Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English traveller—"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something—who had a long, silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.

That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never hit a clam?" asked he.

"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.

"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about in livery-rigs everywhere—sure sign of prosperity."

"Your people are not out," I said.

"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."

"They can't get work," said I.

"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: that I know" said the old man.

"Some are sick."

"They are well enough to walk three miles to a brewery after a free drink."

"Some are too young to work."

"Hah! what's the use of having a parcel of young ones to be poor relations to the rest of the world?" asked he.

"Some are positively starving," said I.

"What of that? You have to let them starve. Five hundred thousand starved in India last year, a country overrun with sacred snakes and animals of all sorts that they might have eaten. Three millions starved in China, and they tore up their English railway, the only thing that could save them. What are you going to do about it? Starving! Bet they are wallowing in the theatre every night," said Nathan.

"The theatre with Lawrence Barrett! I wish they might see anything so elevating. Perhaps Othello might make some impression on them, such a stupendous temperance lecture it is!" I groaned.

"If you would leave the theatre alone you wouldn't be quite so short as you are now," asserted Uncle Nate, almost popping open with contempt.

"'Short,' man! 'Short' in your throat!" shouted I, forgetting myself.

"Yes, short; and it's my opinion you've shorted me in this business."

I could not kick our uncle out of his premises, so I got out myself, not to return; and I left in debt to him as well as to the rest of the world. I went homeward. Though it was August, a cold wind blew from the lake, whipping the large, flapping leaves of the castor-bean plants in the front yards to rags. I quaffed the lake in the wet wind. "No wonder," I thought, "we're three parts water: our world is." A young fellow on the street-car platform smoked a cigar that smelled like pigweed, cabbage-stalks and other garden rubbish burning, and made me sick. He enjoyed it, though: in fact, all, including the street-car driver himself, were on that day more than usually engaged in the intense enjoyment of being Chicagoans. All but me, miserable. The very windows and pavements of our streets, being clean and cold, sent a chill to my bones.

When I reached home Lydia was pinning on her habergeon, her neck-armor of ribbons and lace, before the mirror. "What is this?" I asked, pointing to the suspicious note, still pinned to the cushion.

"That's the note that has to be found in my room in the play of Lost in London," she answered, turning the great lamps of her eyes on mine.

As I had nothing to say to this, I went and lay down on the sofa before the parlor-fire. Though a grate in January is a poor affair—I never knew any human being who really depended on one in winter to speak in praise of it—on a cool August day it is delicious. I fell into a warm doze before the fire, then into a series of agreeable naps. When Lydia said supper was ready I did not want any, and at bedtime I was too stiff to move easily.

After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing. Luxurious indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar—a satisfaction in seeing the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,

While day sank or mounted higher,
The light, aërial gallery, golden railed,
Burn like a fringe of fire

on some remote palace of the city. These and other sensations of malarial fever occupied me for a while. In half dreams I then enjoyed the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned. Light diet and keeping quiet—which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this fever—cured me. I came forth looking like a swairth, one of those words marked "obs." in the dictionary—means phantom of a person about to die. It ought to be revived; so here goes—swairth.

Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.

I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind: I had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made up.

"Well, Lydia," said I, "you wanted to manage: you were bound to wear the breeches. As you make your pants, so you must sit in them."

"You awful man!" said she.

"Now I will manage," said I.

"Indeed! Nothing would please me better," said she.

"I will sell our house and all that's in it, and get out of debt," said I.

"You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags," she exclaimed.

"We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting Class. I shall be of the first class. As to clothes, they are despicable," I replied.

"People who despise clothes can't get any."

"Well, I've done all I'm going to do toward developing the West, which consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see."

When an able woman submits she submits completely. Lydia put our house in order. I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale. I have not been a paragraphist for nothing: the sale was a success. I paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my future poor. I started in again on the Times' city force. To board I hate: it's a chicken's life—roosting on a perch, coming down to eat and then going back to roost. So I got a little domicile in "The Patch." When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been scrubbed emit peculiar odors.

"It smells poor-folksy here," says Lydia.

"All the better!" say I.

    —MARY DEAN.

SHORT STUDIES IN THE PICTURESQUE

Although our American climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests, in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland landscape seem tame in comparison. The rapid changes of temperature in summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge, irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented towers and "looming bastions fringed with fire."

Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,
Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,
Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain
And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.

The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged study. I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature. Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape, "hatchelled" on the sky in minute lines and limnings. Now the sky looks like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there through tender masses of silver frosting. The skies of the New England coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies of the interior. I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I once witnessed in the Ohio Valley. It lasted but a few moments, but what a spectacle! The setting sun was throwing his golden light over the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron. All along the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantasmagoria of splendor, "the magic-lantern of Nature"! What a rich contrast of color!—the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers. I felt assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in The Scarlet Letter and in Oldport Days can hardly be appreciated to the full by those who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast. Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled, grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is. It is a strange je ne sais quoi that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most enchanting and varied scenery—river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse, hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite.

A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again into its sinuous bed. This water was as fickle and wanton and many-mooded as a coquettish girl. Now its translucent glassy surface is unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored. I look out again, and the face of the water is working with rage under the lashing of the wind: at the same time its face seems white with fear, and its ghostly arms are tossing, now in defiance and now in piteous appeal. But now, as I gaze, the winds in their uncouth gambols tear a huge rent in the cloud-tent they had raised over the earth, and in the sweet blue beyond appears the calm and smiling face of the sun. Before its glance the wind-phantoms slink away in fear and the now quiet streamlet smiles through its tears.

The stiff formality and the ridiculous solemnity of the old Puritan times still linger about these secluded New England hamlets. But each winter a huge Christmas tree is set up in the church of the village I have mentioned, and loaded with presents. The winter I was there I went to see the distribution. Recollecting the delightful Christmas days of my own childhood, I was anticipating great pleasure. Of course I was going to look in on a scene of childish joy, of shouting and laughing, and eating of candy and pop-corn in unlimited quantities. Memories of the stories of Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers were floating through my mind as I crunched the crisp snow under my feet on my way to the church. I remembered the rapture of those Christmas mornings at home, when we children stole down stairs by candlelight to the warm room filled with the aromatic perfume of the Christmas tree, that stood there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus—Noah's arks, mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance. Ah, the memory of our childhood's hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up in our nets some magic colored fish? Well, I reached the church. The children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness. Another followed. "Very well, gentlemen," thought I, "but now please to retire and give up the field to these children." But no. The superintendent of the Sunday-school now advanced: the children marched up one by one, as their names were called, and received their presents from him. Some of them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked as if they were going to their execution. When all was done the meeting was dismissed!