Revisiting the Earth Part 5

_The Practice Has Boomerang Implications_

When one is in doubt about recommending a person or thing he ought to take the elder Weller's advice with regard to widows, "Don't." A letter of recommendation ought not to express the judgment of him who seeks it, but of him who gives it. Recommendations too often embody the opinion of the applicant only voiced in the words of a man of influence and position. The pen had over-employment as compared with the feet. We ought to help convicts, released from prison, at the expiration of their sentence, to get employment; but the employer ought to be put in possession of the facts. There is probably no one of us but can say that his letters of recommendation have surpa.s.sed in fruitfulness every other form of helpful service. By them currents have been set in motion that have changed the course of many a life. Among those eminent deeds that have caused most of happiness to others, that the angels unmistakably approved, stand out foremost in all one's past those instances in which a letter of introduction and of unhesitating recommendation has brought certain rare spirits into appropriate positions of usefulness and honor.

An aged clergyman, loving and beloved, tells a wondering company, how one of Boston's merchant-princes went up to the metropolis of New England, cherishing in his pocket as his chief possession, a letter that meant every word it said and into which a whole country church, through its minister, had put its true estimate of a young, manly, Christian character, also its well wishes and its hopes.

_Things with a Difference_

There is a saying that Adam once returned to the earth where he recognized no country but Spain. "Ah," said he, "this is exactly as I left it." Since 1880 we have built more than five hundred cities in America, among them some of the smartest in the world. We once lived here, in a plain country town, and now forsooth they have a little doll of a city. In a Boston burial ground there is an enclosed grave-lot. The iron fence is warping and rusting and crumbling. On the iron gate-way to the lot is moulded the caption, "Never to be disturbed." Nature the same, everything else changes is the rule. Even in hoa.r.s.e, brutal, unprogressive Russia everything is becoming new fangled, dress, features, manners, pursuits, all are becoming new. The alterations, in our former place of abode, have been so unconsciously and so gradually made, as to escape the attention of the resident. The secrecy with which all forms of business was conducted is an example. "No admittance"

signs were once so much used that the form could have been manufactured in lots and kept in stock to supply the constant demand. It used to be the custom, in paying a bill, for a man as he drew out his pocket-book, to turn half way around, and with his back to the gentleman he was dealing with, open the wallet and examine his money.

There has been an astonishing increase in the number of employments, as compared with the few different vocations of earlier days. Medical men and lawyers had no specialties as they do now. Many doctors today, who would like an all-round development, would better enjoy a country practice. The sons of the physicians have gone into vocations that were hardly recognized when their fathers began practice. One of the electrical firms asked to be given, for their work alone, the entire graduating cla.s.s of 1900 from Cornell University.

_The Changing World_

The slang of a generation ago, some of it is given a permanent place in our language, and while in the dictionaries it is rated as a colloquialism, it is thus recognized. It has increased so greatly in the speech of the people, it comes freely also from student bodies, from the trades and sports and from the war camps, that it will now keep the lexicon makers busy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PARADISE LOST--BEFORE THE SALEM FIRE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PARADISE REGAINED--AFTER THE CONFLAGRATION]

Swearing has grown milder. The grossness and blasphemy are largely barred, while the expletives that technically may not be swearing at all, being used for raciness, vigor and emphasis, have increased one hundred fold.

A symptom of decadence is the elimination of book-stores. Speaking broadly it is impossible to find a stall with a stock of books except in the larger cities. When desirous of substantial reading matter I am sometimes able to buy biographies and other books, worth while, at the drug store in a country town. On moving into flats, families commit an unpardonable sin in disposing of their books. The most sickening sight in New York, Chicago, or Boston is to see second-hand books faded and weather-beaten exposed on the street for sale at a seedy, feeble price.

In spite of the strong drift of governments toward democracy, in revisiting the earth, I detected an exaggeration of cla.s.s feeling as compared with the early days when there were no poor in the whole town and hardly any very rich. Our pleasures were then more simple and our life, on the whole, more serious.

The increased height in houses is apparent. As the family prospers, it seeks to have the walls in the second story carried up full height, that they may not show inside the pitch of the roof which is the distinguishing mark of a cottage.

_The Unexpected Happens_

I suppose that the pa.s.sing years make little or no impression on a well-built stone wall, but where growth and prosperity abound they are not likely to preserve many of the primitive buildings and land-marks, but if any living man had predicted the entire remaking and reshaping of this place of my early residence the reply would have been that if the Lord would work a miracle then might this thing be. The man who professed to know just how we are made, as an automobile maker knows a car, tells us that in seven years we get, physically, a brand new outfit, that old things pa.s.s away, and all things become new. As we have not now the same bodies so we have not the same mind. Our ideals, our manners are different. We are different. We have had many a re-birth.

Time has brought changes that could no more be withstood than you could resist the earth in its revolution. It is the miracle of a generation, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to many ears like a fable. The growth in population and in wealth, during a long constructive period, has kept up the clatter of the hammer, the cry of "mort," and the scent of the resinous odor of the pine. Inventions and improvements have placed man in a new relation to the globe he inhabits. Since new ideas began to prevail former methods have been discarded. Even a snake, with years, sheds its scales and envelopes itself in a new skin. The sun once stood still, and the Jordan was arrested in its banks, but life and the stream of events have flowed on without pause or rest. People who have never made a visit, like ours, will talk freely, far from wisely, about what they have always said, and always thought, as if they had always looked through the same eyes, and judged by the same standards. Not so. You looked on life as it seemed then and are looking again with the picture shifted. Your whole point of view is changed. When a man says, "I have always felt," he means that he has felt thus, back part way, or to a given point, but not so certainly much beyond it.

_The Past Looks Like a Dream_

We made from recollection and were aided by inquiry, a catalogue of the false prophets who early moved away, to the big cities, saying that the place where we had lived would never increase much in business or population. There is a French proverb which warns people not to use the words "never or always." The Wall Street Journal has just used that unreliable forbidden word "never." It heads an article, "Cheap Food Never Again." Any man living in our old place of residence would be wary of the use of the term "never." He would feel that almost any good fortune may come. With tractors and gang-plows operating in the Land of the Dakotas, South Dakota alone being a quarter larger than all New England, and Montana, the third largest state in the union, very much more than equal in size to England, Scotland, Ireland combined and Texas as big as Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland together, these states being now chiefly unfarmed, with shoals of immigrants after the war to work these fields, bounded only by the sky line, how can a man use the expression, Cheap Food Never Again? The statesman Cambon said that never would Rome cease to belong to the people and that never would Rome be the capital of the king of Italy. A Clergyman here, of high authority and position, showed how all the sovereigns of the chief European nations were blood relatives and announced that there could never be another great war. He became positive. He said such a thing was unthinkable. Look next at the harvest of death in the German war. "He who, outside of mathematics, p.r.o.nounces the word 'impossible' lacks prudence."

_Achilles Pondered in His Tent_

Yankee Doodle's criticism was quite just. He could not see the town because there were so many houses. We need to get away from the crowded streets and narrow lanes and talkative people to win a true perspective.

I wanted to sit down alone and think things over. The people, generally, were as strange to me as I was to them, and yet there was a time, when I was as well-known to everybody, as a child is to his own mother, and when I knew everybody in town. All the alterations of things are wondrously complete, but these were nothing to the change of appearance in the faces of the people. The old familiar countenances, where were they? I looked here and I looked there and everywhere but they had largely vanished from above and below the earth. The character of the dog has undergone less change, than that of the human master, to whom he is so strangely attached. Change, that immutable law of nature, had wrought such shifts in the faces among old acquaintances that all smiles of recognition were wanting. But when I look in the gla.s.s I see no change. To the people I must have appeared as the veriest Rip Van Winkle. It was not the fault of the thrifty, prosperous place that I had slept so long, but like Rip Van Winkle it was in me to come back, and I am trying to learn to say with him, Everything is changed and I am changed. He recalled the occurrences before he entered upon his extended slumber and returned to find that the place was altered. It was enlarged and more populous and had rows of houses which he had not seen before.

The dress of the people, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed but whether under the somnolent influences of his lethargies, or free from them, he mused amid all the changes of outward affairs upon one immutable scene, "the lordly river moving on its silent but majestic course."

CHAPTER IX

WHAT HAD BECOME OF THE OLD ECCENTRICITIES

On revisiting the earth nothing is more remarkable than to find that with each man goes one striking characterization. There is usually one prevalent well-founded recollection based upon a temperamental peculiarity, and the impression was made, that the former citizen was fortunate to leave that one item in the memory of the people. You make reference to him, "Oh, yes, he was our town clerk for twenty years." As often as you mention him you are told again the fact which distinguishes him. One beloved character was Abiel Ba.s.sett. "Oh yes, he was our good deacon, Deacon Ba.s.sett." He was a farmer. As such, he made his living, but that was nothing to the point. "Deacon Ba.s.sett"--that was all. Cain stands in the catechism for one fact. There are two things beside, that could be said of him. It is not usual to mention them. Judas must have had excellent qualities or he would not have been made an apostle. One thing attaches to him. If a person's picture is to be taken he might like to designate the occasion and expression, but then he might show self-consciousness which spoils everything. He must not appear to want "to be seen of men." History wants to make his picture a likeness, just as he is, and as his friends see him, every day. On revisiting the earth I find that one act is always stated of my father. It gave him earthly immortality. It was not his greatest act nor his best. He took no pose for the permanent picture. Joseph Jefferson, Kate Claxton and Edwin Booth had, each of them, one part that fitted them like a garment and fully expressed them. It would inevitably become the favorite selected for a "Benefit Night." Audiences in part determined their public character. My father took his permanent position thus by a kind of election.

He was not consulted. History does not say, "How would you like to have your picture taken now?" He is caught like a fly in the amber and there he remains. His repute is imperishable. Thus statuesque is history.

_Forgetting all Except One Truth_

My mother left one clear-cut impression. It remained like the imprint of a fern leaf on a rock, a suggestive though accidental record of the years gone by. It was a simple picture stamped with a strange indelibility, like the patience of Job, the meekness of Moses, the daring of Daniel, the greed of Shylock, the indecision of Hamlet, the jealousy of Oth.e.l.lo, the furious driving of Jehu. One story was told with endless iteration by the old-time neighbors who feel themselves under no obligation to laboriously dig up a second story when the usual one is the best and is so thoroughly characteristic. Thus all other occurrences are suffered to fade from the community's recollection. When a patriarch was returning from battle with his spoils, a priest, meeting him, stretched forth his arms and blessed him. In this pose history's snap-shot was taken. After thousands of years we find that he "abideth a priest continually." Such men are the moral pivots of society. Their claim on remembrance, like William the Silent, Charles the Bold, Richard the Lion-Hearted turned upon one conspicuous thing and history will so nail that one fact down and so hammer it that it is practically impossible to effect a readjustment, as in the matter of Daniel Webster's physical condition while making his Rochester speech and of the obloquy cast upon Chief Justice Taney in the Dred-Scott decision, that the negro "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect."

The learned judge never made that affirmation. His sympathies in the recital were against, rather than with, the sentiment he named. In revisiting the earth you find that history did not fasten upon the best form of characterization and you try to argue. Oh never mind now, our story is a good one; it will have to stand. It has been attacked before.

_Personalities of Rarest Types_

The difficulty has been pointed out of recalling our childhood, exactly as it was, for the reason that as we travel backward, we take our present selves with us. Imagination is now less active, and so things are shorn of their size and of their exaggerated features. On coming to town we miss the lion of the place. Our juvenile Hall of Fame was featured by the Sagamore of the tribe. In the good old days society had its leader, its model, its dictator who would have led an army or governed a kingdom. He merited the description by which the Norse sages so often carried a meaning of high praise when they declared one to be "not an every-day man." His individual life was less lost in the crowd.

His isolation reacted on his character. His residence was one of the show places of the town. It was the resort for the itinerant politician, holding out the glad hand, who was to speak in the evening, and was with us to electioneer. In such a community it falls usually to one and the self-same family to entertain. The house is known as the Quaker tavern, or the Methodist tavern. Its hospitality is proverbial. It had its spare room. This became locally quite famous for the celebrities it had welcomed, before they had come to their later fame. Hospitality in this form is the grace of small, remote, detached places. The minister's house had a prophet's chamber, with a "bed and a table and a stool and a candle-stick" so that when any "holy man of G.o.d" pa.s.sed by he could turn in thither. A minister's wife said plaintively that she never knew how many she was cooking a meal for. On one occasion she had provided a custard pie, more than ample, for the few she then had in mind. It was however necessary later to cut it into six pieces and that, notwithstanding the fact that it was imperative, by an unforseen situation, for the mother herself and her daughter not to "care for any"

that day. The minister's family adopted a code of S. O. S. signals which it would sound around F. H. B., "Family hold back," M. I. K., "more in the kitchen." To the manse any minister, though a total stranger and unannounced, could come with complete a.s.surance. The itinerant and his horse were now and then forced by a snow-storm to remain a few days until the roads were broken up and settled.

_Poet of the One-Hoss Shay Said, "No Extra Charge"_

The lobby, in the earlier country tavern, was universally called the bar-room. Travel was thus staging from one bar-room to another. The tables were served by the village belles. Other employment, as in factories or stores, did not then exist. The inn holder was a conspicuous man. He picked up the news from the stage driver and his pa.s.sengers. When the old-fashioned Concord stage coach approached town the four fine horses were slowed down into an easy pace for a few furlongs but reaching the suburbs, the horses were given the word, and the long whip was cracked and they dashed into town, making the arrival peculiarly enlivening.

Presently the country landlord would appear on the long broad platform to sound the summons to the table. This was done by the loud violent ringing of a dinner bell, which was swung by a whole arm-movement on both sides of the artist's body, and made to publish in double tones its noisy welcome. The ringer's whole anatomy entered for the time being into the contortion for producing sound.

Every inst.i.tution is said to be the lengthened shadow of some personality. It was a happy thought that gave those men the t.i.tle of fathers of their country. The term is very significant of their munificence or of some real thing that made them kings in the hearts of men. Those names are enshrined in some academy, or other school, or bank, or business house, or attached to some central conspicuous street.

A return to the residence discovers that imagination had given it a part of its size and that its proportions were carried over from the local prominence of its occupant. "I saw an angel standing in the sun," said St. John. Position gives size. A man who stands near a camp fire projects portentous dimensions on s.p.a.ce behind him. The aristocracy of such a man sometimes was certainly not in his dress. He wore the old-fashions, walked in the old ways, and was a revelation of things that had pa.s.sed away. He wore a heavy, tall, silk cylinder hat in which he carried a bandana handkerchief, valuable papers, and a large pocket-book that was wrapped round with a thin band of leather that was pa.s.sed under a succession of loops. We used to call him a gentleman of the old school. We used to secretly wonder how he escaped the flood.

_Links with the Past_

When he adopted his style of dress his apparel was the last word in fashion. It suited his taste, was becoming, comfortable, and satisfactory. His course was consistent. He adhered to it and kept right on. Toward the last of his career he depended somewhat upon it to make him a marked man. Such an individual with obsolete manners was, like Melrose Abbey, impressive in its decay. In his age, disliking changes, his distrustful mind would cling to what was nearest to him, his appearance. He did not see why his style of dress should be interfered with. He made no reckoning with time. That item alone gives a rude awakening to a recruit. In a call for troops he was pa.s.sed by. Again in a call for troops he is summoned. He is substantially what he felt himself before to be, only time, simply time has pa.s.sed and he is twenty-one and takes a new relation to his own parents and to his country and to his fortune. The city of Washington used to contain a set of pensioned admirals, retired army officers and officials, who still wore the hall marks of their life when at its climax. The simple revolution of the earth made them fossils and relics and reminders that the procession of which they had been honored members had now for the greater part turned the corner and pa.s.sed out of view. Sometimes an old man and his wife, tall and antique in appearance, resembling Abraham and Sarah of old, are distinguished chiefly for looking "like the afternoon shadow of other people."

_Boys Did Not Know What to Make of Them_

On revisiting the earth the old alb.u.ms are the first things inevitably brought out and was there ever anything more grotesque and unearthly than that which is shown in their hideous, faded contents? A woman, in those days, so deformed her fine form, that the wonder was expressed, and the surprise, that with that make-up she ever got a husband.

When de Tocqueville was in this country looking for evidences of democracy in America, he frankly states in the introduction to his epoch-making book that he saw more than there was. Impossible. You cannot find what does not exist, yet his untruth is the exact unqualified truth. He that seeketh findeth. He plainly saw signs of democracy before he left the company's dock as he landed from the ship.

He saw it too at the hotel. It takes a big volume to tell all the tokens he discovered. If he had been accompanied by a twin brother, different in heart, in sympathies, and in his specialty he could in turn have found money kings, railroad kings, kings of fortune, landlords, laborers in a stand-up fight with capitalists. McAllister found a social set limited in number to four hundred. A real estate man takes a different view of the Hawthorne house or of Independence Hall or the Old South Church from the antiquarian. Dr. W. J. Dawson knew a man who sailed with Napoleon but could tell of him later but two items, one of which had some reference to silk hosiery, that his mind probably revolted at, as extravagant or as prudish. Of the same incident, some said it thundered, others said an angel spake. An artist and a banker traveled together abroad and on hearing their recital you would suppose they visited different lands.

_Heroes and Fine Old Gentlemen_

One of the curiosities of history was the great game of follow-my-leader, that the whole community used to play. Under the hat of the great man of the village was a brain large enough for the ruler of a nation. He seemed the peer of a Bismarck in executive force. We have had since a high grade of general education but then we had a giant. He had an individuality peculiar and surprising. His mental traits were exceptional. The dominant features of his character were energy, industry, and courage. He was an able, genial, hard-working man, a treasure and a blessing, but giving some evidence of rusty mental machinery and of being belated in the world's history and of absolute inability to train a successor. A modern, typical exhibition of the relation of the big man to the town was given at Three Oaks, Michigan, when Admiral Dewey gave a cannon to the committee that after the Spanish war was arranging a memorial to the dead soldiers and sailors. It was offered to the city that in proportion to its population would make the largest contribution to the monument. Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco all vied with each other. The case turned on the clear swung conception of one master mind. It would never be possible, Mr. E.