A Gentleman Adventurer

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

AT the very moment when British patresfamilias were reading American Notes aloud, with scornful approval, in the domestic circle, their sons were cherishing a secret wild enthusiasm for America. Little boys felt it burning like a blue flame beneath their roundabouts — young men riding steeplechase found it tugging at their boots and shouting in their ears.

Their elders might look coldly upon us as mere sayers of ‘I guess,’and imbibers of ice-water; but to these generous youth we were all potential Deerslayers and Mohicans, and spent our holiday lives lassoing buffalo.

Such was the view of us entertained in Liverpool in the fifties by a whole shipping-office-full of young Raleighs — prospective La Salles and Magellans. Among them was a fair and curly Scottish youth, from the valley of the Rule, the Border battle-ground. He had from childhood a great longing to ‘tread where no white man had ever trod before.’ Old and thoroughly explored countries had no attraction for him. Ships might go forth under his hand, as it were, to India or China; they left him fancy-free. But let a cable slip for the westward, and the young Roxburghshireman was off in spirit on that deck, with half a dozen of his fellow clerks about him, all outward bound on the ‘trail that is always new.’

It was in the Kangaroo, in 1858, that he achieved his first voyage to America. Fate was pleased when he came, and threw adventures in his way as a decoy to bring him back. For possessions and belongings were no more to this young man than to Socrates, when ‘seeing great store of precious stuffs carried through the city, “Oh, how many things,” cried he, “do I not desire!”’ — But if it were a sin to covet adventure, —

He made, like Hudson, four voyages to these shores. On that famous first one, he was in a rousing storm off Newfoundland, when the boots and boxes of the passengers were washed up and down the corridors, and hurled violently against their cabin doors. Thus ushered into the New World (at a port for which he had not sailed), he lost no time in beginning that series of assorted adventures which he was so well qualified to adorn. Most of these were of a LewisCarrollish, or Stocktonesque description. J. D. C., for example, was never a soldier; yet he was once invited to join a scouting party, the members of which ‘rather expected’ to be ’picked off occasionally by an enterprising sharpshooter.’ He was a member of a committee chosen to present a stand of colors to the hare-brained ‘ Scotch Regiment of Chicago’ at the opening of the Civil War; and managed on that occasion to ride a borrowed war-horse ‘ with no mean éclat’ through a narrow and rickety ‘triumphal arch,’—as great a feat, I think, as his escape from the lampless octagonal room in the strange hotel, when a midnight fire was raging.

Fires many and tragical have pursued the hero of this Odyssey. There was a fire not above seven years ago in ——apolis, where he, dashing back into the blazing tinder-box to rescue his tent and camera, discovered and saved a sleeping boy. Tents, fishingrods, and cameras, by some odd coincidence, are always saved from fires which consume this gentleman’s other worldly goods. It was an invariable answer, when I was young, to all inquiries after this or that picture-book, or piece of furniture (as, ‘Whatever became, J., of that old mahogany desk that you had in Texas?’), —

‘Why, don’t you remember? that was burned up in the fire at Madison — no, I mean the first fire after we were married.’

I have sometimes thought of cataloguing ,J. D. C.’s adventures somewhat on the following plan: —

A. By train: as when the insane man chased the passengers into the freight car, and stood guard over them with a revolver;

B. Adventures at World’s Fairs: as when the Buffalo expressman sent his trunk by mistake to a house-party in the country, leaving a lady’s Saratoga in its place;

C. Camping adventures, in which I should list the Chicago fire (on what I may call the librarian’s or encyclopædian, principle — ‘Chicago fire; see Camping Adventures’). For he was camping in a wild spot near that city when the historic cow overturned the lantern; and a friend came out to join him in a hunt, and only over the campfire at night bethought himself, and said, —

‘ Oh, by the bye, I forgot to tell you — Chicago is all burned up!’

‘And my warehouses with it!’ cried L D. C.

There is a touch of such nonchalance in all the adventures he ever recounted to me, on those walks round ‘the inlet ’ on summer afternoons, when he is in his best narrating mood. Who ever heard a series of accidents by flood and field reported by the principal with such entire absence of megalomania? His modest humor plays all over them like lightning on the hills at home in a spring thunderstorm. That hurricane, in particular, when he was obliged to brace the flimsy door to keep the house about his head, always appeared to him in a humorous light. So did the haying runaway, when the loose load slipped off in bales to left and right, the endeared adventurer balancing perilously on top, as the mad beasts careened down the uneven field. So did the roof toboggan, when he slid down the steep and slippery shingles of our Wisconsin house, with fast increasing momentum, until the eaves-trough, holding fast against his terrific onset, stayed and saved him from the marble steps below.

These all belong in my list under the heading‘Adventures at Home.’ They are the most numerous, the most ingenious, and the most blood-curdling of all. Shall I ever forget the dreadful day when the pole of the barn-door fell on his head? We children huddled near in frightful certainty that he was lost to us. Lost those morning romps — those scrambling games of Creepycrabby — those tid-bits, surreptitious from my mother, of cake and jam — lost, in brief, the dearest, best play-fellow children ever had! Thank heaven, we were mistaken.

Last summer I went with this captain of companions to a remote spot on a reef of Long Island. We kept house in a bungalow, and bathed in a thundering surf not far from our front door. In the midst of our stay a storm and flood came on, the marshes behind our reef were submerged, the Sound came in at the inlet, the surf rolled up over the sandy ridge in front; the waters met beneath our fragile floor. The first billow to reach us from the open sea rolled in at dusk on a Sunday evening, and for half that night J. and I, at intervals of an hour, measured with an inverted broom the depth of the loud wash beneath us. At daybreak we looked out upon such a waste of waters as Miss Ingelow describes in the ‘High Tide’: —

I was very much alarmed. I made a little will bequeathing my Bible, MSS., and Oxford Book. Once I glanced over my bequests at J. D. C. and saw a look of great contentment in his eye. He was ever at home ‘in perils of robbers, in perils in cities, in perils in the sea.’ The bright face of danger had smiled on him in his cradle. His life has been more full than most men’s of cares and affections, yet he has managed throughout to keep the gypsy maxim of Montaigne: —