Chapter IX: Part 9

O Thou who art equally supreme in the moral and the material universe, guiding the sea-bird to her nest amid the blinding snows, the breaker’s foam, and the driving mist of ocean, who makest small the drops of rain, and a way for the lightning of thunder, and the thing that is hid bringest forth to light, we adore thy power and thy wisdom; we magnify thy grace; we hallow thy name. With penitence we confess our manifold transgressions as individuals and as a nation. Holiness belongeth unto Thee, but unto us shame and confusion of faces.

We thank Thee that Thou didst direct our forefathers to these shores, and inspire them with purpose and wisdom to form a civil compact built upon the principles of religion, education, law, and labor. We thank Thee that, in the face of famine, pestilence, and relentless foes, they accomplished their purpose, and with a spirit of self-sacrifice worthy of the cause, devoted themselves as stepping stones to bridge the path of future generations that they might create a republic, lay the foundations of civil liberty, resist oppression, and seal their devotion to their principles with their blood. We thank Thee that though they have passed away, their principles have survived, and that when the republic they had reared was rocking to its foundations, assailed by foes without and treachery within, their children did not prove unworthy of the sires who begat them, nor recreant to the principles they drew in with their mothers’ milk and were taught at their fathers’ knees. We thank Thee that they were equally ready to vindicate at the cannon’s mouth and maintain with property or life the principles of civil and religious liberty, and the inalienable right of every man to the fruit of his own labor.

We pray Thee that, on this day, set apart by the Executive of the nation as a day of grateful remembrance, we may appreciate the true nature of the perils we have escaped and acknowledge our indebtedness to the providence of that Being who ruleth over the affairs of nations. May we not in our prosperity forget those dark hours when all faces gathered blackness. May we not merely decorate the graves, but may we ever cherish with affectionate remembrance our obligations to those whose courage mounted in proportion to the imminence of the danger, and who approved their loyalty with their blood. May we not on this day fraught with associations so sad to those whose wounds, partially healed, are this day reopened, forget the fatherless whose parents sleep in bloody graves, and the widows whom this day reminds of all they have lost, and the aged parents from whom war took the support of their declining years. We commit these to thy care and keeping; we commit unto Thee all those who suffered and sacrificed that the Union might be preserved. And we thank Thee for the comfort of a vast army come back from the deadly uproar of arms to take up again the unheroic duties of life, and strive by honest living to maintain the principles they fought to defend.

We pray for thy blessing upon thy servant. May he be enabled to expound and enforce those principles which lie at the foundation of social happiness and free institutions; those principles which have made this republic, which a little more than a century ago was a mere shrub with bare shade sufficient to cover its roots, to become a tree that hath sent forth its roots to the sea and its branches to the rivers, and on whose foliage the sunlight loves to linger, and on whose branches the dew of heaven lieth all night.--AMEN.

VERSE

FROM “THE PHANTOMS OF THE MIND”

[First printed in _Bowdoin Portfolio_, September, 1839.]

I would not be a fragile flower
To languish in a lady’s bower,
A silken thing of texture rare
That fears to meet God’s blessed air;
My life a water, stagnant, low,
Without an ebb, without a flow;
Chained like a captive to his oar
To toil on, on, forevermore!
And supplicate with frantic cry
For the “poor privilege to die”;
A smooth-faced boy, a harmless thing,
A kitten playing with a string,
A child without, a brute within,
Without e’en energy to sin.
Not thus, when erst that iron race
From whom our birth we proudly trace,
No sculptured arras decked the bed
Whereon reposed the patriot’s head;
Nor proud device or motto wore
Those stern-faced men that lived of yore
In the good days of “auld lang syne,”
When liberty, a feeble vine,
Lay bruised and trailing on the ground,
Nor yet a single trellis found;
Gently they reared its drooping crest,
They bade its tendrils twine,
And many a traveller since hath blessed
The shadow of that vine.

THE DEMON OF THE SEA

[First printed in _Bowdoin Portfolio_, November, 1839.]

Ah! tell me not of your shady dells,
Where the lilies gleam and the fountain wells,
Where the reaper rests when his task is o’er,
And the lake-wave sobs on the verdant shore,
And the rustic maid with a heart all free,
Hies to the well-known trysting-tree;
For I’m the god of the rolling sea,
And the charms of earth are nought to me.
O’er the thundering chime of the breaking surge,
On the lightning’s wing my course I urge,
On the thrones of foam right joyous ride
’Mid the sullen dash of the angry tide.
I hear ye tell of music’s power,
The rapture of a sigh,
When beauty in her wizard bower
Unveils her languid eye.
Of those who die in rugged fight
And battling for their country’s right
With the shivered brand in the “red right hand,”
And the plaudits of a rescued land.
Ye never knew the infernal fire,
The withering curse, the scorching ire,
That rages, maddens in the breast
Of him who rules the billow’s crest.
Heard ye that last despairing yell
That wailed Creation’s funeral knell,
When young and old, the vile, the brave,
Were circled in one common grave?
While on my ear of driving foam
By moaning whirlwinds sped,
O’er what _was_ joyous earth I roam,
And trample on the dead.
This is the music that my ear
Thrills with stern ecstasy to hear!
I love to view some lonely bark,
The sport of storms, the lightning’s mark,
Scarce struggling through the fresh’ning wave
That foams and yawns to be her grave!
I saw a son and father fight
For a drifting spar their lives to save;
The son he throttled his father gray,
And tore the spar from his clutch away,
Till he sank beneath the wave;
And deemed it were a noble sight.
I saw upon a shattered wreck
All swinging at the tempest’s beck,
A mother lone, whose frenzied eye
Wandered in hopeless agony
O’er that vast plain where naught was seen,
The ocean and the sky between,
And there all buried to the breast
In the hungry surf that round her prest--
With feeble arms, in anguish wild,
High o’er her head she raised her child,
Endured of winds and waves the strife,
To add a unit to its life.

I whelmed that infant in the sea
To add a pang to her misery,
And the wretched mother’s frantic yell
Came o’er me like a soothing spell!
Are ye so haughty in your pride,
To deem of all the earth beside
That yours are fields and fragrant flowers,
And lute-like voices in your bowers,
And gold and gems of priceless worth,
And all the glory of the earth?
Ah, mean is all your pageantry
To that proud, fadeless blazonry,
That waves in scathless beauty free
Beneath the blue, old rolling sea!
For there are flowers that wither not,
And leaves that never fall,
Immortal forms in each wild grot,
Still bright and changeless all.
Decay is not on beauty’s bloom,
No canker in the rose,
No prescience of a future doom
To mar the sweet repose--
There Proteus’ changeful form is seen,
And Triton winds his shell,
While through old Ocean’s valleys green,
The tuneful echoes swell.
But though a Demon rightly named,
For terror more than mercy famed,--
Yet demons e’en respect the power
That nerves the heart in danger’s hour.
And when the veteran of a hundred storms,
Whom many a wild midnight
I’ve girded with a thousand startling forms
Of terror and affright,--
When tempests roar and hell-fiends scream,
The thunders crash, the lightnings gleam,
’Mid biting cold and driving hail
Still grasps the helm, still trims the sail,
Nor deigns to utter coward cries,
But as he lived, so fearless dies,--
Mingles his last faint, bubbling sigh
With the pealing tempest’s banner-cry;--
Then winds are hushed, the billow falls
Where storms were wont to be,
As I bear him to the untrodden halls
Of the deep unfathomed sea!
Now Triton sends a mournful strain
Through all that vast profound,--
At once a bright immortal train
Comes thronging at the sound.
And on a shining pearly car
They place the honored dust,
And Ocean’s chargers gently bear
Along the sacred trust,
While far o’er all the glassy plain
By mighty Neptune led,
In sadness moves that funeral train,--
Thus Ocean wails her dead!
And now the watch of life is past,
The shattered hulk is moored at last,
Nor e’en the tempest’s thrilling breath
Can wake “the dull, cold ear of death.”
No bitter thoughts of home and loved ones dart
Their untold anguish through the seaman’s heart.

Peaceful be thy slumbers, brother,
There’s no prouder grave for thee,
Well may pine for thee a mother,
Flower of ocean’s chivalry!

PORTLAND

Still may I love, beloved of thee,
My own fair city of the sea!
Where moulders back to kindred dust
The mother who my childhood nurst,
And strove, with ill-requited toil,
To till a rough, ungrateful soil;
Yet kindly spared by Heaven to know
That Faith’s reward is sure, though slow,
And see the prophet’s mantle grace
The rudest scion of her race.

And while around thy seaward shore
The Atlantic doth its surges pour,
(Those verdant isles, thy bosom-gems)
May Temples be thy diadems;
Spire after spire in beauty rise,
Still pointing upward to the skies,
Unwritten sermons, and rebukes of love,
To point thy toiling throngs to worlds above.

AN ODE

[Written for the Semi-centennial Celebration at Bowdoin College, August 31, 1852.]

From waves that break to break again,
From winds that die to gather might,
How pleasant on the stormy main
Appears the sailor’s native height.

And sweet, I ween, the graceful tears
That glisten in the wand’rer’s eye,
As haunts and homes of early years
Begemmed with morning’s dewdrops lie.

Borne on the fragrant breath of morn,
His lazy vessel stems the tide
Among the fields of waving corn
That nestle on the river’s side.

His mother’s cottage through the leaves
Gleams like a rainbow seen at night,
While all the visions fancy weaves
Are stirring at the well-known sight.

But sweeter memories cluster here
Than ever stirred a seaman’s breast,
Than e’er provoked his grateful tear,
Or wooed the mariner to rest.

’Twas here our life of life began--
The spirit felt its dormant power;
’Twas here the child became a man--
The opening bud became a flower.

And from Niagara’s distant roar
And homes beside the heaving sea,
Rank upon rank thy children pour,
And gather to thy Jubilee.

On these old trees each nestling leaf,
The murmur of yon flowing stream,
Has power to stir a buried grief,
Or to recall some youthful dream.

Each path that skirts the tangled wood,
Or winds amidst its secret maze,
Worn by the feet of those we loved,
Brings back the forms of other days.

Of those whose smile was heaven to thee,
Whose voice a richer music made
Than brooks that murmur to the sea,
Or birds that warble in the shade.

Around these ancient altar fires
We cluster with a joyous heart,
While ardent youth and hoary sires
Alike sustain a grateful part.

A HYMN

[Written for the Celebration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society, at Music Hall, Boston, May 28, 1856.]

I was not reared where heaves the swell
Of surf on coasts remote and drear,
But grew with roses, in a dell,
And waked with bird-notes in my ear.

Glad hours on golden pinions sped,
As folded to her throbbing breast,
A mother’s lips their fragrance shed,
And lulled me with a prayer to rest.

The red has faded from my cheek,
And bronzed and scarred the boyish face;
Affection’s eye might vainly seek
One lingering lineament to trace.

Shipwrecked, the Sailor’s Home I sought,
My raiment gone, my shipmates dead,
Through poverty reluctant brought,
And there a sober life I led.

But when the evening prayer was said,
It brought the unaccustomed tear,
A mother’s hand was on my head,
Her voice was thrilling in mine ear.

Old memories waked that long had slept,
They forced the spirit’s brazen crust;
I wept and prayed, I prayed and wept,
Till anguish ripened into trust.

Blest be the hands that reared thy dome
The wandering seaman’s step to greet;
Guiding the homeless to a home,
And sinners to a mercy-seat.

TRUE POETRY’S TASK

When first the human clay, instinct with thought,
Doth feel the motions of those hidden fires
That by a subtle alchemy sublime
The crude contexture of its grosser powers,
It is not life--rather capacity
Of life and power hereafter to be given.
Life lies beyond us, as an Orphic tale
Of things mysterious and dimly seen,
A gorgeous phantom, but a phantom still
That ever is, and ever is without.
We dwell amid the border flowers that bloom
To bless and cheer life’s brier-planted paths,
Its dusty turnpikes, and its scorching noons;
And thus our primal being is a dream
And most mysterious to the dreamer,
E’en as the dim and iron forms that frown
From the dark walls of some old corridor
On which the moonbeams thro’ the crumbling towers
Bestow expression and inform with life
Delicious but delight indefinite.
The finer tissues of that wondrous web
That doth so strangely link spirit to sense
Matter to mind, are all unwoven yet;
Those subtle telegraphs that make report
Of outward action to the inward life
Still in the secret caves of being sleep.
The soul is conscious of no other tie
To nature than to love its beauty
And with an open sense luxuriate
In woods and fields with animal delight.
For as the sturdy trunk and massive limbs
Of the gigantic oak, lie deftly hid
Within the acorn’s small periphery,
Till in the pregnant bosom of the earth,
Warmed by the sun, moistened with summer dews,
It bursts its coffin and leaps forth to light;
Thus when the soul is in its progress brought,
Led on by nature’s genial processes,
To touch reality and outward life,
There is a stirring, from its inmost depths,
Of yearning thoughts and deathless energies,
Seeking the outward vesture that confers
A definite existence and a form.
Strong roots shoot forth and fibres more minute
That by mysterious alchemy impart
Substance to shadow, breath to lifeless forms.
Life is no more a pageant to admire;
Since with a yearning for a higher life,
The power to struggle, and the thirst to know,
Awakes a bitter principle to sin,
Breeding intestine war and conflict fierce,
Till powers are marshalled in the mind itself
That with itself chaotic warfare wage.
Henceforth man’s life is conflict, and his doom
By conflict to grow stronger, to contend
From the rude cross within some Alpine gorge
To the proud blazon of ancestral tombs.
In eastern myths and Christian chronicles,
In heathen temples, and in holy shrines
The same stern truth is graven on them all--
That conflict only doth ennoble man.
But man is not sufficient to himself
In this great conflict, therefore God has given
A twofold revelation to his faith.
Subjective, one to reason makes appeal;
The other to the grosser sense explains
Stern truths by most persuasive images,
Graving dread mandates on the shifting clouds,
Weaving of wild flowers and of foliage green
A genial symbol for a genial faith.
This is the task to Poetry assigned:
Of life divine to be the messenger.
As to the sorrow-stricken soul of him
Who knelt and prayed in lone Gethsemane
The angel choir did gently minister,
E’en thus true Poetry doth nerve the soul
Upon its Alpine passage to commune
With truths that quicken and with thoughts that stir.
It is the soul’s sheet-anchor in the strife.

1899.]

MISCELLANEOUS

MEMORIES OF LONGFELLOW

TOPSHAM, MAINE, February 10, 1885.

EDITORS OF THE ORIENT:

_Dear Sirs_,--I have received your note requesting me to furnish some reminiscences of Longfellow. I would say in reply that although yielding to no one in my admiration of the character and genius of Mr. Longfellow or regard for his memory, I still feel quite unable to contribute anything that would meet your expectations or serve your purpose, from the fact that my knowledge of him began and to a large extent closed in very early youth before his powers had developed. Nevertheless, as everything even remotely connected with him or his is valued and treasured, I will endeavor to comply with your request.

Hon. Stephen Longfellow, the father of Henry, was a friend of my father’s and resided near us. Judge Potter, the father of the poet’s first wife, lived almost directly opposite to us; and in an adjoining house a sister of the late Eben Steele taught a school which I attended with two of the daughters of Judge Potter and other children. The Potter children, being the nearest neighbors, were my playmates. I can see them now with their little blue aprons and happy faces. There was something very attractive in the expression of Mary Potter’s features, the future wife of the poet. It remains as fresh in my recollection to-day as it was then. I used to hear a great deal about angels, but cherished very incoherent ideas in regard to them, and one evening when my mother was teaching me a hymn, the conclusion of which was:--

“May angels guard me while I sleep
Till morning light appears,”

I astonished her by asking if Mary Potter was not an angel.

Though she was quiet and retiring, it made one happy to be in her society; and she enjoyed fun as well as the rest of us, only in a more quiet way. One morning there was a platform laid around the pump in the schoolyard and a man employed to paint it red. On going to dinner he put his paint-pot and brush under the edge of the platform where we discovered it. The Potters wore red morocco shoes and I wore black ones. Some other children who rejoiced in red shoes were very proud of them, which excited my envy. I painted my own and the shoes of several others a staring red, and we strutted among our mates with great satisfaction, which, however, was somewhat abated upon the arrival of the schoolmistress.

It was the custom at that time in Portland to send children to the Academy very soon after leaving the primary school, and there I first met Henry Longfellow; but he was a large boy fitting for college, and I was a little one. I can therefore only give you the impression made (by his habits and bearing) upon the mind of a boisterous boy who had with him nothing in common. But I recollect perfectly the impression made upon myself and others by his deportment, and from these impressions draw the inferences I communicate. He was a very handsome boy, retiring without being reserved; there was no chill in his manners. There was a frankness about him that won you at once; he looked you square in the face. His eyes were full of expression, and it seemed as if you could look down into them as into a clear spring. There were many rough boys in the school, a great deal of horse-play and a good many rough-and-tumble games at recess, and the boys who were not inclined to engage in them often excited the ill-will of their ruder mates who were prone to imagine that the former felt above them. As a result the quiet boys sometimes fell victims to this feeling and were dragged out and rudely treated. But no one ever thought of taking such liberties with Longfellow, nor did such suspicions ever attach to him. Not even John Bartels or John Goddard ever meddled with him. I think John Goddard expressed the common sentiment of the school when, after some boy had remarked upon Longfellow’s retiring habits, he exclaimed: “Oh, let him alone. He don’t belong to our breed of cats.” He had no relish for rude sports, but he loved to bathe in a little creek on the border of Deering’s Oaks. And he would sometimes tramp through the woods with a gun; but this was mostly through the influence of others. He loved much better to lie under a tree and read. Small boys think it a great affair to tag after larger ones, especially if the larger ones carry guns, and I have often picked up the dead squirrels that he and others used to shoot in the oaks. And he and John Kinsman or Edward Preble would boost me into a tree to shake off acorns for them.

His early associations were very strong, and as is the fact in respect to most of us, they strengthened with age and cropped out everywhere in his verse. One familiar with the scenes and events of his youth can readily trace to their source the allusions in many of his verses. It was doubtless after gathering the mayflower on some half-holiday or tramping through the woods that, as he lay beneath some one of those old oaks on the verge of the forest, with limbs thirty feet in length within reach of the hand, and looked up through the branches and watched the clouds go by, he received those impressions which took form in the following lines:--

“Pleasant it was when woods were green
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where the long drooping boughs between
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go.”

Though Longfellow was a thoughtful, he certainly was not a melancholy boy, and the minor key to which so much of his verse is attuned, and that tinge of sadness which his countenance wore in later years, were due to that first great sorrow which came upon him in the loss of her to whom I have referred, and which was chiselled still deeper by subsequent trials. He never buried her, and that beautiful tribute to her memory in the “Footsteps of Angels” is as true as tender.

He was ever ready to extend a helping hand to others. After leaving school we took different paths and never met again till 1870, when I received a communication from him through Mr. James T. Fields, saying that he had kept run of me and wished me to call upon him at a time fixed by him. I went and was most cordially received. I asked him how he had kept run of me. He replied through his brother Alexander, his sister Mrs. Pierce, and Mr. James Greenleaf, his brother-in-law, an intimate friend and later schoolmate of mine. We reviewed the past, and almost the first question he asked in relation to it was about the scholars in that Academy, and he mentioned almost every name but the one I knew was most dear to him. This is what led me to say that he never buried her.

But what a change in that care-worn face, marked with the deep lines of thought and sorrow, from the smooth-cheeked boy of my early recollections, unconscious of care and to whom the future was rainbow tinted and full of hope. The eyes, however, had not lost their wonted expression, and the same sweet smile was on his lips, and he encouraged me in the kindest manner to continue in the course I had just then commenced, in words that it does not become me to repeat, but which will never be forgotten. And from that time to his death I found that neither success nor sorrow had narrowed the sympathies or chilled the heart of Henry Longfellow.

BEN BOLT

Some time since, in the story of a wasted life, we depicted the results of intemperance and the terrible grasp which this vice fastens upon its victims, alas, but seldom broken. Lest our young readers should be left to imagine that reformation is hopeless, we will relate the story of Ben Bolt.

Ben Bolt was an English sailor about forty years of age, and a very powerful man, of an iron frame and constitution and a choice man on board ship. He was withal intelligent, having received a good common school education, and of most excellent disposition even when in liquor. He was honest as the sun, was never known to back out of a ship, cheat his landlord, or run away after getting his month’s advance. Ben was an excellent singer, and obtained his name from a song called “Ben Bolt,” that he was very fond of singing. What his real appellation was, for many years I did not know. He had none of the vices common to seamen except drinking, and that he had to perfection, insomuch that he was seldom sober while on shore.

I was conscious of a singular attraction towards Ben; I liked him; and whenever I could catch him comparatively sober, endeavored to wean him from his cups. Sailors are, in general, inclined to relate incidents of their life, and if they have religious or well-to-do parents, to speak of them with satisfaction and honest pride. Ben, however, was reticent in this respect.

One day I was sitting at an open window in the reading room of the Sailors’ Home, and Ben was seated on the piazza outside singing a psalm in a low tone; at the conclusion he turned, and seeing me, said:--

“Parson, I’ve sung that psalm many times in the parish church at home.”

Then, as though afraid I might pursue the subject further, abruptly left. I judged from this that during his youth he might have sung in the church choir; at any rate he could read music, had a thorough knowledge of it, and was a skilful player on the violin.

There were two hundred grog shops within a short distance of the Home, several within three or four rods of the door, and every inducement was held out to encourage seamen to drink. Ben had shipped for New Orleans, but when the hour came for the vessel to sail, he was missing. The superintendent of the Home told the “runners” to go to Ben’s room, get a key, open his chest, and see if he had got his outfit of sea-clothes and was ready to go, and if so, to search among the grog shops and find him; but if he had not got his outfit, he would take a man who was ready and put Ben in another vessel.

I happened to be in the entry when they came upstairs, and went into the room with them. They opened the chest, and there were his oil clothes, sea-boots, woollens, and every part of his outfit, and stowed snugly away among the flannels a two-gallon jug of whiskey. One of the “runners” took it and was about to pour the liquor out of the window, but I interfered, saying:--

“You have no right to pour his liquor out; he bought it and paid for it and worked hard to earn the money.”

“It is against the rules of the house to bring liquor into it.”

“Well, it is here now.”

“When he goes aboard, the mate of that ship will throw it overboard. The last time he went from here he carried a jug, and the mate of the ship took all their liquor away, for every man in the forecastle had a jug.”

“Well, the mate can do as he likes, but you shan’t pour it out.”

I put the jug back and sat down on the chest to wait for Ben. The “runners” did not succeed in finding him at his usual haunts, and, as time was pressing, another man was taken and Ben left behind. I knew he had a noble spirit of his own, and that taking liquor from him by force had accomplished nothing in the past, and I resolved to make an effort in another direction. I had some temperance tracts, written by the boatswain of an English man-of-war, discussing the evils of intemperance from the sailor’s standpoint, which I knew had produced impressions upon many sailors. I spread one of these over the jug, then took a Bible and opened to the twenty-ninth verse of the twenty-third chapter of Proverbs, locked the chest, and went away.

The doors of the Home were locked at twelve o’clock, and those who were not in by that time must stay out. Ben came home, as the watchman told me, about ten minutes before twelve pretty decidedly drunk. Finding himself safe in his room, he concluded as he was not going in the ship, and didn’t need the whiskey to carry to sea, he would have a good drink and turn in. Opening the chest, he saw the tract and read it, espied the Bible and read that, the result of which was that he turned in without tasting the whiskey. When he waked in the morning, he read the tract again, then took the jug, turned the liquor out of the window, and broke the vessel on the window-sill. At breakfast he told the “runners” what he had done. Upon this they told him of what had taken place the previous afternoon, and who had placed the tracts and Bible in his chest beside the rum jug. He then came into my room, the tears on his cheeks, exclaiming:--

“Parson, you wouldn’t let ’em pour out my whiskey.”

“No, Ben.”

“Well, I’ve poured it out and broke the jug, and so help me God not another drop of whiskey shall pass my lips. Rum and I have fell out. There’s two kinds of drunk, being drunk in the head and in the legs. I was drunk in the legs last night; I had all I could do to get upstairs, but my head was clear enough to read that tract and take the sense of it. The boatswain of that man-of-war talks well ’cause he talks from experience. I also read the Good Book and took the sense of that. I went to the “runners,” and they told me you wouldn’t let ’em pour out the whiskey. Ah, that took hold. I knew it wasn’t ’cause you wanted me to drink liquor that you wouldn’t let ’em pour it out. I knew you was a bitter enemy to liquor, but a good friend to the man who drinks it. Don’t think I’ve forgotten all the good words you’ve said to me during the four or five years I’ve been knocking about this house drunk. I’ve thought of ’em in the middle watch at sea when I was myself. I’ve thought of these bloodsuckers round this house trying to get my money away from me, to take the clothes off my back and the shoes off my feet, and you trying to get me out of their clutches and save my soul; and I’ve thought if ever I got ashore again, I’d ship in with you and sign the articles, and now I am going to do it.”

“Are you really determined to leave off drinking, or is it a mere impulse of the moment?”

“I never was more resolved to get drunk when I had come off a long voyage than I now am to keep sober.”

“You cannot do this in your own strength. I have known hundreds attempt it and fail; you do not, cannot realize the struggle it will cost. Let us ask help of God.”

We knelt down together. When I had finished, I asked him to pray; he said he could not.

“Then repeat the Lord’s Prayer with me; we are together in this thing and must both have our hands on the rope.” He did so, and added to it,” God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

“Your appetites and passions, Ben, have got you under their feet, and you must have help outside of yourself; so long as you seek it where we have sought it together this morning you will succeed.”

The next week he shipped for Australia. For five years I had seen him go from the house on different voyages, and he had always gone so intoxicated as to be barely able to sit in the wagon and unable to get aboard without help. The captain or mate would often say to the “runners”:--

“What did you bring that drunken fellow here for? I was to have good men from your place.” And the invariable reply would be:--

“Captain, he will be the best man in the ship when the rum’s out of him. He’s a bully man.”

This time he went aboard sober and fit for any duty, and came home as second mate of the ship. He was no longer Ben Bolt, but men who had been in the ship with him and whom he brought to the Home, called him Mr. Adams, William Adams.

Note these two characters so strikingly different in circumstances and in results.

George L., spoken of in “A Wasted Life,” after several struggles for victory over appetite, yielded and died by his own hand. William Adams conquered, continued steadfast through life, and accumulated property. George L. had youth on his side, a mother’s affection and many kind friends to encourage him, and he made shipwreck. Adams at forty years of age was a confirmed drunkard, all his associates were in the practice of the same vice, all leagued together to drag him back, and with but one friend to take him by the hand and encourage him to a better course. George L. had a home, his flute, books, and steady employment. He could attend lectures, find innocent amusement, and good society. Adams was in the narrow compass of a ship’s forecastle, where all the conversation among his shipmates was in respect to the debauchery they had practised while on shore and meant to practise again at the first opportunity. George L., if he had been so minded, could have turned down the next street and got clear of his evil companions, but Adams could not, and when the vessel arrived in a foreign port, and the crew had money given them and liberty to go ashore, the pressure was terrible. You may say, he could stay on board and let them go; so he did. But if you think this was an easy matter for a person of his previous habits, all I can say is, you don’t know what sailors are, and are entirely incapable of forming any conception of the strength of that instinct which leads a sailor to go with his shipmates either in good or evil. We talk about the strength of the college tie; the college tie is a spider’s web in the contrast.

Why, I have frequently known the whole watch in a crew of men who had just come off a long voyage to insist on sleeping in the same room, three in a bed, and the rest on the floor, because they had been so long together in the forecastle in the same watch; but after three or four nights they would pair off and take rooms two together.

All these trials, temptations, and discouragements Adams met and surmounted. I attribute the failure of George L. to the fact that he trusted in himself, and the success of Adams to the fact that he went out of himself at the very outset, went to God for aid. In his case it was the moral force supplementing the will that had become well-nigh powerless which decided a contest in which character, consideration, and happiness both here and hereafter, were at stake. All the talk at present is about forces of various kinds; but if a young man would have real force of character and wage a successful contest, let him seek for it where William Adams sought and found.

MA’AM PRICE

A notable woman was Ma’am Price who taught school in Portland, Maine; and Polly, her daughter, was a spunky piece and was ready with an answer to anybody. The schoolroom was in Ma’am Price’s own house that stood in Turkey Lane, so called from the following circumstance: Mr.----, who lived in that locality, invited the Reverend Samuel Deane to dine with him and partake of a turkey. The parson coming according to appointment found a Cape Cod turkey on the table,--a boiled salt fish. Notwithstanding the town christened the lane Newburg Street, the name Turkey Lane clave to the spot more than forty years.

When the British destroyed the town, Turkey Lane was directly in range of the enemy’s fire; and when Ma’am Price had removed her household stuff to a place of safety, Polly resolved to save her pig. A sea-captain who had assisted her advised her to turn the animal out to shift for itself, as Mowatt had opened fire, and it was not worth while to risk life to save a pig that was not likely to be hit by a cannon-ball. Polly, however, fastened a string to the creature’s leg and undertook to drive it a long mile to Bramhall’s Hill. The pig was obstinate, Polly determined, the progress necessarily slow. Meanwhile shells were bursting and flinging the dirt on Polly. One junk of earth struck the stick from her hand, and red-hot cannon-balls were whirring around her, but Polly was determined to save the pig, and save it she did.

Ma’am Price came to Portland from one of the West India Islands. She was a woman of culture, but very decided and strict in school discipline. If a boy refused to hold his head up, she fastened a fork under his chin. No trifling with her.

Some years after this she was obliged to suspend her school on account of an alarm of smallpox. A number of her scholars, among whom were my mother and uncles, were inoculated with smallpox virus, put in a pesthouse, and Ma’am Price, in whose experience and judgment the parents reposed the greatest confidence, employed to take care of them.

It was customary, before the discovery of Jenner, to inoculate with smallpox matter; but the patients being first put under a strict régime and properly and seasonably cared for, the disorder was not much more severe than varioloid. It was seldom that a patient died or was even pitted.

These young persons had been long kept on water gruel and were convalescent, when Hugh McLellan, by aid of friends outside, procured two lobsters. The whole company were around the table about to partake, when Ma’am Price made her appearance, and forbade them to take a mouthful, saying it would kill them. They were, however, resolved to eat, live or die. When unable to prevent them, for the boys were large, she took out her box that was filled full of yellow Scotch snuff, strewed it over the fish, and stirred it in with a spoon. Though provoked enough at the moment, they cherished no ill-will against her; at least I think not, when I recollect the number of presents the boys and girls, whose parents were Ma’am Price’s scholars, used to carry to Turkey Lane.

The good lady’s house was a great resort for captains of vessels, with whom her husband had been acquainted in the West Indies, and who brought her a great many presents,--fruit, shells, coral, eyestones, and vanilla beans. People who got anything in the eye would go to her to have an eyestone put in, and the old ladies went there for sweet-scented beans to put in their snuff-boxes.

We were everlastingly teasing to carry some present to Ma’am Price, and we found our account in so doing. She would put the eyestones in a saucer and pour in vinegar, when they would crawl all over the saucer. She would show us old pictures, needlework, and beautiful shells, and tell us stories about the West Indies and the pirates. And always when we carried a present, she gave us tamarind or guava jelly, or some West India fruit.

There was one fellow who thought--though doubtless it was just his silly notion--that the boy who carried the most acceptable present received the largest share of sweetmeats. So one time when he was going to the good woman’s with several other boys, and all he had to carry was a plate of doughnuts, while one of the others had a fifteen-pound turkey, he told that boy if he would present the doughnuts and let him present the turkey, he would give him two flounder hooks and a gray squirrel; thus they swapped. We all thought the other boy rather regretted it when going home, but he regretted it a good deal more about a week after when Ma’am Price came to call on their respective mothers and thanked his mother for “the nice plate of doughnuts” she sent her. Ma’am Price was very punctual and particular in returning her acknowledgments, and she did it like Britannia stooping to conquer.

I am now going to tell the most wonderful thing that ever happened to this excellent woman. One forenoon during recess she went into her little garden, picked a mess of beans in her apron, sat down in the schoolroom to shell them, and shelled out three diamonds. What a talk it did make! People came from all the towns round to hear the story and look at “the diamonds that grew in a bean pod.”

I hear some boy say, “That never could be; diamonds couldn’t grow in a bean pod.” I have quoted that as town talk, and Ma’am Price and Polly always thought they grew there. I believe, moreover, that she shelled them out of a bean pod; I shall stick to that. It’s not the least use for you to tell me she didn’t. Mrs. Commodore Preble saw her with her own eyes shell them out, and so did Mrs. Matthew Cobb who lived in the cottage on the eastern corner of High and Free streets. My mother said she did, and Mrs. James Deering said so too. Now, then, that’s not all. The very day before the old lady died Miss Sarah Jewett said to her: “Ma’am Price, did you truly shell those diamonds out of a bean pod? Hadn’t the pod been opened, or was it solid together like the other pods?”

“Bless you, Miss Jewett, how could I tell? You know folks don’t look at every bean or pea they shell, except there’s one that won’t open right. I was shelling away and looking at the children to see that they were all in their seats, when I felt something hard under my thumb and looked into my lap, and there were two little shining things among the beans, and another rolled out of the pod under my thumb when I took it up.”

Miss Jewett had one of the stones set in a ring that is now in the possession of William Gould of Windham. John Campbell, a relative of Polly’s, has another, and where the third is I do not know.

Whenever the children carried Ma’am Price a present, she would take the diamonds out of a cotton in which they were kept, lay them in her lap, and let the children handle them; after which she would tell how she shelled them out of the bean pod, and how surprised she was.

I suppose if I don’t try to explain this mystery, I shall have forty letters from boys inquiring how those diamonds came there. Well, my father said that a vessel came to Portland from Brazil, on board of which were several kinds of precious stones. The mate of the vessel was paying attention to Polly, and he stole them out of the cargo and put them in the bean. He dared not give them to Polly nor tell her about it because he stole them; but as they had only about a dozen bean vines, he knew she or her mother would find them after the vessel was gone, so he put them in the pod just as he was about to sail. The vessel was never heard from, and thus he never came back to claim Polly nor to tell her where the diamonds, which were not of any great value, came from, and Polly always thought they grew in the pod. This was my father’s solution of the mystery which made considerable of a stir at the time. As he knew all the parties and circumstances thoroughly, it seems the most probable explanation; for nobody ever doubted that Ma’am Price took them from the bean pod, and there were not many that believed they grew there, though some did and looked at it in the light of a special providence and provision for a worthy woman; the objections to which are that, though diamonds, they were rough diamonds, not much more valuable than quartz, and that Providence provided abundantly for the good woman in the affections of her scholars, who never suffered her to lack any comfort in her old age.

If Ma’am Price was severe in her management of scholars, she was not more so than the parents themselves, as the following anecdote will show. Captain Joseph McLellan had a thermometer, rather a rare thing in those days. His wife went to meeting one Sunday, leaving the boys, Joe and Stephen, at home. Stephen held the bulb of the thermometer to the fire to see the mercury rise, and by so doing broke it. They were well aware of the consequences. Joe told Stephen if he would give him fifty cents, he would tell his mother that he broke it and take the whipping, which he did. The next day the mother found out the true state of the case and whipped them both, Stephen for breaking the instrument, and Joe for telling a lie. These were the kind of women to handle unruly boys when the father was at sea.

THE DISCONTENTED BROOK

A DIALOGUE

In a province of Old Spain respecting which the inhabitants were wont to say that God had given them a fertile soil, a salubrious climate, brave men, and beautiful women, but He had not given them a good government lest they should not be willing to die and go to heaven, there were two lakes separated by an intervening mountain. Each had an outlet in a brook; and the two brooks, as they wound among the hills, ran near each other, so that they were enabled to converse together quite socially. They lay in the shadow of the hills among whose roots rose the river Guadalquiver. The chain sloped by degrees to a fertile plain covered with vineyards and olive trees. Fields of wheat surrounded the scattered dwellings of the peasants and the tents of shepherds whose flocks fed upon the mountains. The names of the brooks were Bono and Malo.

One pleasant night at the close of a very sultry day they met to pass the evening together; so, getting into a little eddy beneath the shade of some large chestnut trees, where the moonbeams which glanced tremulously through the foliage enabled them to see each other’s faces indistinctly, they thus spake in murmurs.

_Bono._ “What a beautiful evening, neighbor Malo, after such a sultry day! Yet I don’t know as I ought to speak ill of the weather, for it has enabled me to do much good, to water many beautiful flowers and fields of grain that otherwise would have perished.”

_Malo._ “I don’t know about that. Who thanked you for it? I have been this whole day,--yes, for the matter of that, my whole life,--running first here, then there, squeezed in flumes, tangled in water-wheels, pounded in fulling mills, flung over precipices till my neck was well-nigh broken. Again, I am kept broiling in the sun, and if I steal for a moment into the shade, I cannot stay there. I have almost boiled to-day journeying among hot rocks and over burning sands. And what thanks have I got for it? Do you know, neighbor Bono, the old peasant Alva?”

_Bono._ “Has he a daughter Lenore? Is his cottage shaded by two large cork trees? And is there a field of saffron between his house and the mill?”

_Malo._ “Just so.”

_Bono._ “I have known him these many years. His daughter keeps a few sheep and goats on the mountain and often drives them to my waters.”

_Malo._ “Well, only think! the old churl has been hoeing this morning among his saffron; so at noon he comes to me and goes down on his hands and knees to drink. Then he says, ‘I’ll bathe.’ So he bathes and, without saying as much as ’By your leave’ or ’God is good’ or anything of the sort, just puts on his clothes and walks off. Yet I have watered his fields and those of his ancestors for a thousand years, have often kept them from starving, and not one of them ever gave me even a look of gratitude. But I am resolved to do so no more. I won’t wear out my life for those who give me no thanks. I mean in the future to keep my waters to myself and to water no one but myself.”

_Bono._ “Well, neighbor Malo,” replies Bono, with a murmur so sweet that the nightingale who was saying her evening prayers in the almond tree stopped to listen, “I cannot feel as you do, neither do I wish to. I have, indeed, had some weary times, especially, as you say, to-day, and sometimes have been almost dried up. But I know what my duty is; God made me to water the earth and the plants. It would be pleasant to receive gratitude, but if we cannot have that, there is one thing we can always have,--the happiness of feeling that we have done our duty.”

_Malo._ “Duty! This is fine talking, but I heed it no more than the song of that nightingale. What duty do I owe to that old peasant or any of his kin? To the earth or the plants? What good have they ever done me?”

_Bono._ “But, neighbor Malo, the duty I speak of is not to them but to God. I have, as you very well know, turned the mills of Henrique these forty years, and also the fulling mills of Gonzalez, his nephew. As I said before, this old Alva’s daughter, who used you so scurvily, both waters and washes her sheep in my stream. Not one of these people ever thanked me; yet I love very much to see their sheep fat, their lambs frisking on the hills, and their families thriving. I indeed enjoy their happiness as though it were my own.”

_Malo._ “By this crouching spirit you invite insult and aggression.”

_Bono._ “But are we not as well off in this respect as our neighbors? The earth bringeth not forth fruit for itself; the ocean shares not in the profits of the voyage. Who thanks the patient ox for dragging the plough all his life? The sheep gives her fleece to clothe them and then has her throat cut and her skin pulled over her ears, and not so much as ’Thank you’ or ’By your leave’ to it all. You and I have not thanked God for this pleasant moonlight, this sweet shade, and these flowers that perfume our banks. He, without any thanks, causes ’his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ Surely then we, His instruments, ought not to complain who are so forgetful ourselves.”

_Malo._ “You are a very noisy brook as everybody knows, but I am determined to take care of myself. I shall go home and stay at home. And you, who are as full of Scripture as a brook is of pebbles, ought to know that charity begins at home.”

_Bono._ “True, but it does not stay there. I shall be sorry to lose your company; we have run together so long, but if you are resolved to benefit only yourself, I am just as firmly resolved to benefit others; yes, the last drop--I will share even that with the faint and the thirsty.”