Chapter I: AM proud of my acquaintance with Dobbs (1)

He was a hero, whose deeds were not spread upon any of the books of men, but whose martyrdom I am sure illustrates a glowing page in God’s great life book.

I met him late one night.

The paper, with its burden of news and gossip, had just been put to press, and I strolled out of the hot, clanking room to catch a sight of the cool morning stars, and a whiff of the dew-laden breezes of the dawn.

Silhouetted against the intercepted stars, I saw a tall and striking form, standing like a statue on the corner.

As I came out of the door the figure approached.

“Is this the _Herald_ office, sir?”

“Yes, sir. Can I serve you in any way?”

“Well—” hesitating for an instant, and then speaking boldly and sharply, “I wanted to know if you could not trust me for a few papers?”

“I suppose so; walk in to the light.”

I shall never forget the impression Dobbs made on me that night, as we two walked in from the starlight to the glare of the gas-burners.

A BLAZE OF HONESTY.

As I have said before, he had a tall and striking figure. His face was ugly. He was ungraceful, ragged, and uncouth. Yet there was a splendid glow of honesty that shone from every feature, and challenged your admiration. It was not that cheap honesty that suffuses the face of your average honest man; but a vivid burst of light that, fed by principle, sent its glow from the heart. It was not the passive honesty that is the portion of men who have no need to steal, but the triumphant honesty that has grappled with poverty, with disease, with despair, and conquered the whole devil’s brood of temptation; the honesty that has been sorely tried, the honesty of martyrdom; the honesty of heroism. He was the honestest man I ever knew.

THE PATHOS OF INCONGRUITY.

There was one feature of his dress that was pathetic in its uniqueness. He wore a superb swallow-tail dress-coat; a gorgeous coat, which was doubtless christened at some happy wedding (his father’s, I suppose); had walked side by side with dainty laces; been swept through stately quadrilles, pressed upon velvet, and to-night came to me upon a shirtless back, and asked “trust” for a half-dozen newspapers.

It had that seedy, threadbare look which makes broadcloth, after its first season, the most melancholy dress that sombre ingenuity ever invented. It was scrupulously brushed and buttoned close up to the chin, whether to hide the lack of a shirt, I never in the course of six months’ intimate acquaintance had the audacity to inquire. In the sleeve, on which rosy wrists had, in days gone by, laid in loving confidence, a shriveled arm hung loosely, and from its outlet three decrepit fingers driveled. His hat was old, and fell around his ears.

His breeches, of a whitish material, which had the peculiarity of leaving the office perfectly dirty one evening and coming back pure and clean the next morning. What amount of midnight scrubbing this required from my hero Dobbs, I will not attempt to tell. Neither will I guess how he became possessed of that wonderful coat. Whether in the direst days of the poverty which had caught him, his old mother, pitying her boy’s rags, had fished it up from the bottom of a trunk where, with mayhaps an orange-wreath or a bit of white veil, it had lain for years, the last token of a happy bridal night, and, baptizing it with her tears, had thrown it around his bare shoulders, I cannot tell. All I know is, that taken in connection with the rest of his attire, it was startling in its contrast; and that I honored the brave dignity with which he buttoned this magnificent coat against his honest rags, and strode out to meet the jeers of the world and work out a living.

FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK.

I knew Dobbs for six months! Day after day I saw him come at three o’clock in the morning. I saw his pale face, and that coat so audacious in its fineness, go to the press-room, fold his papers, and hurry out into the weather. One night I stopped him.

“Dobbs,” says I, “how much do you make a week?”

“I average five dollars and twenty cents, sir. I have twenty-seven regular customers. I get the paper at fifteen cents a week from you, and sell it to them at twenty-five cents. I make two dollars and seventy cents off of them, and then I sell about twenty-five extra papers a morning.”

“What do you do with your money?”

“It takes nearly all of it to support me and mother.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you and your mother live on five dollars and twenty cents a week?”

“Yes, sir, we do, and pay five dollars a month rent out of that. We live pretty well, too,” with a smile, possibly induced by the vision of some of those luxuries which were included under the head of “living pretty well.” I was crushed!

_Five dollars and twenty-five cents a week!_ The sum which I waste per week upon cigars. The paltry amount which I pay almost any night at the theater. The sum that I spend any night I may chance to strike a half-dozen boon companions. This sum, so contemptible to me—wasted so lightly—I find to be the sum total of the income of a whole family—the whole support of two human beings.

I left Dobbs, humiliated and crushed. I pulled my hat over my eyes, strolled down to Mercer’s, and bought a twenty-five cent cigar and sat down to think over my duty in the premises.

* * * * *

... One morning the book-keeper of the _Herald_, to whom my admiration for Dobbs was well known (I having frequently delivered glowing lectures upon his character from the mailing table to an audience of carriers, clerks, and printers), approached me and with a devilish smack of joy in his voice, says:

“I am afraid your man Dobbs is a fraud. Some time ago he persuaded the clerk to give him credit on papers. He ran up a bill of about seven dollars, and then melted from our view. We have not seen or heard of him since—expect he’s gone to trading with the _Constitution_ now, to bilk them out of a bill.”

This looked bad—but somehow or other I still had a firm faith in my hero. God had written “honesty” too plain in his face for my confidence in him to be shaken. I knew that if he had sinned or deceived, that it was starvation or despair that had driven him to it, and I forgave him even before I knew he was guilty....

* * * * *

About a week after this happened, a bombazine female—one of those melancholy women that occasionally arise like some Banquo’s ghost in my pathway, and always, I scarce know why, put remorse to twitching at my heart-strings—came into my sanctum and asked for me.

“I am the mother,” says she, in a voice which sorrow (or snuff) had filled with tears and quavers—“of Mr. Dobbs, a young man who used to buy papers from you. He left owing you a little, and asked me to see you about it.”

“Left? Where has he gone?”

“To heaven, I hope, sir! He is dead!”

“Dead?”

A CONSCIENTIOUS DEBTOR.

“Yes, sir; my poor boy went last Thursday. He were all I had on earth, but he suffered so it seemed like a mercy to let him go. He were worried to the last about a debt he was owin’ of you. He said you had been clever to him, and would think hard ef he didn’t pay you. He wanted you to come and see him so he could explain as how he were took down with the rheumatizum, but that were no one to nuss him while I come for you. He had owin’ to him when he were took, about three dollars, which he have an account of in this little book. He told me with his last breath to cullect this money, and not to use a cent tell I had paid you, and if I didn’t git enough, to turn you over the book. I hev took in one dollar and tirty cents, and”—with the air of one who has fought the good fight—“here it is!” So saying, she ran her hand into a gash in the bombazine, which looked like a grievous wound, and pulled out one of those long cloth purses that always reminded me of the entrails of some unfortunate dead animal, and counted out the money. This she handed me with the book.

I ran my eye over the ruggedly kept accounts and found that each man owed from a dime up to fifty cents.

“Why, madam,” says I, “these accounts are not worth collecting.”

“That’s what he was afraid of,” says she, moving toward a bundle that lay upon the floor; “he told me if you said so, to give you this, and ask you to sell it if you could, and make your money. It’s all he had, sir, or me, either, and he wouldn’t die easy ’til I told him I wud do it! God knows”—and the tears rolled down her thin and hollow cheeks—“God knows it were a struggle to promise to give it up. He wore it, and his father before him. How many times it has covered ’em both! I had hoped to carry it to the end with me, and wrap my old body in it when I died. But it was all we had which was fine, and he wouldn’t rest ’til I told him I wud give it to you. Then he smiled as pert-like as a child, and kissed me, and says, ‘Now I am ready to go!’ He were a good boy, sir, as ever lived”—and she rocked her old body to and fro with her grief. Need I say that she had offered me the old dress-coat? That sacred garment, blessed with the memory of her son and his father, and which, rather than give up, she would willingly pluck either of the withered arms that hung at her sides from its socket!

I dropped my eyes to the account book again—for what purpose I am not ashamed that the reader may guess.

In a few moments I spoke:

“Madam, I was mistaken in the value of these accounts; most of the debtors on this book, I find upon a second look, are capitalists. The $11 worth of accounts will sell for $12 anywhere. Your son owed me $7. Leave the book with me; I will pay myself, and here is $5 balance which I hand to you. Your son was a good boy, and I feel honored that I can serve his mother.”

She folded the old coat up and departed.

I kept the book.

It was a simple record of Dobbs’s life. Here ran his expense list—a dreary trickle of “bacon” and “meal” and “rent,” enlivened only once with “sugar”; a saccharine suggestion that I am unable to account for, as it surely did not comport with either of the staples that formed the basis of his life. Probably, on some grand occasion, he and his mother ate it in the lump.

Here were his accounts, of say fifty cents each, on men accounted responsible in the world’s eye—accounts for papers furnished through snow, and sleet, and rain! Some of them showed signs of having been called for a dozen times, being frescoed with such notes as “Call Tuesday,” “Call Wednesday,” “Call Thursday,” etc.

On another page was a pathetic list of delusive liniments and medicines, with which he had attacked his stubborn disease. Such as, “King of Pane—kored a man in Maryetti in 2 days, $1.00”; “Magic Linament—kores in 10 minnits, $2.00 a bottel”; and so on through the whole catalogue of snares which the patent office turns out year after year. Poor fellow! the only relief he got from his racking pains was when God laid his healing hand on him.

I shall keep the book as long as I live.

In its thumbed and greasy leaves is written the record of a heroism more lofty and a martyrdom more lustrous than ever lit the page of book before or since.

I think I shall have it printed in duplicate, and scattered as leaven throughout the lumpy Sunday-school libraries of the land.

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A CORNER LOT.

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“HE has been at that for thirteen years.”

And the speaker laughed as he watched an old man gathering up a bucket of stones and broken bricks. The old man continued his work until his bucket was filled, and then started back toward Spring Street, stopping on the way to resurrect a rusted old hoop that was nearly buried in the gutter.

After walking about three blocks he stopped at the corner of Spring and James streets, and laying the rusty hoop carefully upon a great heap of hoops of all kinds and sizes, he carried the bucket to the back of his lot, a part of which was considerably lower than the front, and emptied the bucketful of bricks and stones.

He was a very old man—about seventy years old, apparently—in his shirt-sleeves, and wearing a dingy straw hat. He was feeble, too, and his steps were slow, but he stopped only to get a drink of water at the back door, and then ambled off with the empty bucket.

The little frame structure is half store and half residence. Just inside the door to the store sat a portly old lady of sixty or thereabouts. “Who is that old man yonder with that empty bucket?”

“Him! Why that’s old man Lewis Powell, and he’s my husband. I thought everybody knowed him.”

“Is that all he does?”

“Fill up the lot, you mean? No, no, he puts hoops on barrels and kegs, and raises calves and such like, but that’s his main business. He’s been at it now for nigh on to fourteen years.”

“And how much has he filled in?”

“Oh, from the sidewalk on back. The lot is fifty by eighty, and it used to be just one big hole. Now here on Spring Street where the front is, the bank went nearly straight down ’cause the eye of the sewer was right there. Then the sewer was open and run in a gully the whole length of the lot, and just about in the middle of the lot. Here on James Street, at the side there, it wasn’t so steep. The front of the old house was about half-way down the bank, and the pillars at the back was over ten feet high. The house wasn’t more’n twelve feet that way, either, so you can tell how steep it was. And right at the back door the sewer passed.”

“How deep was it?”

“Well, right here at the front the city men measured to the sewer once, and it was a little over twenty feet below the sidewalk. The back of the lot was a little lower. It was one big hole fifty by eighty, and almost in the bottom of it was the old house.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“Fourteen years ago we bought it from Jack Smith on time. It wasn’t much, but me and Jenny and Joe and Stella just buckled down and worked like tigers. The neighbors made fun of us at first, and even the niggers thought it was funny. Now, I aint telling you this because I’m stuck up about it, but it just shows what the Powell family has done, and it shows what any poor folks can do if they just stick at it.”

“Didn’t the old man help?”

“Yes, a little. But we had to live, and then he spent lots of his time a-fillin’ up, so the brunt of the money part fell on me and the children. We bought the mudhole, and he made the mudhole what it is now. Right here where the mudhole was there is a corner lot, and them what used to laugh at us would like mighty well to own it now.”

And the old lady smiled as though the thought was a very pleasant one.

“Yes, sir,” she continued, “it’s worth a good deal now, and the first thing you know, when the streets get paved along here, it will be worth a lot more than it is now.”

“And the old man?”

“The old man has worked mighty faithful. Little at a time he has fetched dirt, and rocks, and bricks, and trash. Then the city put a pipe there for the sewer, and he begun at the sidewalk on Spring Street and filled back. The bank kept getting further and further, and after, I don’t know how long, we built this little house on the filled-in part. The old man kept fillin’ back till we’ve got a pretty big back yard; and there’s only a little part left to fill back there. You see, he never tore up the old house—the patchwork palace of ’77—just throwed in around it and in it till he has almost buried it.”

“Why?”

“Oh, it’s just a notion of his. He didn’t want to see the old house tore up, and there it is now, with just the roof stickin’ out. In a little while it will be one level yard, fifty by eighty, and a corner lot, too. And by the time it all gets filled up—well, me and the old man is gettin’ feeble now, and we won’t last much longer. But, now that we are all out of debt, and just enough left to do to keep the old man’s hand in, it does me good to think of that old mudhole, and how we had to save and slave and pinch to pay for it. And I think the old man likes to stand there at the corner and look back how level and smooth it is, and think how it was done, a handful at a time, through the rain and the snow and the sunshine. Fourteen years! It was a big job, but we stuck to it, and I’m restin’ now, for my work is done. The old man don’t work like he used to, but he says his job aint finished yet, and he keeps fillin’ up.”

“And when his work is done—”

“Then he’ll rest, too.”

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THE ATHEISTIC TIDE SWEEPING OVER THE CONTINENT.

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THE THREATENED DESTRUCTION OF THE SIMPLE FAITH OF THE FATHERS BY THE
VAIN DECEITS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.—AN ATTACK CHRISTIANS MUST MEET.

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[WRITTEN FOR THE CONSTITUTION, 1881.]

NEW YORK, January 26.—The dread of the times, as I see it, is the growing skepticism in the leading circles of thought and action throughout the country—a swelling tide of atheism and unbelief that has already swept over the outposts of religion.

I am not alarmed by the fact that Henry Ward Beecher shook hands with Ingersoll on a public stand, and has since swung beyond the limit of orthodoxy, any more than I am reassured by the fact that Stephen H. Tyng has, by indorsing the miracles at Lourdes, swung back into the stronghold of superstition. These are mere personal expressions that may mean much or little. They may be classed with the complaint of Dr. Talmage that he found religion dead in a circuit of 3000 miles of travel last year, which complaint is balanced by the assertion of Dr. Hall that the growth of religious sentiment was never so decisive as at present.

I have noted, in the first place, that the latter-day writers—novelists, scientists and essayists—are arraying themselves in great force either openly on the side of skepticism, or are treating religious sentiment with a readiness of touch and lack of reverence, that is hardly less dangerous. I need not run over the lists of scientists, beginning with Tyndall, Huxley and Stephens, that have raised the banner of negation—nor recount the number of novelists who follow the lead of sweet George Eliot, this sad and gentle woman, who allied sentiment to positivism so subtly, and who died with the promise on her lips that her life would “be gathered like a scroll in the tomb, unread forever”—who said that she “wanted no future that broke the ties of the past,” and has gone to meet the God whose existence she denied. We all know that within the past twenty years there has been an alarming increase of atheism among the leading writers in all branches. But it is the growth of skepticism among the people that has astonished me.

I am not misled by the superb eloquence of Ingersoll nor the noisy blasphemy of his imitators. I was with five journalists, and I found that every one of them were skeptics, two of them in the most emphatic sense. In a sleeping-car with eight passengers, average people I take it, I found that three were confirmed atheists, three were doubtful about it, and two were old-fashioned Christians. A young friend of mine, a journalist and lecturer, asked me a few months ago what I thought of his preparing a lecture that would outdo Ingersoll—his excuse being that he found Ingersoll so popular. I asked Henry Watterson once what effect Ingersoll’s lectures had on the Louisville public. “No more than a theatrical representation,” was the quick reply. Watterson was wrong. I have never seen a man who came away from an Ingersoll lecture as stout of faith and as strong in heart as he was when he went there.

I do not know that this spirit of irreligion and unbelief has made much inroad on the churches. It is as yet simply eating away the material upon which the churches must recruit and perpetuate themselves. There is a large body of men and women, the bulk probably of our population, that is between the church and its enemies; not members of the church or open professors of religion, they have yet had reverence for the religious beliefs, have respected the rule of conscience, and believed in the existence of one Supreme Being. These men and women have been useful to the cause of religion, in that they held all the outposts about the camp of the church militant, and protected it with enwrapping conservatism and sympathy. It is this class of people that are now yielding to the assaults of the infidel. Having none of the inspiration of religion, and possessing neither the enthusiasm of converts nor the faith of veterans, they are easily bewildered and overcome. It is a careless and unthinking multitude on which the atheists are working, and the very inertia of a mob will carry thousands if the drift of the mass once floats to the ocean. And the man or woman who rides on the ebbing tide goes never to return. Religious beliefs once shattered are hardly mended. The church may reclaim its sinners, but its skeptics, never.

It is not surprising that this period of critical investigation into all creeds and beliefs has come. It is a logical epoch, come in its appointed time. It is one of the penalties of progress. We have stripped all the earth of mystery, and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitched its crucible for an analysis of the soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine—a vastness and vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret; felt its most secret pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed it and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstrated; what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth, and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself, and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders as the shores of a star that lights the space beyond our vision are to us to-day; the Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder; ships that were freighted from the heart of Africa lie in our harbor, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders at Babel; a letter slips around the earth in ninety days, and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean; we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined; we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe. Fit time is this, then, for science to make its last and supreme assault—to challenge the last and supreme mystery—defy the last and supreme force. And the church may gird itself for the conflict! As the Pope has said, “It is no longer a rebel that threatens the church. It is a belligerent!” It is no longer a shading of creed. It is the upsettal of all creeds that is attempted.

It is impossible to conceive the misery and the blindness that will come in the wake of the spreading atheism. The ancients witnessed the fall of a hundred creeds, but still had a hundred left. The vast mystery of life hung above them, but was lit with religions that were sprinkled as stars in its depths. From a host of censers was their air made rich with fragrance, and warmed from a field of altars. No loss was irreparable. But with us it is different. We have reached the end. Destroy our one belief and we are left hopeless, helpless, blind. Our air will be odorless, chill, colorless. Huxley, the leader of the positivists, himself confesses—I quote from memory: “Never, in the history of man, has a calamity so terrific befallen the race, as this advancing deluge, black with destruction, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.” And yet Mr. Huxley urges on this deluge with furious energy. The aggressiveness of the atheists is inexplicable to me. Why they should insist on destroying a system that is pure and ennobling, when they have nothing to replace it with; why they should shatter a faith that colors life, only to leave it colorless; why they should rob life of all that makes life worth living; why they should take away the consolation that lifts men and women from the despair of bereavement and desolation, or the light that guides the feet of struggling humanity, or the hope that robs even the grave of its terror,—why they should do all this, and then stand empty-handed and unresponsive before the yearning and supplicating people they have stripped of all that is precious, is more than I can understand. The best atheist, to my mind, that I ever knew, was one who sent his children to a convent for their education. “I cannot lift the blight of unbelief from my own mind,” he said, “but it shall never fall upon the minds of my children if I can help it. As for me, I would give all I have on earth for the old faith that I wore so lightly and threw off so carelessly.”

The practical effects of the growth of atheism are too terrible to contemplate. A vessel on an unknown sea that has lost its rudder and is tossed in a storm—that’s the picture. It will not do for Mr. Ingersoll to say that a purely human code of right and wrong can be established to which the passions of men can be anchored and from which they can swing with safety. It will not do for him to cite his own correct life or the correct lives of the skeptical scientists, or of leading skeptics, as proof that unbelief does not bring license. These men are held to decency by a pride of position and by a sense of special responsibility. It is the masses that atheism will demoralize and debauch. It is thousands of simple men and women, who, loosed of the one restraint that is absolute and imperious, will drift upon the current of their passions, colliding everywhere, and bringing confusion and ruin. The vastly greatest influence that religion has exercised, as far as the world goes, has been the conservative pressure that it has put upon the bulk of the people, who are outside of the church. With the pressure barely felt and still less acknowledged, it has preserved the integrity of society, kept the dangerous instincts within bounds, repressed savagery, and held the balance. Conscience has dominated men who never confessed even to themselves its power, and the dim, religious memories of childhood, breathing imperceptibly over long wastes of sin and brutality, have dissolved clouds of passion in the souls of veterans. Atheism will not work its full effect on this class of men. Even after they have murdered conscience by withholding the breath upon which it lives, its ghost will grope through the chambers of their brain, menacing and terrible, and to the last,—

Creeping on a broken wing
Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear!

It is on the young men and women—the generation bred in the chill atmosphere of unbelief—that atheism will do its worst. With no traditions in which to guide their faith, no altar before which they can do reverence, no ideal to which their eyes can turn, no standard lofty enough to satisfy, or steadfast enough to assure—with no uplifting that is not limited, no aspiration that has wings, and no enthusiasm that is not absurd—with life but a fever that kindles in the cradle and dies in the grave,—truly atheism meets youth with a dread prospect, sullen, storm-swept, hopeless.

In the conflict that is coming, the church is impregnable, because the church is right; because it is founded on a rock. The scientists boast that they have evolved everything logically from the first particles of matter; that from the crystal rock to sentient man is a steady way, marked by natural gradations. They even say that, if a new bulk were thrown off from the sun to-morrow it would spin into the face of the earth, and the same development that has crowned the earth with life would take place in the new world. And yet Tyndall says: “We have exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, and yet a mighty mystery looms up before us.” And this mystery is the kindling of the atoms of the brain with the vital spark. There science is baffled, for there is the supreme force that is veiled eternally from the vision of man.

The church is not bound to the technicalities of argument in this contest. It has the perfect right to say, and say logically, that something must rest on faith—that there must be something in the heart or soul before conviction can be made perfect. Just as we cannot impress with the ecstasies and transports of earthly love a man who has never loved, or paint a rainbow to a man who has never seen. And yet the time has passed when religion can dismiss the skeptic with a shriek or a sneer. I read one little book a year ago, gentle, firm, decisive; a book that demonstrated the necessity and existence of the Supreme Being, as clearly and as closely as a mathematical proposition was worked out. But the strength of the church is, after all, the high-minded consistency of its members; the warmth and earnestness of its evangelism; the purity and gentleness of its apostles. If the creeds are put at peace, and every man who wears the Christian armor will go forth to plead the cause of the meek and lowly Nazarene, whose love steals into the heart of man as the balm of flowers into the pulses of a summer evening—then we shall see the hosts of doubt and skepticism put to rout.

Of course I have no business to write all this. It is the province of the preachers to talk of these things, and many no doubt will resent as impertinent even the suggestion of a worldling. And yet it seems so sure to me that in the swift and silent marshaling of the hosts of unbelief and irreligion there is presaged the supremest test that the faith of Christians has ever undergone, that I felt impelled to write. There are men, outside of the active workers of the church, who have all reverence for its institutions and love for its leaders; whose hearts are stirred now and then by a faith caught at a mother’s knee, or the memory of some rapt and happy moment; who want to live, if not in the fold of the chosen, at least in the shadow of the Christian sentiment, and among the people dominated by Christian faith; and who hope to die at last, in the same trust and peace that moved the dying Shakespeare—wisest, sweetest mind ever clothed in mortal flesh—when he said: “I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”

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ON THE OCEAN WAVE.

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AN AMATEUR’S EXPERIENCE ON A STEAMSHIP.

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A VERY TALL STORY.—THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS.—A SIDE VIEW OF
SEA-SICKNESS.—THE SIGHT OF THE OCEAN.—LAND AT LAST AND GLAD OF IT.

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[SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE COURIER.]

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 20, 1876.—The ocean is a greatly exaggerated affair. About four years ago, my friend Charles I. Graves and myself were sitting on a country fence, in Floyd County, after the manner of lizards, drinking in the sunshine, when a wagon containing a small box wheeled past us. It had hardly got abreast us when my friend dropped from his comfortable perch as if he were shot, and rushed to the wagon. Then ensued a remarkable scene. You have all seen a well-bred country dog meet a city dog on some green highway. You know with what hurried circumspection he smells the stranger at all points. So did my friend approach the little square box on the wagon. He sniffed at it as if “he would draw his soul through his nose.” I examined the ugly little box closely. It was marked

TO MR. BERCKMANS,

MONT ALTO, NEAR ROME,

GA., U.S.A.

It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.

My friend explained to me, after his rhapsody was over, that the box having been brought across the ocean in the hold of a steamer, retained a subtle scent of bilge-water, that brought the sea with all its dangerous fascination back to him—he having served all his young life before the mast. He was, at this writing, a plain, staid farmer, content among his cattle and clover. And yet that sharp, briny, saline flavor, thrown on the bosom of the still country breeze, put a restless devil in his breast. It was as if a born gallant, exiled for a decade to the heart of some desert, should, near the expiration of his sentence, stumble upon a cambric handkerchief, redolent with the perfume of a lady’s boudoir. In less than two years after the sight or rather the smell of that box my friend had sold his plantation, convinced his wife, and gone to the ocean again. Had Dr. Berckmans been content to drink native wine, Mr. Graves would yet be alternating cotton with clover, in the peaceful valley of the Etowah.

After this strong proof of the fascination that the sea has for its votaries, I achieved a strong desire to try it for myself. It renewed in my mature days the wild ambition that put turmoil into my schoolboy life, after I had read “Lafitte, or the Pirate of the Gulf.”

I have longed for many a day to run a “gore” into each leg of my pantaloons, roll back my collar, tousle my hair, fold my cloak about my shoulders, and stand before the mast in a stiff breeze, and there read Byron with one eye, and with the other watch the effect of the tableau on the female passengers.

I never had a chance to gratify the desire until lately. I never saw the ocean until the trip that results in this letter; I shall never forget the impression it made on me.

I had imagined that it would be a moment of ecstasy. I had believed that my soul, in the glad recognition of something as infinite, as illimitable as itself, would laugh with joy, and leap to my lips, and burn in my fingers, and tingle in my veins. I wisely reserved the first sight until we had steamed out beyond the land, and then with the air of one who unchains himself, I raised my head and looked out to the future. There, as far as the eye could reach, aye, and way beyond, as if mocking the finiteness of sight, stretched the blue waters. Ah! how my fine-spun fancies crumbled and came tumbling back on me in dire confusion! My soul literally shriveled! My very imagination was cowed and driven to its corner, and I sat there dumb and trembling!

No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand, even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and pronounce its uttermost boundary.

I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death; certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the crowd again.

I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”

The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by white-hot pincers.

HOW SEA-SICKNESS WORKS.

I believe I have said somewhere in this letter that my soul didn’t leap to my lips when I went out to meet the ocean. I regret to say that my breakfast did. I do not know whether any writer has addressed himself to sea-sickness. I am certain that no writer of sacred or profane literature can do it sufficient injustice. Walt Whitman might do it. He’s better on the yawp than any poet I know. Never tell me again that hell is a lake of fire and brimstone. Eternal punishment means riding on a rough sea, in a steamer that don’t roll well, without a copper-bottomed stomach, and a self-acting stop-valve in the throat. To have been jostled about in a lake of fire would have been real cheerful business compared to the unutterable anguish that I suffered for three days. I do believe that if I had tied a cannon-ball to a crumb of bread and swallowed them both, the crumb would have come prancing to the front again, and brought the cannon-ball with it. It at last became a sort of dismal joke to send anything down. But this was not what made it so hard to bear. It was the abject degradation that it brought upon me. The absolute prostration of every mental, moral and physical activity, of every emotion, impulse and ambition; the reduction of a system that boasted of some nervous power and of excessive tone, to the condition of a wet dish-clout,—these were the things that made sea-sickness a misery beyond the power of words. For three days I lay like an old volcano, still, desolate and haggard; but with an exceedingly active crater. I was brought to that condition which Chesterfield says is the finest pitch to which a gentleman can be brought, that sublime pitch of indifference that enables him to hear of the loss of an estate, or a poodle dog, with the same feeling. Nothing disturbs the man who is sea-sick. He blinks in the face of disaster, and yawps at death itself. He actually longs for sensation. To stick him with a pin, or drop ice down his back, would be a mercy. He spraddles madly over the ship, flabbing himself like a mollusk over everything he stumbles on, and knows not night or morning. As far as I was concerned, I was seized with a yawning that came very near proving fatal. I was taken with a longing to turn myself wrong-side outwards, and hang myself on the taffrail. Several times I was on the point of doing it; but I struggled against it and saved myself.

THE SIGHTS OF THE SEA.

The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard to bring everything down to this standard.

The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness. The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.

We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that world of wonders that began with the syrens, was modernized with the mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous. Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.

THE LOVERS AND THE PILOT.

The intercourse between the passengers was not pleasant. We got tired of each other. The fact that none of us could get on or off, gave us a sort of feeling that we were prisoners; or, when locked up at night in our berths, that we were animals traveling in the same menagerie; brought together by chance, and held together through necessity.

There was one couple on board that won my attention. It was a man, full-grown, handsome and accomplished, but with the deep furrows in his brow that always come after a man has wrestled with the world; and the girl not more than fifteen years of age. The girl had not worn off the subtle bloom of childhood that gave her grace and glow, as the dew-chrism of early dawn graces the lily. She was not beautiful, after the approved models, but there was an elastic freshness, a bright charm that would have put beauty to the blush. She was brimming with the splendid and tender divinity that fills the odorous buds just before they burst into life’s beauty. She was full of spring. She carried its balms about with her, its aroma hung about her skirts, and its auroral light illuminated her very being. She was April, with all its joys and all its happy tears—its dear restlessness, and its thrills. I marveled to see how the man of affairs loved her. It annoyed me to see how this man, with all his vast concerns, his rugged schemes, his vaulting ambition, bowed down at the feet of a child. It was a very miracle of love that centered all the impulses, aspirations, hopes, and endeavors of this man of the world in a bright slip of a girl. She understood her power, too; and taking the reins of affairs in her little fingers, carried herself with a pretty imperiousness. Not always was she mistress, though. Once in awhile I noticed, when he held her beneath his words, her eyes softened and fell, and she sat half absorbed and trembling, thrilling under an ecstasy that stirred her soul to its very depths, and yet left her unconscious of what it meant or from what it came. I watched this couple with a strange interest, and my heart went out to the child. But beyond this there was nothing interesting on shipboard. The people were all tame. They seemed to have been planted on the ship, and grown there. They were all indigenous; and hence, when the pilot—a breezy fellow, by the way—jumped on board just outside of New York, he brought with him the charm of a rare exotic, and actually acquired a sort of game flavor, by being a stranger.

SOME CONCLUSIONS NOT JUMPED AT.

Altogether, a trip on the ocean is a very great bore. It does not compare to the cozy and bustling comforts of an inland trip, especially if one have the benefits of a Pullman.

The ocean is meant to be looked at and enjoyed—from the shore, or through books. You may see more of it by going on board a ship. It is pretty apt to see more of you, though, than you do of it. There are many moments during the first day or two, when, leaning over the taffrail, you yawp into its face, that it can see clear through to your boots. That’s the way it was with

JOHN, JR.

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TWO MEN WHO HAVE THRILLED THE STATE.

AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING ON THE STREET, IN WHICH TWO GREAT MEN ARE
RECOGNIZED AS THE TYPES OF TWO CLASHING THEORIES—TOOMBS’S
SUCCESSES—BROWN’S JUDGMENT.

THE other day I saw two men meet on the street, bow cordially, and pass. I was struck by the contrast between them—by the difference in their walk, appearance and manner. This suggested that the contrast in their lives, in their lineage and their methods, was even greater than their physical make-up. And then, forgetting for the moment that a gubernatorial campaign of great fierceness was raging, I fell to wondering if there had ever been two masterful men whose paths lay near each other, and whose performance was so nearly equal, who had been born in such dissimilar conditions, and moved by such dissimilar motives. Joe Brown and Bob Toombs! Both illustrious and great—both powerful and strong—and yet at every point, and from every view, the perfect opposites of each other.

Through two centuries have two strains of blood, two conflicting lines of thought, two separate theories of social, religious and political life, been working out the two types of men, which have in our day flowered into the perfection of contrast—vivid, thorough pervasive. For seven generations the ancestors of Joe Brown have been aggressive rebels; for a longer time the Toombs have been dauntless and intolerant followers of the king and kingliness. At the siege of Londonderry—the most remarkable fasting match beyond Tanner—Margaret and James Brown, grandparents of the James Brown who came to America and was grandparent of Joe Brown, were within the walls starving and fighting for William and Mary; and I have no doubt there were hard-riding Toombs outside the walls charging in the name of the peevish and unhappy James. Certain it is that forty years before, the direct ancestors of General Toombs on the Toombs estate were hiding good King Charles in the oak at Boscabel, where, I have no doubt, the father and uncles of the Londonderry Brown, with cropped hair and severe mien, were proguing about the place with their pikes, searching every bush, in the name of Cromwell and the psalm-singers. From these initial points sprang the two strains of blood—the one affluent, impetuous, prodigal, the other slow, resolute, forceful. From these ancestors came the two men—the one superb, ruddy, fashioned with incomparable grace and fulness; the other pale, thoughtful, angular, stripped down to bone and sinew. From these opposing theories came the two types—the one patrician, imperious, swift in action and brooking no stay; the other democratic, sagacious, jealous of rights and submitting to no imposition. The one for the king; the other for the people. It does not matter that the elder Toombs was a rebel in Virginia against the fat George, for that revolt was kingly of itself, and the Virginian cavaliers went into it with love-locks flying and care cast to the winds, feeling little of the patient spirit of James Brown, who, by his Carolina fireside, fashioned his remonstrance slowly, and at last put his life upon the issue.

Governor Brown and General Toombs started under circumstances in accordance with the suggestions of the foregoing. General Toombs’s father had a fine estate, given him by the State of Georgia, and his son had a fine education and started in life in liberal trim. Governor Brown had nothing, and for years hauled wood to Dahlonega; and sold vegetables from a basket to the hotel and what others would buy. Young Toombs made money rapidly, his practice for the first five years amounting to much over $50,000. He conquered by the grace of his genius, and went easily from triumph to triumph. Young Brown moved ahead laboriously but steadily. He made only about $1200 his first year, and then pushed his practice to $2000 or $3000. He made no brilliant reputation, but never lost a client, and added to his income and practice. His progress was the result of hard labor and continuous work. He lived moderately and his habits were simple. General Toombs has lived in princely style all his life, and has always been fond of wine and cards. Both men are rich, and both are well preserved for their time of life. General Toombs is seventy-one and Governor Brown fifty-nine. Each had a lucky stroke early in life, and in both cases it was in a land investment. General Toombs bought immense tracts of Texas land, of which he has sold perhaps $100,000 profit and still holds enough to yield double or treble that much more. Governor Brown, when very young, paid $450 for a piece of land, and afterward sold a half interest in a copper mine thereon for $25,000. This he invested in farms, and thus laid the basis of his fortune.