his watch much as one of those yellow hummocks goes slumping up and down his cage. On the Atlantic, if the wind blew a gale from the northeast, and it was cold as an English summer, he was sure to turn out in a calico s.h.i.+rt and trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, and slippers, without stockings. But lest you might fancy this to have chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out in a monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, when the evening is so hot that Adam would have been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. "It's a kind o'

damp and unwholesome in these ere waters," he says, evidently regarding the Midland Sea as a vile standing pool, in comparison with the bluff ocean. At meals he is superb, not only for his strengths, but his weaknesses. He has somehow or other come to think me a wag, and if I ask him to pa.s.s the b.u.t.ter, detects an occult joke, and laughs as much as is proper for a mate. For you must know that our social hierarchy on s.h.i.+pboard is precise, and the second mate, were he present, would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. always combs his hair, and works himself into a black frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waist-coat) before he comes to meals, sacrificing himself n.o.bly and painfully to the social proprieties. The second mate, on the other hand, who eats after us, enjoys the privilege of s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, and is, I think, the happier man of the two. We do not have seats above and below the salt, as in old time, but above and below the white sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, and it is delightful to see how he ignores the existence of certain delicates which he considers above his grade, tipping his head on one side with an air of abstraction so that he may seem not to deny himself, but to omit helping himself from inadvertence, or absence of mind. At such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar manner, inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscription, but as easily read after you once get the key. The sense of it is something like this: "I, X., know my place, a height of wisdom attained by few. Whatever you may think, I do _not_ see that currant jelly, nor that preserved grape.

Especially a kind Providence has made me blind to bowls of white sugar, and deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It is much that a merciful compensation gives me a sense of the dingier hue of Havana, and the muddier gurgle of beer. Are there potted meats? My physician has ordered me three pounds of minced salt-junk at every meal." There is such a thing, you know, as a s.h.i.+p's husband: X. is the s.h.i.+p's poor relation.

As I have said, he takes also a below-the-white-sugar interest in the jokes, laughing by precise point of compa.s.s, just as he would lay the s.h.i.+p's course, all _yawing_ being out of the question with his scrupulous decorum at the helm. Once or twice I have got the better of him, and touched him off into a kind of compromised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with painful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your match, and touch him off again and again with the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many times to get him _en rapport_ with a jest. This once accomplished, you have him, and one bit of fun will last the whole voyage. He prefers those of one syllable, the _a-b abs_ of humor. The gradual fattening of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant for a woman, and had become a man by accident, as in some of those stories by the elder physiologists, is an abiding topic of humorous comment with Mr. X. "That 'ere stooard," he says, with a brown grin like what you might fancy on the face of a serious and aged seal, "'s agittin' as fat's a porpis. He was as thin's a s.h.i.+ngle when he come aboord last v'yge. Them trousis'll bust yit. He don't darst take 'em off nights, for the whole s.h.i.+p's company couldn't git him into 'em agin." And then he turns aside to enjoy the intensity of his emotion by himself, and you hear at intervals low rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. He tells me of St. Elmo's fires, Marvell's _corposants_, though with him the original _corpos santos_ has suffered a sea change, and turned to _comepleasants_, pledges of fine weather. I shall not soon find a pleasanter companion. It is so delightful to meet a man who knows just what you do _not_. Nay, I think the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance like what the body feels in cus.h.i.+ony moss. Talk of the sympathy of kindred pursuits! It is the sympathy of the upper and nether mill-stones, both forever grinding the same grist, and wearing each other smooth. One has not far to seek for book-nature, artist-nature, every variety of superinduced nature, in short, but genuine human-nature is hard to find. And how good it is! Wholesome as a potato, fit company for any dish. The free masonry of cultivated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I like better the natural grip with which manhood recognizes manhood.

X. has one good story, and with that I leave him, wis.h.i.+ng him with all my heart that little inland farm at last which is his calenture as he paces the windy deck. One evening, when the clouds looked wild and whirling, I asked X. if it was coming on to blow. "No, I guess not,"

said he; "b.u.mby the moon'll be up, and scoff away that 'ere loose stuff." His intonation set the phrase "scoff away" in quotation-marks as plain as print. So I put a query in each eye, and he went on. "Ther' was a Dutch cappen onct, an' his mate come to him in the cabin, where he sot takin' his schnapps, an' says, 'Cappen, it's agittin' thick, an' looks kin' o' squally, hedn't we's good's shorten sail?' 'Gimmy my alminick,'

says the cappen. So he looks at it a spell, an' says he, 'The moon's due in less'n half an hour, an' she'll scoff away ev'ythin' clare agin.' So the mate he goes, an' b.u.mby down he comes agin, an' says, 'Cappen, this 'ere's the allfiredest, powerfullest moon 't ever you _did_ see. She's scoffed away the main-togallants'l, an' she's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you'd better look in the alminick agin, and fin' out when _this_ moon sets.' So the cappen thought 'twas 'bout time to go on deck.

Dreadful slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. walked away, rumbling inwardly, like the rote of the sea heard afar.

THE ROAD TO A WOMAN'S HEART

BY SAM SLICK

As we approached the inn at Amherst, the Clockmaker grew uneasy. "It's pretty well on in the evening, I guess," said he, "and Marm Pugwash is as onsartin in her temper as a mornin' in April; it's all suns.h.i.+ne or all clouds with her, and if she's in one of her tantrums she'll stretch out her neck and hiss like a goose with a flock of goslin's. I wonder what on airth Pugwash was a-thinkin' on when he signed articles of partners.h.i.+p with that are woman; she's not a bad-lookin' piece of furniture, neither, and it's a proper pity sich a clever woman should carry sich a stiff upper lip. She reminds me of our old minister Joshua Hopewell's apple-trees.

"The old minister had an orchard of most particular good fruit, for he was a great hand at buddin', graftin', and what not, and the orchard (it was on the south side of the house) stretched right up to the road.

Well, there were some trees hung over the fence, I never seed such bearers: the apples hung in ropes, for all the world like strings of onions, and the fruit was beautiful. n.o.body touched the minister's apples, and when other folks lost their'n from the boys, his'n always hung there like bait t' a hook, but there never was so much as a nibble at 'em. So I said to him one day, 'Minister,' said I, 'how on airth do you manage to keep your fruit that's so exposed, when no one else can't do it nohow?' 'Why,' says he, 'they are dreadfully pretty fruit, ain't they?' 'I guess,' said I, 'there ain't the like on 'em in all Connecticut.' 'Well,' says he, 'I'll tell you the secret, but you needn't let on to no one about it. That are row next the fence, I grafted it myself: I took great pains to get the right kind. I sent clean up to Roxberry and away down to Squawneck Creek.' I was afeard he was a-goin' to give me day and date for every graft, bein' a terrible long-winded man in his stories; so says I, 'I know that, minister, but how do you preserve them?' 'Why, I was a-goin' to tell you,' said he, 'when you stopped me. That are outward row I grafted myself with the choicest kind I could find, and I succeeded. They are beautiful, but so etarnal sour, no human soul can eat them. Well, the boys think the old minister's graftin' has all succeeded about as well as that row, and they sarch no further. They snicker at my graftin', and I laugh in my sleeve, I guess, at their penetration.'

"Now, Marm Pugwash is like the minister's apples, very temptin' fruit to look at, but desperate sour. If Pugwash had a watery mouth when he married, I guess it's pretty puckery by this time. However, if she goes to act ugly, I'll give her a dose of 'soft sawder' that will take the frown out of her frontispiece and make her dial-plate as smooth as a lick of copal varnish. It's a pity she's such a kickin' devil, too, for she has good points,--good eye, good foot, neat pastern, fine chest, a clean set of limbs, and carries a good--But here we are. Now you'll see what 'soft sawder' will do."

When we entered the house, the travelers' room was all in darkness, and on opening the opposite door into the sitting-room we found the female part of the family extinguis.h.i.+ng the fire for the night. Mrs. Pugwash had a broom in her hand, and was in the act (the last act of female housewifery) of sweeping the hearth. The strong flickering light of the fire, as it fell upon her tall, fine figure and beautiful face, revealed a creature worthy of the Clockmaker's comments.

"Good evening, marm," said Mr. Slick. "How do you do? and how's Mr.

Pugwash?" "He!" said she: "why, he's been abed this hour. You don't expect to disturb him this time of night, I hope?" "Oh, no," said Mr.

Slick, "certainly not, and I am sorry to have disturbed you, but we got detained longer than we expected; I am sorry that--" "So am I," said she, "but if Mr. Pugwash will keep an inn when he has no occasion to, his family can't expect no rest."

Here the Clockmaker, seeing the storm gathering, stooped down suddenly, and, staring intently, held out his hand and exclaimed: "Well, if that ain't a beautiful child! Come here, my little man, and shake hands along with me. Well, I declare, if that are little feller ain't the finest child I ever seed. What, not abed yet? Ah, you rogue, where did you get them are pretty rosy cheeks? Stole them from mama, eh? Well, I wish my old mother could see that child, it is such a treat. In our country,"

said he, turning to me, "the children are all as pale as chalk or as yaller as an orange. Lord! that are little feller would be a show in our country. Come to me, my man." Here the "soft sawder" began to operate.

Mrs. Pugwash said, in a milder tone than we had yet heard, "Go, my dear, to the gentleman; go, dear." Mr. Slick kissed him, asked him if he would go to the States along with him, told him all the little girls would fall in love with him, for they didn't see such a beautiful face once in a month of Sundays. "Black eyes,--let me see,--ah, mama's eyes, too, and black hair also; as I am alive, you are mama's own boy, the very image of mama." "Do be seated, gentlemen," said Mrs. Pugwash. "Sally, make a fire in the next room." "She ought to be proud of you," he continued.

"Well, if I live to return here, I must paint your face, and have it put on my clocks, and our folks will buy the clocks for the sake of the face. Did you ever see," said he, again addressing me, "such a likeness between one human and another, as between this beautiful little boy and his mother?" "I am sure you have had no supper," said Mrs. Pugwash to me; "you must be hungry, and weary, too. I will get you a cup of tea."

"I am sorry to give you so much trouble," said I. "Not the least trouble in the world," she replied; "on the contrary, a pleasure."

We were then shown into the next room, where the fire was now blazing up, but Mr. Slick protested he could not proceed without the little boy, and lingered behind to ascertain his age, and concluded by asking the child if he had any aunts that looked like mama.

As the door closed Mr. Slick said, "It's a pity she don't go well in gear. The difficulty with those critters is to git them to start: arter that there is no trouble with them, if you don't check 'em too short. If you do they'll stop again, run back and kick like mad, and then Old Nick himself wouldn't start 'em. Pugwash, I guess, don't understand the natur' of the crittur; she'll never go kind in harness for him. _When I see a child_," said the Clockmaker, "_I always feel safe with these women-folk; for I have always found that the road to a woman's heart lies through her child_."

"You seem," said I, "to understand the female heart so well, I make no doubt you are a general favorite among the fair s.e.x." "Any man," he replied, "that understands horses has a pretty considerable fair knowledge of women, for they are jist alike in temper, and require the very identical same treatment. _Encourage the timid ones, be gentle and steady with the fractious, but lather the sulky ones like blazes._

"People talk an everlastin' sight of nonsense about wine, women and horses. I've bought and sold 'em all, I've traded in all of them, and I tell you there ain't one in a thousand that knows a grain about either on 'em. You hear folks say, Oh, such a man is an ugly-grained critter, he'll break his wife's heart; jist as if a woman's heart was as brittle as a pipe-stalk. The female heart, as far as my experience goes, is jist like a new india-rubber shoe: you may pull and pull at it till it stretches out a yard long, and then let go, and it will fly right back to its old shape. Their hearts are made of stout leather, I tell you; there's a plaguy sight of wear in 'em.

"I never knowed but one case of a broken heart, and that was in t'other s.e.x, one Was.h.i.+ngton Banks. He was a sneezer. He was tall enough to spit down on the heads of your grenadiers, and near about high enough to wade across Charlestown River, and as strong as a tow-boat. I guess he was somewhat less than a foot longer than the moral law and catechism, too.

He was a perfect pictur' of a man; you couldn't fault him in no particular, he was so just a made critter; folks used to run to the winder when he pa.s.sed, and say, 'There goes Was.h.i.+ngton Banks; beant he lovely!' I do believe there wasn't a gal in the Lowell factories that warn't in love with him. Sometimes, at intermission, on Sabbath-days, when they all came out together (an amazin' handsom' sight, too, near about a whole congregation of young gals), Banks used to say, 'I vow, young ladies, I wish I had five hundred arms to reciprocate one with each of you; but I reckon I have a heart big enough for you all; it's a whopper, you may depend, and every mite and morsel of it at your service.' 'Well, how you do act, Mr. Banks!' half a thousand little clipper-clapper tongues would say, all at the same time, and their dear little eyes sparklin' like so many stars twinklin' of a frosty night.

"Well, when I last seed him he was all skin and bone, like a horse turned out to die. He was teetotally defleshed, a mere walkin' skeleton.

'I am dreadful sorry,' says I, 'to see you, Banks, lookin' so peaked.

Why, you look like a sick turkey-hen, all legs! What on airth ails you?'

'I'm dyin', says he, '_of a broken heart_.' 'What!' I says I, 'have the gals been jiltin' you?' 'No, no,' says he; 'I beant such a fool as that, neither.' 'Well,' says I, 'have you made a bad speculation?' 'No,' says he, shakin' his head, 'I hope I have too much clear grit in me to take on so bad for that.' 'What under the sun is it, then?' said I. 'Why,'

says he, 'I made a bet the fore part of the summer with Leftenant Oby Knowles that I could shoulder the best bower of the Const.i.tution frigate. I won my bet, _but the anchor was so etarnal heavy that it broke my heart_.' Sure enough, he did die that very fall; and he was the only instance I ever heard tell of a _broken heart_."