Mose Evans: Part I

I.

IT was most unbusiness-like in me! Yet I cannot acknowledge it to be ungentlemanly, for I had no intention of the sort. Shot enough, Heaven knows, had come from my side already; the shattered houses all around us as I spoke testified to that. My engagement to Helen Sinclair, resulting in marriage that very noon, — I recall it as I write, — itself would have prevented me.

“Allow me to say, General,” that was all I did say, “ it was what your royalist ancestor did in coming over from England ! ”

It is to old General Theodore Throop of Charleston, South Carolina, I make the miserable remark, and in Charleston almost before the cannon are cold.

But, please let it be perfectly understood, there is to be no passing over, much less camping upon, the battle-fields of the Rebellion in these pages. I heartily agreed with Miss Sinclair that the man must be very wicked or very weak who would binder the hand that is so surely reclothing these torn plains, and in every sense, with grass and grain. I only record my blunder and the General’s reply for—reasons !

“ Yes, sir ! ” The General flushes, as he replies, not merely over his great face; I see the glow run far back under the white hair of his forehead, to the very tips of the large hands rested on the head of his yellow cane ! The heart leaves no inch of the General’s portly person untinged by its exasperation. “ Yes, sir! And it was by Puritan fanaticism he was driven across the Atlantic ! It is the same thoroughly detestable Puritanism which has ruined me, sir, compels me, sir, in my old age, to go to even a ruder West. I tell you, sir ! — ” There is tremor as well as deepening color in the grand old soul, as he rises from his seat and grasps the ivory-headed cane as if it were a sword. “ I tell you, sir ! —■ ”

Now, what is the use ? The General was born in South Carolina. I was born, I am proud to say, in New' England. It is all over, — our being born and the war. Besides, it neither merits nor demerits anything. Moreover, here is the present and the future to be practically settled. I was a land-agent at the time. I violate no confidence when I say that I was, at that date, in charge of the extensive affairs, since very lucrative, of the Great Western Land Company, having been myself the author (a friend, “old New Hampshire,” being, as you will see, the largest owner) of the whole scheme. I frankly say, as land-agent I made the acquaintance of General Theodore Throop, and our conversation took place the first day I approached him in reference to exchange of real estate. I knew — who did not know ? — that the General was ruined in the ruin of Charleston by the war. As I succeeded, to our mutual advantage, in afterward showing him, he could make far more of property out West by settling it than he could ever hope for in relation to his Charleston estate.

Of course the reader has read of the magnificent mines of marl opened since the war, but lying undreamed of under the feet of the South-Carolinians till then. It is like the gold and the silver, and the value in the soil, nobler still, producing such splendid fruits and crops, over which Californian aborigines and Spaniards wandered with idle steps so long. Why should I have told General Throop all my reasons for our bargain ? He would have despised the marl as portion of the new and detested era.

“ Ever since I came here,” I remarked to my young wife, — bride, in fact, — the very evening of my first conversation with General Throop, “ those old lines have been ringing in my head, —

miserable doggerel, and where did I get it from ? ”

“ Faust,” my wife replies. “He sings it, or somebody does, in that wine-cellar.”

“ This Charleston suggests it less than does the General himself, who is himself Charleston. Such a steady grandeur in the General still, the inertia of two hundred years of position and power ! ” I go on to add.

“ By the by, Henry, when and where did you make acquaintance with Goethe?” It is some two weeks after this that my wife asks the impertinent question, doing up or undoing down her hair for the night at the glass as she does so.

“ I perfectly understand, Helen, the you of your question,” I make placid return. “ I was a newspaper-boy from my sixth year; did black boots, even, I do believe. I told you the whole story. Somehow, here, in my stay in your South, during my little runs over Europe, I have gathered something besides money.”

“ You know perfectly well, Henry,” — my wife faces me in a magnificent background of loosened hair, — “that you are — ”

“ The exact opposite of General Throop. South Pole and North Pole. Old era and new. The largest good travel and reading have done me,” I add, “ is that I have come to see things as they exactly are ! ”

“ You do not know how struck I was, dear,” my wife said, on this occasion, after certain endearments which made it necessary to do all that wealth of hair entirely over again, “ with your plans to buy up Charleston property at its lowest ebb because — ”

“ The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide toward flood,” I add. “ Yes, I possess the money-making faculty, I do believe. And I happen, also, to know that General Throop possesses, apart from money and in himself, all the deference paid only to money. There is a certain something, — a James Madison, George Washington, — something in the man which compels from all a respect beyond — ”

“ That is why I loved you, Henry ; not your having it, dear, your being able to see and acknowledge it in our people. But it is to please me you have made your home in Charleston; all that about business is only pretence.”

But my wife was mistaken. General Throop never had reason to regret our real-estate transactions. I am living, as I write, in the former mansion of the Throops near St. Peter’s Church in Charleston. I remember so well the evening I first entered this house. My conversation with the General, with which I begin these pages, was soon after my making his acquaintance. During the months after, it was long and hard work, — extremely delicate work on my part; he came not only to see the sound sense of my business suggestions, but to take a liking for me. I wonder — it flashes upon me as I write — if that was not largely because of my sincere respect and admiration for the General himself; for I can make all allowance for one who lived in a different era from myself, — more so than Oliver Cromwell made, I feel sure, for Charles I. But is not this very making all allowance for other people itself a part, not the least excellent part of our new era ?

“Can you not take tea with us, Mr. Anderson ? ” he said to me, at last, during the conversation wherewith this narrative begins. “ Let us say on Thursday evening. Thursday ? No, that is the Fast of Saint Sebastian the martyr,—a matter of my wife’s,” the General explained, with a slight flush. “Say Friday evening ? ”

Now, I knew it was to the General very much as if au inhabitant of the Faubourg St. Germain had made like request of a denizen of the Faubourg St. Antoine. I was pleased at his liking me. I like the liking of any good man; so I said, “ I thank you, sir, but it is not in my power.” And I suppose there was a flush on my face now. “ I am a married man, General, and Mrs. Anderson is with me at the hotel,” I added.

“ Ah, excuse me! ” in return. For here was very grave matter. The General sat still in portly body before me in my office ; really he was, on the instant, in his gloomy old parlor, laying the matter before his wife and daughter, and there, excusing himself almost immediately, he was in person two hours later.

“ They will invite us, Henry,” my wife said to me that night. “ I am glad of it, because I am so tired of this solitary hotel life, I knew Agnes Throop at school. But, especially since I married you, she has to approach me first; has to, if she is an angel. Besides, it gives you a firmer position in business. And then the Throops give admittance to — Charleston ! ” And if my wife kissed me once, she did several times in the course of the evening, singing her gayest songs at the piano in the hotel parlor, no one but ourselves being in the room ; dressing herself more brightly than since we came. Amazing the value women attach to certain things ! If it had been ten thousand dollars cleared in a transaction, my wife could not have been more delighted.

“ Because it show’s I was right in loving you, Henry,” she explained. “ I knew General Throop would learn to know you. Did you tell him all ? ”

“ There is nothing I am ashamed to tell him, I am sure,” I began.

“ Because I am almost afraid, at last,” my wife said, more soberly. “ You see, Henry, I know all about the Throops. There are only three of them now. Theodore, the only son, was killed by a splinter of rock in Sumter during the siege. Mrs. Throop and Agnes and — I suppose I should say — Mr. Clammeigh make up the family.”

“ Mr. Clammeigh ! The lawyer ? ” I ask.

“Tall, black-haired, exceedingly neat, very composed, perfectly fitting clothes — ”

“ He is our legal adviser,” I interrupt. " Very silent and cold, a perfectgentleman.”

“Yes; O, of course,” my wife replies, in a perplexed way. “ I will tell you in a moment why I happen to know him.” — It is the strangest way people have ! (I make the remark here while my wife hesitates.) You cannot mention Mr. Clammeigh’s name, but somehow, after a curious silence, there is somebody certain to say, “ Now, you may say what you please, but I like Mr. Clammeigh ! ” in a defiant way, as if some one had attacked him. — “If he ever did anything wrong I never knew of it. But somehow — ” And I saw that my wife, her hands resting upon the keys of the piano, was really looking at my lawyer in the full-length portrait of the mother of Washington hanging upon the wall before her and over the instrument. “ They say they were engaged before the war,” she added, beginning a low-tuned tinkling upon the keys as she said it.

“ Engaged to Miss Throop ? How do you know anything about it.? I do believe you ladies had an instinct, through the globe, of the betrothal of the Emperor of China.”

“, Women do not always tell everything, Henry, when it is a matter of feeling and has reference to a man —I mean to another woman. Did I ever tell you that I was at a convent school with Agnes Throop ? ” And my wife, as she said it, played a little louder.

“ I knew that you were born and educated in South Carolina,” I said. “But why ? ”

“ Because of your birth in New England, your — and my political opinions !

I said to myself, Let the Throops find out who Mrs. Anderson is if they wish to; I do not care a picayune ! What a fib ! O, I do hope, Henry, we shall be asked ! ” And my wife turns to me, actually crying. “ I love Agnes so, and we have not spoken to each other since we left school. And now that we are married, I want you to know her, Henry.”

“Now that we are married?”

“ Because you would have fallen in love with her desperately, hut for that! ”

“ What a foolish remark ! I beg pardon.”

“ Perfectly natural. Wait till you see Agnes, and you will understand! ” my wife replies. I did wait and I did understand !

“ Hid you observe anything when you first mentioned Mr. Clammeigh, — in me, I mean ? ” my wife asked, after some longcontinued tinkling upon thepiano.

“ Your face was from me, but I imagined at the moment you gave a little start,” I said, wondering a little.

“ Because,” my bride replied, turning around on the screw of the music-stool, seat and all, looking me full in the face, paling a little, but her steady eyes of blue in mine, — “ because I ouce supposed I was to — would — Henry, Mr. Clammeigh and myself were once engaged to be married ! ”

I rather think the pain was greater than the surprise on my part, and she saw it in my eyes.

“ You remember, Henry, I told yon of the fact without the name,” she went steadily on, her eyes never leaving mine. “ I was very young, very young ! He is not a day older now than he was then, looks exactly the same in every respect now as then, —like a corpse ! No, I mean like a wax image in a show. Never mind how it began, nor how it ended. He was teaching school near my father’s plantation then. I had to conceal it from my father and brother, as they would have shot — no, they had too much sense. I did love that man then. I do not love him now.” No special emphasis, but exceeding meaning in the way the words were spoken. “ And I do love you, Mr. Henry Anderson, land-agent, from New England, with all my heart! ” And I was perfectly satisfied, seeing, as I did, the entire woman in those loving eyes. .

“ It will be no barrier to our associating with them,” my wife said half an hour afterward. “Mr. Clammeigh will know me. I know him. Agnes Throop will not be disturbed by me in the version of the matter her betrothed will hasten to give her. He is an admirable lawyer, — not before a jury, but for office-work, — which is all you care about in him; but it is strange. And,” my wife added, with clouded eyes, “ the strangest part of all is in the future.”

“ How do you know, Miss Medea ? ” I ask.

“ Wait, 0 Jason, and you will see ! ” she replies, It will sufficiently explain all this to say that we were together in Paris before our marriage and saw Rachel in the tragedy in question.

II.

In a week after the General’s first allusion to the matter Mrs. Throop and their daughter made the formal call; after due return of which we did take tea with General Throop and Itis household.

“They thoroughly like you, Henry,” my wife said to me after both events. “ General Throop knows a genuine gentleman when he sees him, and by the instinct of a gentleman. Agues and myself were, in an instant, as if we had parted only yesterday at the convent. And a true woman knows a true woman too. I have never met a woman — my mother died when I was an infant — to compare with Agnes Throop! ”

Let me record it frankly just here: besides my dear wife, Agnes Throop is to me the woman best worth knowing of all the race. I hardly understand more of her style of beauty than I do of her dress, material and cut; but I know there was a peculiar loveliness in her—which I will not mar by attempting to describe — as indescribable as is the violet-characteristic of a violet, making that flower to differ—shall we say from a dahlia ? for my wife is a brunette. Mrs. General Throop is a partial explanation other daughter.

I understood all my wife told me of her as. we were dressing to go there to tea, in the first half an hour after we were in the old-fashioned parlor. It is down stairs, as I write, curiously carved marble mantel and all. If I live —it is Helen’s suggestion— till that next anniversary, I intend to have that same mantel carefully taken down, packed, and sent. But never mind about that just now.

It was in the cool of an early autumn. and Mrs. Throop was standing beside the mantel the evening we took tea there for the first time, when General Throop introduced me. Dressed in black, jet cross upon her bosom, jet hair silvered with the gray of her sixty years here and there. Of course, if my wife had not prepared me for it, I should have been unprepared. As it was, I brought my business faculty into unconscious exercise as I often — invariably — do when dealing with a stranger, — yourself, if you will allow me. It is experience, I suppose, hut I make final decision, in the ten minutes after introduction, whether or no you are a trained swindler, or a rich ignoramus, or an insolvent ne’er-do-well, or simply what you say of yourself. So, when I met -Mrs. Throop I intrenched myself rapidly, before those terrible eyes and her most peculiar manner, in that way. “Whatever we were saying with our lips, what she said with those singular eyes was this: “ I understand you perfectly, sir! you are a New-Englander. You were caught by business, when the war broke out, in Alabama. You bated secession more heartily every day by reason of being conscripted. You went through battles without firing your gun, holding yourself only by main force from shooting your own Confederate officers. You are heartily glad Mr. Davis was overthrown. You are speculating in land. You love money desperately because it is power. You have awful defects and — ”

It was merely by way of parry, not thrust, that I crossed swords with those inexpressible eyes by saying, only with my eyes, to myself and to her : “ All your life, madam, you were too rich, and thus made selfish, —yourself became your occupation and your weariness. The long siege of Charleston and the killing of your only son has kept you at such strain of nerves, in reference to yourself more than ever, as that you cannot sleep at night, — how intensely wide awake during the day ! And you are a ritualist. I blame your forms of religion for that no more than I do the particular street a man in delirium of fever dashes down, escaping from his chamber. Except this, obeying a purer gospel, you would have gone utterly out of and apart from yourself to the sufficient Saviour, standing away from you, but bidding you come, leaving yourself behind, to him. All your perpetual observances are but the workings of the same unceasing introspection. By long-continued, tensely strained gaze inward upon your own soul you have grown into the second nature of your exceeding insight as to the inmost souls of others — ”

I think I am a sensible, practical man. I do heartily despise mesmerism and spiritualism, but I have met Mrs, Throop! I find I have to abandon the making you understand anything about her. Her soul had so worn the body' threadbare, as by perpetually grinding spirit against the flesh, that she was to you almost purely a soul, having to do only with the’soul in you too. Yes, I will stop. The reader who has met such persons will excuse my failure in describing this lady. Mr. Clammeigh was a great relief that evening. If you desire to interest a statue of Apollo in your conversation, your work is hard, — so steadily interested in all you are saying as to his eyes, so essentially uninterested in you and all your fly-like buzz as to his soul. Because I know' land, know cotton, by having come pretty thoroughly to know the man who sells the same! What did I care, however, for Mr. Clammeigh’s perfect propriety, accurate excellence, gentlemanly reticence ? He had to do our law work to our company’s satisfaction, or there were other lawyers. As to Helen? Here, too, being only a land-agent, having no facility with my pen, I cannot make you understand how perfectly we understood Mr. Clammeigh. So far as Helen or myself was concerned, he was a corpse with alt of the death of a corpse, but untouched, I do assure you, by one of the tears generally dropped upon such !

And the reader must allow me to make an explanation here. I said I have no literary facility, being merely a man of business. Now' a friend, whose painful task has been to look over my manuscript, entreats me to correct my style, or at least “put in more verbs.” I have no objection to verbs, none at all, if I but knew what verbs and where to put them ! My business correspondence has not been considered uninteresting, — for the matter, however, not the manner: please accept this narrative in that way.

I am not dealing with characters, hut actual persons. I know I should let them live for themselves on these pages instead of trying to portray them, but neither Mrs. Throop nor Mr. Clammeigh express themselves at all in their words; you had to know them in person. Therefore I have a dozen times given up all idea of attempting to make this narration. But how can I help myself? The whole affair is, in certain senses, the most remarkable of my life; it will cease to press upon me when I have fairly written it out, — that is, as well as I can.

“Did you observe our meeting?” my wife asked me afterward.

“ No, I completely forgot about all that,” I said. “ I was in the custody, at the moment, of Mrs. Throop.”

“ We were both perfectly prepared for it, of course ! ” my wife said. “ I merely remarked, when introduced, ‘ We have met before, I believe.’ I thought his steady pallor turned a shade of yellow at. first, I don’t know. It is amazing how keenly people can live and afterward utterly die ; it almost shakes my belief in the immortality of the soul,” my wife added.

“His soul seems, at least, to have withdrawn itself from the surface,” I said. “ The hand of a dead man has as little warmth and pressure. I dare say you have prejudiced me. The man has come to hide himself very perfectly in himself, but it may be mere timidity ; a rabbit burrows as deeply in its hole from fright as a robber in his cave for ambush.”

“Did you notice Agues Throop?” my wife asks.

“ How could I help it ? At least after I passed from Mrs. Throop to the mere bodily presence of her husband. She is more frail and more beautiful than I had expected.”

“ But it was touching! ” my wife continues. “ I did not need that special tenderness in her eyes and her kiss at, meeting and parting, to see that Mr. Clammeigh had told her everything. I was more vexed and touched than I can say! It was so at the convent,” my wife continues, after long thought. “The girl bewitched those pallid old nuns; they crossed themselves and petted and almost dreaded her. Au unaccountable fascination of manner? eyes ? — what is it ? ”

“ Magnetism,” I make reply, for I have not for nothing heard so many lectures in Boston. “ Excess of electricity. She has instant, ready, amazing sympathy for almost every person she meets. She is giving her soul away all the time. And she requires and has everybody else’s soul back in return. If she was to spend an evening in one of those five-acre parlors at Saratoga, every one of the five hundred who were thrown with her would say, — - every man, child, even woman of them would say,—‘ What a charming woman ! ’ I would say myself that only love like hers could melt that man Clammeigh. Ah, how she loves him ! ”

“ I wonder, wonder, wonder,” my wife said, dreamily, and explained by adding, “ O, never mind ! ”

“ Mrs. Throop,” I say, as much to myself as to my wife, “ is what the French call — I know my pronunciation is wrong — a femme exaltée. Madame Roland in politics, Madame Krüdener in religion, possibly Madame Guyon in the same, Charlotte Corday in vengeance. In various forms it is all Joan of Arc over and over again. I never had exactly the same experience, — experience as to another individual I mean. She was to me as if my conscience had taken flesh and dress in her person and stood before me.”

“ And therefore you made so clean a breast of it at supper? ” my wife asked.

“ O, in mentioning — incidentally and very quietly, I am sure — that I was from New England ; that, although you are from the South, you held through the war the same Union sentiments as myself? Yes, I think it always best to have no concealments.”

“Frankness is your one weakness, dear,” my wife saw fit to reply.

“ I have always found it best, in society as in business, my love. It certainly places us all at our ease with each other.”

“ And the General and yourself are going West to look at that land ? ”

“ Yes, the daughter naturally inherits from the mother,” I say, in continuance of profound philosophical thought, and postponing, with a gesture, my wife and her question, “the power of the eyes without their ferocity, the fulness of soul without its violence. It is the father in her which tempers the mother.”

“ You told me that General Throop realized George Washington to you for the first time in your life. And when I was so pleased, you told me that Aaron Burr — ”

“A New-Englander,” I interpose.

“ —had said Washington was far from being the demi-god people thought.”

“And,” I added, “that Adams had told a friend, waving his hand, after dinner, toward a portrait of the said Father of his Country, ‘that old wooden head made his fortune by holding his tongue! ’ A little stolid, not swift enough for Wall Street, not having instinct for money as of a rat-terrier for vermin. It was not on carrion the eagles of those days fed, if they were slow of wing. Behind the times General Throop certainly is, absurd in his exasperation at the new era, intensely prejudiced— I do believe, however,” I abruptly added, “if George Washington were to rise from the dead, he would he elected president! ”

I could have proved the same, had not an old and very black woman from General Throop’s entered our room at this moment with a courtesy as deep as her brightcolored handkerchief head-dress was high. She brought certain patterns of millinery matters for Helen, and I wish I had let her alone.

“Well, Aunt Mary Martha Washington,” I said,— for Helen had thus made her known to me, —“ how do you like the new filings, aunty ? ”

“They ’re not the things, marster, only patterns to make ’em with,” she replies, seriously, for she suspects me.

“O, I mean your being free and all that! ” And I wish, as I say it, that I had known better.

“ I don’t like them at all, sir ! ” she says, with a grave gladness for the opportunity. “ We were chillern of body-sarvents of General Washington. General Theodore Throop, he bought us at the break-up there. All my life I 've sat in our church, left-hand gallery. I ’ve heard a thousand sermons proving we was chillern of Ham, made slaves by our Heavenly Father! I am religious, sir, I hope. He permits these abolitionist fool folks and things, black and white ! It’s sinful ! It won’t be for long — ”

“ Never mind, aunty ! ” Curious the command with which this Southern wife of mine checks her on the spot. It lay in certain inflections of voice, the heritage in the blood for generations. But the black woman knows I am a Yankee, as marked in her coldness to me as she is deferential to Helen thereafter'

III.

Not three weeks after this, and General Theodore Throop and myself were making together our last day’s ride before reaching the lands I was endeavoring to exchange with him for his Charleston property. So far as steamer and railway could carry us on our journey we had gone. For the last week the prelocomotive horse had been our only conveyance possible to the dense forests and miry roads far west of the Mississippi. Roads, horse, cabins, coarse food, shuck beds, people as of a stone age prior even to the taming of horses, — at all these I winced in sympathy with the aversion, greater still, of the General. Not that he intimated it by a word. A hundredth part of the annoyance then endured occurring before the war, or even now in Charleston, would have kept him an Etna in perpetual eruption. I could not but admire, almost venerate and love, the thorough gentleman in my aged companion. A removal was essential to the support of wife and daughter. Such a trip would have been the business of Theodore the son; possibly would have been unnecessary had Theodore lived. But Theodore was now part of the dust — how wholly in vain ! — of Sumter. The General rode by my side, feeble but erect, and resolved to make the best of everything, — an old soldier upon a campaign, a cavalier of Charles and Prince Rupert retreating before the Roundheads. And, riding with a Roundhead, too, the old General clothed himself in endurance as in his necessary coat of mail. Silent in regard to bodily inconvenience, the negroes swarming about us everywhere, less, with all his kindness, than the other insects in his regard; the war and its results a powder-magazine between us from which we both instinctively held hack the torches of our tongues, — these things excepted, my companion is as genial as when in his parlor at home. Only somehow I am the host now in this very extensive parlor of the West, whose duty it is to entertain, — as hard a business as devolved on Virgil playing the host to Dante through Malbolge; for we rode upon a causeway through a vast swamp on either side, every pool thereof venomous beneath its green scum with snakes and terrible with alligators, nature itself turned vicious iu the vines strangling, anaconda-like, the decrepit trees, and leaping through the air upon fresh victims. Now and then the crash of a falling tree sounding through the slimy silence, decayed trunks falling, on three occasions, across our very road!

“ But some teu miles more to Brownstown,” I say to the General as we ride soberly along through the live-oaks craped in moss.

“ Fifty, if necessary,” the General adds, cheerfully, “although I am a little fatigued.”

“ And here comes some one who can tell us,” I add; for during the last twenty miles we have not been so certain we are on the right road. I turn to speak to a horseman who has joined us, but am, at first, too dazzled to speak. For, instead of some rough backwoodsman, I behold a Philadelphia exquisite ! The fool is young, and not bad-looking in his waxed mustache, pomaded hair, broadcloth suit, gauntleted hands, well-brushed hat a little to one side. The instant I address him I am, in imagination, at the office of a first-class hotel in the East, confronting the exceedingly cool clerk thereof. And to him am I the dusty and tired and probably disreputable and insolvent traveller, the nuisance inevitable to his calling.

“ I intended to ask about the road,” I say, as soon as I can adjust myself to the occasion; “ hut I see you are a stranger like myself.”

“ Road to Brownstown nine miles.” And our hotel clerk lifts his silver-handled whip to pass us, with a contemptuous cut on the flanks of his very bright bay, then consents to endure us, seeing the road is so lonely. He had not looked at my companion.

“ Are you acquainted in this region, sir ? ” the General asks after some silence ; and I observe, on the instant, that our new arrival recognizes in the General a millionuaire, pecuniary or social, and modulates his entire tone and bearing. As I rein my horse in from between the two that they may ride together, I demand of myself: Culture, manner, social position,—just how do those mould the very body of a man or woman ? This old General wears them like the purple of a king, bowed to as such, no man plainer in person or attire. And what amount of dress or diamonds could make this fop other I han himself ? Yet it does speak well for the fellow that he defers to, recognizes, unbosoms himself to the old General. We soon have his history. He was born and has lived all his life, in Brownstown. His father and family live there now. He lives there himself, a regular physician. He is back but a few months from medical lectures in Philadelphia. This whole region, sir, is a miserable wilderness, fit only for alligators and negroes. He would not stay in it an hour if he could help it. The people are disgusting savages. He avenges himself “by dosing them, sir, dosing them most deucedly ! ” only his language is more highly colored as he warms to the companionship. Incidentally, as cool matter of course, he refers with contempt to Christianity as an exploded superstition, a species of Buddhism lingering for a little longer, chiefly in such benighted regions, sir, as we are riding through. As we journey rather slowly, the nine miles suffice to reassure us as to the tremendous strides of science, sir; in the very foremost rank of which marches Dr. Alexis Jones,— for the honor of his name, intensely illuminated upon a cream-colored card, is also intrusted to the General, who has slowly to unbutton many wrappings to place the same in his pocket. Here a sudden turn of the road brings us upon a horse tied to a sapling a little off the edge of the highway to the left; the dismounted rider, his saddlebags at his feet, just turning from a huge oak as we come upon him unawares, owing to the mud which deadens the sound of our horses’ hoofs. The General and myself see nothing beyond this, merely bowing as we ride by. Dr. Alexis Jones is both nearer to the person and sharpersighted ; reins up a moment, then rides on, breaking into a peal of insolent laughter.

“ Would you believe it, sir,” he explains to the General at last, “ that fellow was standing by that tree shaving ! See the lather on his face ? Had hung up one of those little round looking-glasses to the bark by his knife stuck in. Was going to black his boots, brush his clothes and hair, — saw all the things lying on his saddle-bags. Put on a clean shirt, too, sure as you live ! ” But Dr. Jones is far more profane than can be here recorded. “You see? He is fixing up before he goes into Brownstown. Like a circus, wants to make an awn-tray ! Road so lonely, never thought anybody would happen along, see ? ” And as our companion goes off into another fit of laughter, I recall a certain burned movement and shamefacedness in the person surprised, who seemed from my hasty glance to be a gentleman and very young.

“ And I know who it is! ” Dr. Jones bursts out a moment after, with an oath and a downward cut of his whip-hand which causes his horse to bound, “ The preacher ! See the black clothes and the peculiar face?” Dr. Jones is evidently speaking of a species of being entirely distinct from, exceedingly inferior to, himself.

The way remaining before we enter Brownstown hardly suffices for even the rapid and condensed information imparted in this connection. There once had been a flourishing church in the little town. No regular minister had lived there for years, — “dying out, gentlemen, the whole thing, even here as everywhere ! ” Terribly fallen the membership had become; horse-racing, gambling, hunting on Sundays but varieties of the apostasy into which the brotherhood had fallen, the very officers of the church participants of the same. “ There is old Squire Robinson, very pillar of the ex-church, worst of all. Nice time this preacher will have there ! You see, that will be his home while he stays, — yes, while ! ” The securing of a pastor being hardly by action of the apostate church itself, said pastor more probably sent by some Board of the denomination outside, “this young fellow shaving there ” is to be the pastor of the scattered sheep.

“ It will be fun alive,” our friend adds, to see how the thing will work ! And the idea of his actually stopping to fix up before meeting his people, brushing up to go to Squire Robinson’s ! ” Our friend sees a degree of amusement in the matter which we cannot appreciate until afterward.

“ There’s about only one Christian — never mind the women, their weakness, poor things!—in this Brownstown that has stood it out. New Hampshire they call him, queer old soul! I suppose he came from there. Postmaster. Office, you know, in his store. Grim as death. And this, gentlemen,”—unspeakable scorn in our friend as he waves his hand toward a neglected graveyard on the roadside as we enter the street of straggling cabins which constitutes the town, — “this is our Laurel Hill, our City Cemetery. Added dozens to its denizens myself since I began my practice, practice, you observe, practice ! And this,” halting his restless horse as we get fairly into the ragged hem, so to speak, of the village, and regarding the same with disgust beyond words, — “ this is our Philadelphia! Our Continental Hotel is that long, low, double, villanous old cabin on the right, with the tumbledown porch in front; Dick Frazier — sheriff also by profession, gambler and sot by occupation — hotel-keeper. I hope to see you again, to show you our churches, libraries, museums, galleries of art, Fairmounts, navy-yards. If you survive Dick Frazier! ”

I saw that the very horse of the man was restless because laden with such an ass, glancing at me with intelligent eye which said, “ Is n’t he a fool ? How would you like to carry him ? ” The offensiveness of the fellow being in manner more than in words.

“ And here,” he continued, as a man rode toward us from the village, “is a representative specimen of our lovely city, — a genuine, unadulterated Brownstownian in the original package. Hold on a moment, Evans,” he added as the countryman was riding by, “ allow me to make Mr. Mose Evans known to you, gentlemen ! I will merely add,” he continued, as the other raised his hat to us, “ that Mr. Evans is ” — and be spelled without pronouncing the word — • “ a B-o-o-r. An I -g-n-o-r-a-n-t man. In fact, my friend Mr. Evans is a f-o-o-l ! ” There was for a moment a perplexity upon the wholesome face of the person in question, — was it possible he could not read? — coloring and looking sharply from the rascal to myself, followed by a glance of such good-humored but absolute contempt for Dr. Alexis Jones as he bowed to General Throop in silence and rode on, that I was sorry he had not shaken hands with me. I could have kicked the puppy as, with a wave of his hat, Dr. Jones turned down a side street and rode off; hut I was busy, so to speak, in being ashamed to look the old General in the face, the aspect of the town was so particularly miserable. Yet I had told him of it before ; and I recalled places up the Ashley and Cooper, not many miles from sacred Charleston even, as uninviting. But the brave old soul winced nothing at all. He was on a campaign, and rode as steadily up to the wretched old tavern as if it had been a battery !

Good climate, rich lands, navigable river rolling lazy with excess of mud in sight,— yet a more miserable town could not exist. I would cheerfully describe the scenery, had there been any. My field notes, for our company, of Brown County arc, “ Land dead level. Sandier soil, post-oaks. Bottom-lands, live-oak; soil, black, waxy, twenty feet deep, very rich, but will bake and crack in summer. Corduroy roads. Mud. Alligators. Bayous full of ‘cotton mouths,’ i. e. venomous mocassin snakes. Crops, com, splendid cotton. Register A 1.”

Personally, horror and loathing of the place seized upon me ; suicide even to sojourn there ! Brownstown was, in fact, the very corpse of a town which had tumbled down and died in the mud in a drunken fit! It may be a singular remark to make, yet, if it were not so entirely unadvisable to do so, I would like dearly, at this very juncture, to give my views as to the resurrection of the dead ! I do not mean the rising of dead men from their graves unknown ages hence, save, at least, so far as the doctrine to that effect is incidentally established by another thing. Allow me to state, as clearly as I can, that the thing I refer to is the capability of their resurrection, and complete and eternal transformation in the case of persons dead and buried for years in a figurative, yet good Saxon sense of the word! I am greatly pressed for time in our real-estate transactions, could find no leisure or disposition to enter on this narrative were it not for the remarkable illustration it affords in reference just to that! See if I am not right !

IY.

“ I suppose I do have,” I wrote the week of our arrival in Brownstown to my wife, “ a quick sense of the ludicrous, but I could hardly keep from laughing outright that first morning at breakfast, the idea of our George Washington being so terribly bitten of vermin! Not that he spoke of it, but I knew his experience during the night from my own. Wherein does the nobility of this General Throop consist, that you reject any comparison of him to Uncle Toby, say, or to Mr. Pickwick, on the instant? The wearying journey, coarse food, miserable nights, with all the tremendous work of creating a new Carolina for himself out in these Western wilds, is enough to daunt a man thirty years younger; and the old General has lost twenty pounds by the scales in ‘old New Hampshire’s store,’ is pale, tremulous, almost tottering, but uncomplaining and a perfect gentleman,—there is no other word; commanding, by his very aspect, the hats off the heads and the loose talk off the tongues of even the ‘ characters ’ of Brownstown ! If is what Falstaff said of himself with a variation; the General is not only a gentleman himself, but the cause of gentlemanliness in others ! We rode out to see the land the General is exchanging his Charleston property for the day after our arrival, three miles from Brownstown, and upon the bank of the river. We stayed all night, by the by, at the cabin, near by, of a Mrs. Evans, a redfaced virago, not worse, I dare say, than Queen Bess. The only member of her family is her grown son, Ike Evans, or Tom, or Bob, I have forgotten his name. He is our guide among these terrible woods, — a sort of mute, inglorious Milton; for you have read of the Oxford students who came upon that poet, when a boy, lying asleep in the summer woods in his yellow hair, and thought it was Pan I will tell you more about this Romulus and his she-wolf of a mother, if I do not forget it.

“ When, after riding over a few hundred acres of lands, rich as cream, we lighted off our horses and had our dinner upon a bluff' of live-oaks overhanging the stream, I saw in his manner that he had made up his mind—the General — to close the bargain. One or two steamboats passed, as we sat, laden to the water’s edge with cotton ; hut I think it was a remark made at breakfast by a certain Odd Archer, which went even further to settle the matter. Odd is, as he himself told us, ‘ a jack-leg lawyer,’ the wild son of a distinguished minister of Georgia, a prodigal son heartily enjoying himself among the swine, and not having the least intention of coming to himself. ‘For heaven’s sake, General Throop,’ he said, ‘ establish yourself here, and give existence and lone to society ! ’ Dirty, drunken, worthless Odd Archer! and yet, the indescribable freemasonry of gentlemen between the General and the unprincipled scamp the moment they meet! Queer people, you Southerners, Helen! ”

Thus far, and a good deal more, to my wife, awaiting results in Charleston.

The fact is, the General and myself are the sensation of the year in Brownstown. He is, in gossip there which I could not help overhearing, “the distinguished General Theodore Throop of Charleston, South Carolina, here to buy and make his home among us, sir! ” I am, “ O, a Yankee, anybody can see that; but I am told, gentlemen, a millionnaire, president of a new railroad to run through Brownstown to the Pacific ! Besides, he is in company with General Theodore Throop ! ” I must confess I did hear a certain Joh Peters reject this statement of Odd Archer, Esq., with a certain “Er-r-r-r ! ” like the strong purring of a contemptuous cat, ending in an unwritable “Ah-h-h, yah — yes! May be so! A dapper little sand-peep of a NewEnglander!” For General Throop is a much larger and more imposing presence, I will admit. I did not put Peters in my letters to my wife, but I do not mind such things. As to his remark in continuation, — “ Yes, and he has this big General from Carolina with him as protection, dars n’t come by himself!” — of course, that is not worth denying, For I could not help overhearing Brownstown, as I sat writing in the back room of—I cannot see the use of writing out his real name, when every person knows it is old New Hampshire whom I refer to, postmaster, and proprietor of the one store in Brownstown, a store “ bound to have ” for sale everything any and every body could want, with extraordinary variety of customers, — a little weazen old man in a snuff-colored suit, small eyes that looked perfect experience of men, large ears with very red tips; though a very mummy of a man, yet Brownstown shows well that he is industrious as a beaver, shrewd as a fox, cool as a fish, fearless as a lion.

“Old New Hampshire! Now, that man ! ” — Odd Archer, the jack-leg lawyer, explains to me during our stay, on the front, porch of our hotel this cool November noon, — “ O, you have seen him ! Blue steel! Why, sir, I ’ve seen our boys go in there during the war! You see they had no pay for a year, — Confederate money at that, — no clothes, feet on the ground, half starved. Go in his store, you see ! When a fellow asked to look at a pair of boots, he always held on to one while the fellow was looking at the other. ‘ You let go ! ’ fellow said to him one day, the counter between them, you see. ‘ Why, you can look at it just as well,’he said. Because, you see, the boys had helped themselves out of stores in every other town. ‘ You let go! ’ fellow said, aiming his revolver exactly between the old man’s eyes across the counter. And he never even winked. — old New Hampshire,— holding on to the boot. Well, the fellow fired, just to scare him, missing his left ear by an inch; held on none the less; there’s the hole made by the bullet now! I saw one fellow walk in there one Saturday,—I suppose the fellow’s wife was almost naked at home,—draw his knife and hold it between his teeth while he just took up an armful of bolts of calico piled on the counter, and turn and walk out. Sir, that old man was over that counter and after him! Like a hornet. Pulled away this bolt, that bolt, another bolt, fellow walking fast as he could toward his piebald mare hitched to a tree. The fellow went home to his wife without one yard; old New Hampshire came in, piled up the calico again, ready for the next customer! A New-Englander, I know,” apologetically, “ but you can’t scare him! ” Although I have left out the oaths of the speaker, oaths uttered with relish and moral meaning!

You understand how and why Odd Archer, Esq., is the most purely wicked of all the men you meet when you know of his parentage, — Satan himself, because fallen forever from heaven ! If there is a peculiarly disreputable tiling in such a man, it is the singular ease and suddenness with which you find yourself an intimate friend in his very familiar converse with you on the part of the same, pulling you on and off like an old glove ! And that disreputable scoundrel would talk about his father, the distinguished minister, his wonderful success in pastorate and revivals, his long-suffering efforts to reclaim his prodigal. “No, sir!” he would add, “not a bit of it. I am a gone case, past praying for!” I am satisfied there is no crime known to men the fellow would not have committed with zest had it come in his way, greed of the very wickedness involved for the very wickedness’ sake. Singular -world, ours ! Now General Throop was as pure a knight as Sir Galahad, and how there could be that perfect understanding between the two, as of horn gentlemen among peasants, is a matter which puzzles me as much to-day as ever.

As to New Hampshire, the postmaster, I saw he was hardened to things as are the rocks of his own coast to winter and the wash of wild waves. Sitting in his back room, I often paused from my writing at the rickety black desk, to listen to what said wild waves Were saying while the mail was being opened, before, and after ; or while a heavy rain held the assembled “ crowd ” from going home. Socially, politically, morally, irreligiously, a viler torrent of talk, especially when Odd Archer is present, speaker, prompter, applander, fouls no kennel on earth. Now, as I came to know, there remains in New England no more sincerely Christian man than is this old gentleman, — the very life and soul and leader and purse afterward of the Rev. Mr. Parkinson’s church; for it was the Rev. Mr. Parkinson himself, fresh from his college, whom we had come upon at his roadside toilet. I suppose the old postmaster had, by long practice, learned to abstract himself from the living mire around him morally, as Archimedes did philosophically from the storming — himself the centre of the same — of Syracuse. My theory is, he created a New England for himself, of the space behind his counter and of the small room back of the store in which I wrote, and in which he slept and had his meals ; constructed a New England out of himself as he sorted letters, made entries on his journal, closed bargains, allowing all the hatred of the government, the profanity and obscenity, to dash unfelt, unheard, upon the granite coast of his weather-beaten exterior. The Puritan aroma was to him as its Cuban flavor to best cigars, as its peculiar excellence to choicest brands of wine, — the deeper and stronger in virtue of long and close keeping. He had been away from home so many years, a bewildered Rip Van Winkle he would have found himself, had he revisited the scenes of his youth. I said to him one day, I could not help it, “ My dear sir, you have come not to mind all this ridicule of religion by these reckless Brown County loafers, as natural to you from them as cards, whiskey, oaths, obscenity, the crack of revolvers. Suppose you are East, and hear a perfectly polished but far deadlier assault upon your Christianity by ministers of the gospel from the pulpit on Sunday, hailed with glee as great by crowds there too. Heh ? Just suppose ? You cannot suppose ? Well, I ’ll say nothing about the eloquent and overwhelming disproving there, by the very Rulers of the Synagogue, of everything you hold dear. But it is a good thing you landed so long ago from your Mayflower upon this remote West! ”

Change the figure and say this postmaster flowed hither as from the molten furnace of His Hampshire home ; in that case he certainly has hardened into cold steel among these moulding sands ! If he ever relaxes the corner of mouth, even, or of eye, it is, at least, no man that knows it. Harry Peters himself in his jolliest story is as much to him, and no more, than yonder crow cawing from the dead top of that girdled post-oak over the way, in Dick Brazier’s field, near the tavern. For Harry is the joker of all the world lying around Brownstown, — the Sir Charles Sedley, the Rev. Sydney Smith, the Grimaldi, and the Dickens of Brown County. Brown County ? Harry was elected captain during the war, member of the Legislature since, simply as being the most popular man known, on account of his fun ! Joking and laughing is nature to Harry, as much as digestion and sleep. A miserable merrymaking it would be considered if Harry Peters was not there. The simple announcement on such occasions of “ O, yonder comes Harry Peters! ” by any one on porch or at window, sent a laugh over every face in advance. You said, the next time you met him after introduction, “Why, how are you, Harry ?” and from your heart, with warm grasp of hand, as if you had known him and he you from birth in the same village. I noticed it at New Hampshire’s store, that dull, dreary downpour of a fall day I was there. A duller, drearier, dirtier set than sat on nail-kegs and tobacco-boxes that hour, making the very weather dirtier, I never saw. Suddenly, some one said in joyful accents, “Hi, Harry!” And the entrance of that lame, pale-faced, stoop-shouldered, jeans-clad fanner, ex-planter, was like a blast of oxygen from a blow-pipe, every man wide awake, laughing already !

“ You never drink, Harry,” I heard Odd Archer say, with many an oath, “ because you never need it,”

“ Yes, private distillery in here, large supply of best, Bourbon always on hand ! ” replies Harry, his palm on his bosom. Nothing in the words, — mere champagne froth; not worth writing, anything he said; tone and manner and meaning all, and as impossible to define as any other magnetism. I know a powerful preacher in New York, whose hairs stand erect around his capacious head, on exactly the same principle as with the dolls having flowing locks which are insulated for that purpose ; it is excess of electricity in the one case as in the other ! And Harry Peters is magnetic, electric, as the torpedo-eel is, fun and laughter the special species of his fluid ! Nothing foul or profane, his fun a simple force of nature, no more immoral or moral than lightning !

Rev. Mr. Parkinson having come, we have church On Sundays thereafter. When the postmaster lifted the lid of his old desk, as I sat at it in the back room, to get me letter-paper, I caught a glimpse of a little, worn, old book therein. How well I know what you are ! I said to myself on the instant. Mainspring, disinfectant, companion, sole and sufficient, in this island among very foul waters. Judæa, New England, heaven. All this old soul loves of past, future, present! Merely a little black book ? Not a prophet or apostle, or least Mary or leper in you, but is more of a living associate to this postmaster than all Brown County can afford ! I wondered if, of Sundays and of nights and of mornings before his store is opened, my friend did not succeed in making out of that dismal surrounding an actual New England for himself, this living book assisting. Wondered if he had a turkey there to himself Thanksgivings. We won’t mention Antæus, if you please, strengthened by touch of his mother earth : certainly the reviving force is from quite another direction in this case. But this old soul’s religion must be, if figures may be multiplied, of a right royal Tyrian dye indeed, which can strike its purple so into the very fabric of the man. If some people are right, will it not be a sad stain in him eternally ? But then, you see, there is no Eternity ! What is climate and soil at last ? South Carolina, for instance, is nothing whatever, except so far as it is — General Theodore Throop! That State will yet be another individual altogether when we once get at that bed of marl there six hundred feet deep and hundreds of miles long. Up to date Carolina is General Theodore Throop or nothing. I succeed the General in Charleston; am, I suppose, the typical South-Carolinian of the future. I do wonder if, in the end, the entire Republic is to be only one immense New England. I cannot say I hope so,—in every sense, I mean.

As I came out of the post-office, on my way back to Dick Frazier’s and General Throop there, I stopped to shake hands with young Evans. I have already alluded, in my letter to my wife, to a sojourn with the General at his cabin near our lands. Allow me to speak more particularly here of the same ; permit me, in fact, to make a new chapter of it, going back, therefore, a few days.

Wm. M. Baker.