Chapter XXVII: Requiescat in Pace

It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on a Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the riotous crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner, inscribed with gilt letters:

“BUNKER-HILL
1775.
GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!”

It was on Copps’ Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy’s positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose that day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked off across Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient monument, at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his now feeble hands had wielded both ends of the musket. There too he had received that slit upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with the Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the bescarred bearer of a cross.

For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry July day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising to return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the ship-captain. “Nay,” replied the old man, “I shall get no fitter rest than here by the mounds.”

But from this true “Potter’s Field,” the boy at length drew him away; and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country of the Housatonic. But the exile’s presence in these old mountain townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the west; where exactly, none could say.

He sought to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead. But it had been burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted, he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been changed. The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new one ran straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards, planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel. At length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of those fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry, that but three summers since a walnut grove had stood there. Then he vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes talked of planting such a grove, to defend the neighboring fields against the cold north wind; yet where precisely that grove was to have been, his shattered mind could not recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during his long exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested, as well as the annual crops preceding and succeeding it, on the very same soil.

Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient natural wood, which seemed some way familiar, and midway in it, paused to contemplate a strange, mouldy pile, resting at one end against a sturdy beech. Though wherever touched by his staff; however lightly, this pile would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it preserved the exact look, each irregularly defined line, of what it had originally been--namely, a half-cord of stout hemlock (one of the woods least affected by exposure to the air), in a foregoing generation chopped and stacked up on the spot, against sledging-time, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned to oblivious decay--type now, as it stood there, of forever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting in early mishap.

“Do I dream?” mused the bewildered old man, “or what is this vision that comes to me of a cold, cloudy morning, long, long ago, and I heaving yon elbowed log against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay, I cannot be so old.”

“Come away, father, from this dismal, damp wood,” said his son, and led him forth.

Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man ploughing. Advancing slowly, the wanderer met him by a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry, like a tumbled chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire-place, now aridly stuck over here and there, with thin, clinging, round, prohibitory mosses, like executors’ wafers. Just as the oxen were bid stand, the stranger’s plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone at the ruin’s base.

“There, this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old hearthstone. Ah, old man,--sultry day, this.”

“Whose house stood here, friend?” said the wanderer, touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.

“Don’t know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know ’em?”

But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.

“What are you looking at so, father?”

“‘_Father!_’ Here,” raking with his staff, “_my_ father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend.”

Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.

Few things remain.

He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print--himself out of being--his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.

THE END.

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AE 2 JOHN WOOLMAN’S JOURNAL _and_ A PLEA FOR
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AE 3 THE LIFE OF MRS. MARY JEMISON by James E. Seaver.
The famous Indian captivity narrative of the “White Woman of the
Genesee.” Introduction by Allen W. Trelease.

AE 4 BROOK FARM by Lindsay Swift. America’s most
unusual experiment in establishing the ideal society during the
Transcendentalist 1840’s. Introduction by Joseph Schiffman.

AE 5 FOUR VOYAGES TO THE NEW WORLD by Christopher
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R. H. Major. Introduction by John E. Fagg.

AE 6 JOURNALS OF MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS. Frontier
campaigning during the French and Indian Wars by the
organizer of “Rogers’ Rangers.” Introduction by Howard H. Peckham.

AE 7 HARRIET TUBMAN, THE MOSES OF HER PEOPLE by Sarah
Bradford. The heroic life of a former slave’s struggle for her
people. Introduction by Butler A. Jones.

AE 8 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE JERSEY PRISON SHIP by Albert
Greene. The “Andersonville” of the Revolutionary War. Introduction
by Lawrence H. Leder.

AE 9 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD by Lucy Larcom. A classic
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Davis.

AE 10 AMERICAN COMMUNITIES by William Alfred Hinds. First
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AE 11 INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN NATIONAL THOUGHT.
Edited, with commentary, by Wilson Ober Clough. Pages from the
books our Founding Fathers read. Second, revised edition.

AE 12 LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS by Lewis Henry Morgan. The
first scientific account of an American Indian tribe by the father
of American ethnology. Introduction by William N. Fenton.

AE 13 MY CAPTIVITY AMONG THE SIOUX INDIANS by Fanny Kelly.
A pioneer woman’s harrowing story of frontier days. Introduction by
Jules Zanger.

AE 14 JOUTEL’S JOURNAL OF LA SALLE’S LAST VOYAGE. The
Mississippi exploration (1684-7) which ended in La Salle’s murder.
Introduction by Darrett B. Rutman.

AE 15 THE DISCOVERY, SETTLEMENT AND PRESENT STATE OF
KENTUCKE ... by John Filson. The historic post-Revolutionary
description, which includes Daniel Boone’s memoir. Introduction by
William H. Masterson.

AE 16 THE LIFE AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL R.
POTTER. The autobiography of America’s first tragic hero--the
basis for Melville’s famous novel. Introduction by Leonard Kriegel.

AE 17 EXCURSIONS by Henry David Thoreau. The famous
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AE 18 FATHER HENSON’S STORY OF HIS OWN LIFE. Autobiography
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THE LIFE AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL R. POTTER

“Israel Potter is not merely another good man adrift in a world devoid of goodness: he is, above all, an American, whose ideals and aims are derived from that same self-reliant democratic ethos which Whitman and Emerson were later to celebrate. Hired laborer, farmer, chain bearer, hunter, trapper, Indian trader, merchant sailor, whaler, soldier, courier, spy, carpenter, and beggar, through it all, Israel remains the American, the man who, even in the hardships of exile, insists that all will be well once he can again walk ‘on American ground.’

“This small book did not help Israel Potter achieve his objective: his quest for a pension proved unsuccessful, and he died soon after, on ‘the same day,’ Melville tells us, ‘that the oldest oak in his native hills was blown down.’ He took with him whatever was left of his dreams and pride, an end which, to some extent, all victims share. ‘Kings as Clowns,’ Melville wrote bitterly, ‘are codgers--who ain’t a nobody?’ It is a fitting epitaph for all the Israel Potters.”

from the Introduction by Leonard Kriegel,
The City College of New York

_The American Experience Series_ is devoted to publishing new editions of historic books which mirrored and shaped the growth of our Nation from earliest times to the present.

_Consulting Editor_: Henry Bamford Parkes

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Transcriber’s Note:

Spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained as published in the 1962 source book except as follows:

Page iv
never as good, as enobling, or as fulfilling _changed to_
never as good, as ennobling, or as fulfilling

Page 22
than raging in his Majesty’s _changed to_
then raging in his Majesty’s

Page 59
surpassed in expresssions _changed to_
surpassed in expressions

Page 95
life was dispaired of _changed to_
life was despaired of

Page 99
his (the Consul.) on his arrival _changed to_
his (the Consul,) on his arrival

would to God it was to morrow _changed to_
would to God it was to-morrow

AE 6
campaining during the French _changed to_
campaigning during the French