The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

One who never analyzed the mysteries of a sensitive child's heart cannot appreciate the sense of awful responsibility which oppressed me during that visit. But all went faultlessly for a time. I corrected myself instantly each time. I said, "Yes, Ma'am," to Mr. Simon, and "No, Sir," to Madam, which was as often as I addressed them; I clenched little fists and lips resolutely, that they might not touch, taste, handle, tempting bijouterie; I even held in check the spirit of inquiry rampant within me, and indulged myself with only one question to every three minutes of time.

At last I found myself at the handsome dinner-table, triumphantly mounted upon two "Comprehensive Commentaries" and a dictionary, fearing no evil from the viands before me. Least of all did I suspect the vegetables of guile. But deep in the heart of a bland, mealy-mouthed potato lurked cruel designs upon my fair reputation.

No sooner had I, in the most approved style of nursery good-breeding, applied my fork to its surface, than the hardhearted thing executed a wild pirouette before my astonished eyes, and then flew on impish wings across the room, dashing out its malicious brains, I am happy to say, against the parlor-door, but leaving me in a half-comatose state, stirred only by vague longings for a lodge with "proud Korah's troop," whose destination is unmistakably set forth in the "Shorter Catechism."

There is a possibility that I received my innate distrust of things by inheritance from my maternal grandmother, whose holy horror at the profanity they once provoked from a bosom-friend in her childhood was still vivid in her old age.

It was on this wise. When still a pretty Puritan maiden, my grandame was tempted irresistibly by the spring sunshine to the tabooed indulgence of a Sunday-walk. The temptation was probably intensified by the presence of the British troops, giving unwonted fascination to village-promenades. Her confederate in this guilty pleasure was a like-minded little saint; so there was a tacit agreement between them that their transgression should be sanctified by a strict adherence to religious topics of conversation. Accordingly they launched boldly upon the great subject which was just then agitating church-circles in New England.

Fortune smiled upon these criminals against the Blue Laws, until they encountered a wall surmounted by hickory rails. Without intermitting the discussion, Susannah sprang agilely up. Quoth she, balancing herself for one moment upon the summit,—"No, no, Betsey! I believe God is the author of sin!" The next she sprang toward the ground; but a salient splinter, a chip of depravity, clutched her Sunday-gown, and converted her incontinently, it seems, into a confessor of the opposing faith; for history records, that, following the above-mentioned dogma, there came from hitherto unstained lips,—"The Devil!"

Time and space would, of course, be inadequate to the enumeration of all the demonstrations of the truth of the doctrine of the absolute depravity of things. A few examples only can be cited.

There is melancholy pleasure in the knowledge that a great soul has gone mourning before me in the path I am now pursuing. It was only to-day, that, in glancing over the pages of Victor Hugo's greatest work, I chanced upon the following:—"Every one will have noticed with what skill a coin let fall upon the ground runs to hide itself, and what art it has in rendering itself invisible; there are thoughts which play us the same trick," etc., etc.

The similar tendency of pins and needles is universally understood and execrated,—their base secretiveness when searched for, and their incensing intrusion when one is off guard.

I know a man whose sense of their malignity is so keen, that, whenever he catches a gleam of their treacherous lustre on the carpet, he instantly draws his two and a quarter yards of length into the smallest possible compass, and shrieks until the domestic police come to the rescue, and apprehend the sharp little villains. Do not laugh at this. Years ago he lost his choicest friend by the stab of just such a little dastard lying in ambush.

So also every wielder of the needle is familiar with the propensity of the several parts of a garment in the process of manufacture to turn themselves wrong side out, and down side up; and the same viciousness cleaves like leprosy to the completed garment so long as a thread remains.

My blood still tingles with a horrible memory illustrative of this truth.

Dressing hurriedly and in darkness for a concert one evening, I appealed to the Dominie, as we passed under the hall-lamp, for a toilet-inspection.

"How do I look, father?"

After a sweeping glance came the candid statement,—

"Beau-tifully!"

Oh, the blessed glamour which invests a child whose father views her "with a critic's eye"!

"Yes, of course; but look carefully, please; how is my dress?"

Another examination of apparently severest scrutiny.

"All right, dear! That's the new cloak, is it? Never saw you look better. Come, we shall be late."

Confidingly I went to the hall; confidingly I entered; since the concert-room was crowded with rapt listeners to the Fifth Symphony, I, gingerly, but still confidingly, followed the author of my days, and the critic of my toilet, to the very uppermost seat, which I entered, barely nodding to my finically fastidious friend, Guy Livingston, who was seated near us with a stylish-looking stranger, who bent eyebrows and glass upon me superciliously.

Seated, the Dominie was at once lifted into the midst of the massive harmonies of the Adagio; I lingered outside a moment, in order to settle my garments and—that woman's look. What! was that a partially suppressed titter near me? Ah! she has no soul for music! How such ill-timed merriment will jar upon my friend's exquisite sensibilities!

Shade of Beethoven! A hybrid cough and laugh, smothered decorously, but still recognizable, from the courtly Guy himself! What can it mean?

In my perturbation, my eyes fell and rested upon the sack, whose newness and glorifying effect had been already noticed by my lynx-eyed parent.

I here pause to remark that I had intended to request the compositor to "set up" the coming sentence in explosive capitals, by way of emphasis, but forbear, realizing that it already staggers under the weight of its own significance.

That sack was wrong side out!

Stern necessity, proverbially known as "the mother of invention," and practically the step-mother of ministers' daughters, had made me eke out the silken facings of the front with cambric linings for the back and sleeves. Accordingly, in the full blaze of the concert-room, there sat I, "accoutred as I was," in motley attire,—my homely little economies patent to admiring spectators: on either shoulder, budding wings composed of unequal parts of sarcenet-cambric and cotton-batting; and in my heart—parricide I had almost said, but it was rather the more filial sentiment of desire to operate for cataract upon my father's eyes. But a moment's reflection sufficed to transfer my indignation to its proper object,—the sinful sack itself, which, concerting with its kindred darkness, had planned this cruel assault upon my innocent pride.

A constitutional obtuseness renders me delightfully insensible to one fruitful source of provocation among inanimate things. I am so dull as to regard all distinctions between "rights" and "lefts" as invidious; but I have witnessed the agonized struggles of many a victim of fractious boots, and been thankful that "I am not as other men are," in ability to comprehend the difference between my right and left foot. Still, as already intimated, I have seen wise men driven mad by a thing of leather and waxed-ends.

A little innocent of three years, in all the pride of his first boots, was aggravated, by the perversity of the right to thrust itself on to the left leg, to the utterance of a contraband expletive.

When reproved by his horror-stricken mamma, he maintained a dogged silence.

In order to pierce his apparently indurated conscience, his censor finally said, solemnly,—

"Dugald! God knows that you said that wicked word."

"Does He?" cried the baby-victim of reral depravity, in a tone of relief; "then He knows it was a doke" (Anglicè, joke).

But, mind you, the sin-tempting boot intended no "doke."

The toilet, with its multiform details and complicated machinery, is a demon whose surname is Legion.

Time would fail me to speak of the elusiveness of soap, the knottiness of strings, the transitory nature of buttons, the inclination of suspenders to twist, and of hooks to forsake their lawful eyes, and cleave only unto the hairs of their hapless owner's head. (It occurs to me as barely possible, that, in the last case, the hooks may be innocent, and the sinfulness may lie in capillary attraction.)

And, O my brother or sister in sorrow, has it never befallen you, when bending all your energies to the mighty task of "doing" your back-hair, to find yourself gazing inanely at the opaque back of your brush, while the hand-mirror, which had maliciously insinuated itself into your right hand for this express purpose, came down upon your devoted head with a resonant whack?

I have alluded, parenthetically, to the possible guilt of capillary attraction, but I am prepared to maintain against the attraction of gravitation the charge of total depravity. Indeed, I should say of it, as did the worthy exhorter of the Dominie's old parish in regard to slavery,—"It's the wickedest thing in the world, except sin!"

It was only the other day that I saw depicted upon the young divine's countenance, from this cause, thoughts "too deep for tears," and, perchance, too earthy for clerical utterance.

From a mingling of sanitary and economic considerations, he had cleared his own sidewalk after a heavy snow-storm. As he stood, leaning upon his shovel, surveying with smiling complacency his accomplished task, the spite of the arch-fiend Gravitation was raised against him, and, finding the impish slates (hadn't Luther something to say about "as many devils as tiles"?) ready to coöperate, an avalanche was the result, making the last state of that sidewalk worse than the first, and sending the divine into the house with a battered hat, and an article of faith supplementary to the orthodox thirty-nine.

Prolonged reflection upon a certain class of grievances has convinced me that mankind has generally ascribed them to a guiltless source. I refer to the unspeakable aggravation of "typographical errors," rightly so called,—for, in nine cases out of ten, I opine it is the types themselves which err.

I appeal to fellow-sufferers, if the substitutions and interpolations and false combinations of letters are not often altogether too absurd for humanity.

Take, as one instance, the experience of a friend, who, in writing in all innocency of a session of the Historical Society, affirmed mildly in manuscript, "All went smoothly," but weeks after was made to declare in blatant print, "All went snoringly!"

As among men, so in the alphabet, one sinner destroyeth much good.

The genial Senator from the Granite Hills told me of an early aspiration of his own for literary distinction, which was beheaded remorselessly by a villain of this type. By way of majestic peroration to a pathetic article, he had exclaimed, "For what would we exchange the fame of Washington?"—referring, I scarcely need say, to the man of fragrant memory, and not to the odorous capital. The black-hearted little dies, left to their own devices one night, struck dismay to the heart of the aspirant author by propounding in black and white a prosaic inquiry as to what would be considered a fair equivalent for the farm of the father of his country!

Among frequent instances of this depravity in my own experience, a flagrant example still shows its ugly front on a page of a child's book. In the latest edition of "Our Little Girls," (good Mr. Randolph, pray read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,) there occurs a description of a christening, wherein a venerable divine is made to dip "his head" into the consecrating water, and lay it upon the child.

Disembodied words are also sinners and the occasions of sin. Who has not broken the Commandments in consequence of the provocation of some miserable little monosyllabic eluding his grasp in the moment of his direst need, or of some impertinent interloper thrusting itself in to the utter demoralization of his well-organized sentences? Who has not been covered with shame at tripping over the pronunciation of some perfectly simple word like "statistics," "inalienable," "inextricable," etc., etc., etc.?

Whose experience will not empower him to sympathize with that unfortunate invalid, who, on being interrogated by a pious visitor in regard to her enjoyment of means of grace, informed the horror-stricken inquisitor,—"I have not been to church for years, I have been such an infidel,"—and then, moved by a dim impression of wrong somewhere, as well as by the evident shock inflicted upon her worthy visitor, but conscious of her own integrity, repeated still more emphatically,—"No; I have been a confirmed infidel for years."

But a peremptory summons from an animated nursery forbids my lingering longer in this fruitful field. I can only add an instance of corroborating testimony from each member of the circle originating this essay.

The Dominie loq.—"Sha'n't have anything to do with it! It's a wicked thing! To be sure, I do remember, when I was a little boy, I used to throw stones at the chip-basket when it upset the cargo I had just laded, and it was a great relief to my feelings too. Besides, you've told stories about me which were anything but true. I don't remember anything about that sack."