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Title: Impressions and experiences

Author: William Dean Howells

Release date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66257]

Language: English

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES ***

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IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES

BY
W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF “A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES”
“THE QUALITY OF MERCY” ETC.

[Illustration: Logo]

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896




W. D. HOWELLS’S WORKS.

_IN CLOTH BINDING._


     STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS. Illustrated by HOWARD PYLE. $2 50.

     A PARTING AND A MEETING. Illustrated. $1 00.

     THE DAY OF THEIR WEDDING. $1 25.

     MY LITERARY PASSIONS. $1 50.

     A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA. $1 50.

     THE COAST OF BOHEMIA. Illustrated. $1 50.

     THE WORLD OF CHANCE. $1 50.

     THE QUALITY OF MERCY. $1 50.

     AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. $1 00.

     THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. $1 00.

     ANNIE KILBURN. $1 50.

     APRIL HOPES. $1 50.

     CRITICISM AND FICTION. With Portrait. $1 00.

     A BOY’S TOWN. Ill’d. $1 25.

     A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 2 Vols., $2 00.

     MODERN ITALIAN POETS. With Portraits. $2 00.

     CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY, and Other Stories. Illustrated. $1 25.

     THE MOUSE-TRAP, and Other Farces. Illustrated. $1 00.

     MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. Illustrated. 50 cents.

     A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN. Illustrated. 50 cents.

     FARCES: Five O’Clock Tea.--The Mouse-Trap.--A Likely Story.--The
     Unexpected Guests.--Evening Dress.--A Letter of Introduction.--The
     Albany Depot.--The Garroters. Ill’d. 50 cents each.


PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.


Copyright, 1896, by W. D. HOWELLS.

_Electrotyped by J. A. Howells & Co., Jefferson, Ohio._




CONTENTS

                                     PAGE
THE COUNTRY PRINTER                     1

POLICE REPORT                          45

I TALK OF DREAMS                       95

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE                   127

TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER      150

THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL              189

GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK              224

NEW YORK STREETS                      245




IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES.




THE COUNTRY PRINTER.


My earliest memories, or those which I can make sure are not the sort
of early hearsay that we mistake for remembrance later in life, concern
a country newspaper, or, rather, a country printing-office. The office
was in my childish consciousness some years before the paper was;
the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the
pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression,
with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms, and
the foreman bending over the imposing-stone, were familiar to me when I
could not grasp the notion of any effect from their labors. In due time
I came to know all about it, and to understand that these activities
went to the making of the Whig newspaper which my father edited to
the confusion of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry
Clay; I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the Presidency
in my seventh year that it was long before I could realize that the
election of 1844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had already been
a printer for a good many years, and some time in the early thirties
he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West Virginian town, with a
monthly magazine, which he printed himself and edited with the help of
his sister.

As long as he remained in business he remained a country editor and a
country printer; he began to study medicine when he was a young man,
but he abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, and
though with his speculative and inventive temperament he was tempted to
experiment in other things, I do not think he would ever have lastingly
forsaken his newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was in
our blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; and we were
always planning and dreaming to get out of it, or get it out of us;
but we are all in some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so
endeared by the associations of childhood that I cannot breathe the
familiar odor of types and presses without emotion; and I should not be
surprised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the
old-fashioned country office in what I shall have to say of it here.


I.

Our first newspaper was published in southwestern Ohio, but after a
series of varying fortunes, which I need not dwell upon, we found
ourselves in possession of an office in the northeastern corner of the
State, where the prevalent political feeling promised a prosperity
to one of my father’s anti-slavery opinions which he had never yet
enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days it was an easy matter to
get an interest in a country paper on credit, and we all went gladly
to work to help him pay for the share that he acquired in one by this
means. An office which gave a fair enough living, as living was then,
could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars; but this was an
uncommonly good office, and I suppose the half of it which my father
took was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, within a few months,
when it was arranged to remove the paper from the village where it had
always been published to the county-seat, a sort of joint-stock company
was formed, and the value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at
least, that he was nearly ten years paying for it. By this time I was
long out of the story, but at the beginning I was very vividly in it,
and before the world began to call me with that voice which the heart
of youth cannot resist, it was very interesting; I felt its charm
then, and now, as I turn back to it, I feel its charm again, though it
was always a story of steady work, if not hard work.

The county-seat, where it had been judged best to transfer the paper
lest some other paper of like politics should be established there, was
a village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United
States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, it was “a place
of great political privileges.” The dauntless man who represented
the district in the House for twenty years, and who had fought the
anti-slavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, and more
than compeer in distinction; and besides these, there was nearly always
a State Senator or Representative among us. The county officers, of
course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading lawyers, who were
the leading politicians, made their homes in the shadow of the court
house, where one of them was presently elected to preside as Judge of
the Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already overwhelmingly
Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called;
the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of
General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in
state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not
greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would
not vote at all under a constitution recognizing the right of men to
own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that
vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally
perish if kept out of the territories, and confined to the old Slave
States. With the removal of the press to the county-seat there was a
hope that this field could be widened, till every Freesoil voter became
a subscriber. It did not fall out so; even of those who subscribed
in the ardor of their political sympathies, many never paid; but our
list was nevertheless handsomely increased, and numbered fifteen or
sixteen hundred. I do not know how it may be now, but then most country
papers had a list of four or five hundred subscribers; a few had a
thousand, a very few twelve hundred, and these were fairly decimated
by delinquents. We were so flown with hope that I remember there was
serious talk of risking the loss of the delinquents on our list by
exacting payment in advance; but the measure was thought too bold,
and we compromised by demanding two dollars a year for the paper, and
taking a dollar and a half if paid in advance. Twenty-five years later
my brother, who had followed my father in the business, discovered
that a man who never meant to pay for his paper would as lief owe
two dollars as any less sum, and he at last risked the loss of the
delinquents by requiring advance payment; it was an heroic venture, but
it was perhaps time to make it.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all
were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except
perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from
the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of
the region. The portable steam sawmills dropped down on the borders of
the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them,
and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the
watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the
land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and
chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds
of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now
there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses
are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows
themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow
soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in
the hands of the farmers there, though there is still so little that
by any city scale it would seem comically little, pathetically little;
but forty years ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom
passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made in kind
rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender
at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for the huge
box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and then did not heat
the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room,
and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as
of the building. In that cold lake-shore country the people dwelt in
wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the
first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which
the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case; the
inking rollers had to be thawed before they could be used on the press;
and if the current of the editor’s soul had not been the most genial
that ever flowed in this rough world, it must have been congealed at
its source. The cases of type had to be placed very near the windows
so as to get all the light there was, and they got all the cold there
was, too. From time to time, the compositor’s fingers became so stiff
that blowing on them would not avail; he passed the time in excursions
between his stand and the stove; in very cold weather, he practiced
the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and when it
lost heat, warming it again. The man at the press-wheel was then the
enviable man; those who handled the chill damp sheets of paper were no
more fortunate than the compositors.


II.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind
factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for
sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these
robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft.
Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business
block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled
in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without
much change. It could never have been a very luxurious dwelling, and
my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than
that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region
is rough and fierce; and the lake winds have a malice sharper than
the saltiest gales of the North Shore of Massachusetts. I know that
there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full
of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from
some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the
winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the
frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country
roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the
“slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to
April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a
little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village,
and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the
morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion
for Don Quixote, and I was then, at the age of fifteen, preparing to
write a life of Cervantes. This scheme occupied me a good deal in those
bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that
my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would
get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that
life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to
make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots
froze.


III.

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had
a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together these always
kept life interesting and sunshiny to him. With his serene temperament
and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly well
fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for
the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal
of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The
printing-office was the centre of civic and social interest; it was
frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was
a scene of gayety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect.
The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to
be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with
refuse newspapers; but lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps
attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the
printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked
in, and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses
and faces, their eager chatter, and lively energy in folding the papers
and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of
the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus,
stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do
to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all
those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos
the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity
far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge
power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand press hitherto
employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the
hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin’s time; but
it had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of
a power-press of modern contrivance, and of a speed fitted to meet the
demands of a subscription list which might be indefinitely extended.
A deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to
New York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a
second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not
know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle
governed his selection of this superannuated veteran; it seems not
to have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the
disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of
that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped
with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing
it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off
publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds,
so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be
doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some
organic trouble, too, for though it did not really fall to pieces
on our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several
improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully
applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It
went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at
a great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression,
when the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing
but an heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so
great a draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute
steam for muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine, which
could fully sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do
not know that there was anything the matter with the engine itself,
but the boiler had some peculiarities which might well mystify the
casual spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that there
was no danger of its blowing up, when he saw my brother feeding bran
or corn-meal into its safety-valve, in order to fill up certain seams
or fissures in it, which caused it to give out at the moments of the
greatest reluctance in the press. But still, he must have had his
misgivings of latent danger of some other kind, though nothing ever
actually happened of a hurtful character. To this day, I do not know
just where those seams or fissures were, but I think they were in the
boiler-head, and that it was therefore suffering from a kind of chronic
fracture of the skull. What is certain is that, somehow, the engine
and the press did always get us through publication day, and not only
with safety but often with credit; so that not long ago, when I was at
home, and my brother and I were looking over an old file of his paper,
we found it much better printed than either of us expected; as well
printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old hand-press, instead
of the steam power-press which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was
that, under all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our
steam power-press at all; it was little short of miraculous that it was
legibly printed, and altogether unaccountable that such impressions
as we found in that file could come from it. Of course, they were not
average impressions; they were the very best out of the whole edition,
and were as creditable as the editorial make-up of the sheet.


IV.

On the first page was a poem, which I suppose I must have selected,
and then a story, filling all the rest of the page, which my brother
more probably chose; for he had a decided fancy in fiction, and
had a scrap-book of inexhaustible riches, which he could draw upon
indefinitely for old personal or family favorites. The next page was
filled with selections of various kinds, and with original matter
interesting to farmers. Then came a page of advertisements, and then
the editorial page, where my father had given his opinions of the
political questions which interested him, and which he thought it the
duty of the country press to discuss, with sometimes essays in the
field of religion and morals. There was a letter of two columns from
Washington, contributed every week by the congressman who represented
our district; and there was a letter from New York, written by a young
lady of the county who was studying art under a master of portraiture
then flourishing in the metropolis; if that is not stating it too
largely for the renown of Thomas Hicks, as we see it in a vanishing
perspective. The rest of this page, as well as the greater part of the
next, was filled with general news, clipped from the daily papers, and
partly condensed from them. There was also such local intelligence
as offered itself, and communications on the affairs of village and
county; but the editor did not welcome tidings of new barns and
abnormal vegetation, or flatter hens to lay eggs of unusual size or
with unusual frequency by undue public notice. All that order of minute
neighborhood gossip which now makes the country paper a sort of open
letter was then unknown. He published marriages and deaths, and such
obituary notices as the sorrowing fondness of friends prompted them to
send him; and he introduced the custom of publishing births, after the
English fashion, which the people took to kindly.

We had an ambition, even so remotely as that day, in the direction of
the illustration which has since so flourished in the newspapers. Till
then we had never gone further in the art than to print a jubilant
raccoon over the news of some Whig victory, or, what was to the same
purpose, an inverted cockerel in mockery of the beaten Democrats; but
now we rose to the notion of illustrated journalism. We published a
story with a woodcut in it, and we watched to see how that cut came out
all through the edition with a pride that was perhaps too exhaustive;
at any rate, we never tried another.

Of course, much of the political writing in the paper was
controversial, and was carried on with editors of other opinions
elsewhere in the county, for we had no rival in our own village. In
this, which has always been the vice of American journalism, the
country press was then fully as provincial as the great metropolitan
journals are now. These may be more pitilessly personal in the conduct
of their political discussions, and a little more skilled in obloquy
and insult; but the bickering went on in the country papers quite as
idly and foolishly. I fancy nobody really cared for our quarrels, and
that those who followed them were disgusted when they were more than
merely wearied.

The space given to them might better have been given even to original
poetry. This was sometimes accepted, but was not invited; though
our sixth page commonly began with verse of some kind. Then came
more prose selections, but never at any time accounts of murder or
violent crimes, which the editor abominated in themselves and believed
thoroughly corrupting. Advertisements of various kinds filled out the
sheet, which was simple and quiet in typography, wholly without the
hand-bill display which now renders nearly all newspapers repulsive
to the eye. I am rather proud, in my quality of printer, that this
was the style which I established; and we maintained it against all
advertisers, who then as now wished to out-shriek one another in large
type and ugly woodcuts.

It was by no means easy to hold a firm hand with the “live business
men” of our village and country, who came out twice a year with
the spring and fall announcements of their fresh stocks of goods,
which they had personally visited New York to lay in; but one of the
moral advantages of an enterprise so modest as ours was that the
counting-room and the editorial-room were united under the same head,
and this head was the editor’s. After all, I think we lost nothing
by the bold stand we made in behalf of good taste, and at any rate
we risked it when we had not the courage to cut off our delinquent
subscribers.

We had business advertising from all the villages in the county,
for the paper had a large circle of readers in each, and a certain
authority, in virtue of representing the county-seat. But a great deal
of our advertising was of patent medicines, as the advertising still
is in the country papers. It was very profitable, and so was the legal
advertising, when we could get the money for it. The money had to come
by order of court, and about half the time the order of court failed
to include the costs of advertising. Then we did not get it, and we
never got it, though we were always glad to get the legal advertising
on the chance of getting the pay. It was not official, but was made
up of the lawyers’ notices to defendants of the suits brought against
them. If it had all been paid for, I am not sure that we should now be
in a position to complain of the ingratitude of the working-classes, or
prepared to discuss, from a vantage of personal experience, the duty
of vast wealth to the community; but still we should have been better
off for that money, as well as the money we lost by a large and loyal
list of delinquent subscribers. From time to time there were stirring
appeals to these adherents in the editorial columns, which did not
stir them, and again the most flattering offers to take any kind of
produce in payment of subscription. Sometimes my brother boldly tracked
the delinquents to their lairs. In most cases I fancy they escaped
whatever arts he used to take them; many died peacefully in their beds
afterward, and their debts follow them to this day. Still, he must now
and then have got money from them, and I am sure he did get different
kinds of “trade.” Once, I remember, he brought back in the tail of his
wagon a young pig, a pig so very young that my father pronounced it
“merely an organization.” Whether it had been wrought to frenzy or not
by the strange experiences of its journey, I cannot say, but as soon
as it was set down on the ground it began to run madly, and it kept on
running till it fell down and perished miserably. It had been taken for
a year’s subscription, and it was quite as if we had lost a delinquent
subscriber.


V.

Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and
self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds
of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not
know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and
as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot
be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is
altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some
tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of
conviction that devoted itself to the highest interest of the reader,
that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It
went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense,
for my father usually brought his exchanges from the office at the end
of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while
the household work went on around him, and his children gathered about
the same lamp, with their books or their jokes; there were apt to be a
good many of both.

Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of
counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years
ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by
direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn
of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern
Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of
Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and
blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They
formed in that day a leaven of right thinking and feeling which was to
leaven the whole lump of the otherwise proslavery or indifferent state;
and I suppose that outside of the antislavery circles of Boston there
was nowhere in the country a population so resolute and so intelligent
in its political opinions. They were very radical in every way, and
hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more
new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less
inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been
swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of
smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. A
belief in the saving efficacy of spirit phenomena still exists among
them, but not, I fancy, at all in the former measure, when nearly every
household had its medium, and the tables that tipped outnumbered the
tables that did not tip. The old New York Tribune, which was circulated
in the country almost as widely as our own paper, had deeply schooled
the people in the economics of Horace Greeley, and they were ready
for any sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that should
arrive, while they looked very wisely after the main chance in the
meantime. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who
dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the County Fair once
a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for
their papers. In spite of the English superstition to the contrary,
the average American is not very curious, if one may judge from his
reticence in the presence of things strange enough to excite question;
and if our craft surprised these witnesses they rarely confessed it.

They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to
think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in
expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at
one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case,
“Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this
sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge
as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s
horse, tied before the office, crossed his hind-legs and sat down in
his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him
a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. But
fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create
their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.

There was always a good deal of talk going on, but although we were
very ardent politicians, the talk was not political. When it was not
mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among
ourselves, and with the village wits who dropped in. There were several
of these who were readers, and they liked to stand with their backs to
our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and
Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.

It was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the
printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theatre
that compositors and comedians were easily convertible; and I have seen
our printers engaged in hand-to-hand combats with column-rules, two up
and two down, quite like the real bouts on the stage. Religion entered
a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant
of men, would not suffer to become irreverent, even on the lips of law
students bathing themselves in the fiery spirit of Tom Paine. He was
willing to meet any one in debate of moral, religious, or political
questions, and the wildest-haired Comeouter, the most ruthless
sceptic, the most credulous spiritualist, found him ready to take them
seriously, even when it was hard not to take them in joke.

It was part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, to bear patiently
with another kind of frequenter: the type of farmer who thought he
wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into
continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting the subscriber talk
himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument,
always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully
persuading him at last that a home-paper was more suited to his needs
than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his
reasoning, but they are gone from me now. The editor was especially
interested in the farming of the region, and I think it was partly
owing to the attention he called to the question that its character was
so largely changed. It is still a dairy country, but now it exports
grain, and formerly the farmers had to buy their flour.

He did not neglect any real local interest in his purpose of keeping
his readers alive to matters of more general importance, but he was
fortunate in addressing himself to people who cared for the larger,
if remoter, themes he loved. In fact, as long as slavery remained a
question in our politics, they had a seriousness and dignity which the
present generation can hardly imagine; and men of all callings felt
themselves uplifted by the appeal this question made to their reason
and conscience. My father constantly taught in his paper that if
slavery could be kept out of the territories it would perish, and, as
I have said, this was the belief of the vast majority of his readers.
They were more or less fervid in it, according to their personal
temperaments; some of them were fierce in their convictions, and some
humorous, but they were all in earnest. The editor sympathized more
with those who took the true faith gayly. All were agreed that the
Fugitive Slave Law was to be violated at any risk; it would not have
been possible to take an escaping slave out of that county without
bloodshed, but the people would have enjoyed outwitting his captors
more than destroying them. Even in the great John Brown times, when it
was known that there was a deposit of his impracticable pikes somewhere
in our woods, and he and his followers came and went among us on some
mysterious business of insurrectionary aim, the affair had its droll
aspects which none appreciated more keenly than the Quaker-born editor.
With his cheerful scepticism, he could never have believed that any
harm or danger would come of it all; and I think he would have been
hardly surprised to wake up any morning and find that slavery had died
suddenly during the night, of its own iniquity.

He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being
a printer as well as an editor, and he took a full share in the
mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for
twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country
offices. At the present day the country printer buys of a city agency
his paper already printed on one side, and he gets it for the cost of
the blank paper, the agency finding its account in the advertisements
it puts in. Besides this patent inside, as it is called, the printer
buys stereotyped selections of other agencies, which offer him almost
as wide a range of matter as the exchange newspapers he used to choose
from. The few columns left for local gossip and general news, and for
whatever editorial comment he cares to make on passing events, can
be easily filled up by two compositors. But in my time we had three
journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a
boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality,
and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we
began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they
cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their
thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the men. They looked
to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in
it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had done,
and served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type. They
were then paid by the thousand ems, and their earnings were usually as
great at the end of a month as at the end of a year. But the boy who
came up from his father’s farm, with the wish to be a printer because
Franklin had been one, and with the intent of making the office his
university, began by sweeping it out, by hewing wood and carrying water
for it. He became a roller-boy, and served long behind the press before
he was promoted to the case, where he learned slowly and painfully to
set type. His wage was forty dollars a year and two suits of clothes,
for three years, when his apprenticeship ended, and his wander-years
(too often literally) began. He was glad of being inky and stained
with the marks of his trade; he wore a four-cornered paper cap, in the
earlier stages of his service, and even an apron. When he became a
journeyman, he clothed himself in black doeskin and broadcloth, and put
on a silk hat and the thinnest-soled fine boots that could be found,
and comported himself as much like a man of the world as he knew how to
do. His work brought him acquainted with a vast variety of interests,
and kept his mind as well as hands employed; he could not help thinking
about them, and he did not fail to talk about them. His comments had
generally a slightly acid flavor, and his constant survey of the
world, in the “map of busy life” always under his eye, bred in him
the contempt of familiarity. He was none the less agreeable for that,
and the jokes that flew about from case to case in our office were
something the editor would have been the last man to interfere with.
He read or wrote on through them all, and now and then turned from his
papers to join in them.


VI.

The journeyman of that time and place was much better than the printer
whom we had known earlier and in a more lax civilization, who was
too apt to be sober only when he had not the means to be otherwise,
and who arrived out of the unknown with nothing in his pocket, and
departed into it with only money enough to carry him to the next
printing-office. If we had no work for him it was the custom to take
up a collection in the office, and he accepted it as a usage of the
craft, without loss of self-respect. It could happen that his often
infirmity would overtake him before he got out of town, but in this
case he did not return for a second collection; I suppose that would
not have been good form. Now and then a printer of this earlier sort
appeared among us for a little time, but the air of the Western Reserve
was somehow unfriendly to him, and he soon left us for the kindlier
clime of the Ohio River, or for the more southerly region which we
were ourselves sometimes so homesick for, and which his soft, rolling
accent so pleasantly reminded us of. Still, there was something about
the business--perhaps the arsenic in the type-metal--which everywhere
affected the morals as it was said sometimes to affect the nerves.

There was one of our printers who was a capital compositor, a most
engaging companion, and of unimpeachable Western Reserve lineage, who
would work along in apparent perpetuity on the line of duty, and then
suddenly deflect from it. If he wanted a day off, or several days, he
would take the time, without notice, and with a princely indifference
to any exigency we might be in. He came back when he chose, and offered
to go to work again, and I do not remember that he was ever refused.
He was never in drink; his behavior was the effect of some obscure
principle of conduct, unless it was that moral contagion from the
material he wrought in.

I do not know that he was any more characteristic, though, than another
printer of ours, who was dear to my soul from the quaintness of his
humor and his love of literature. I think he was, upon the whole, the
most original spirit I have known, and it was not the least part of
his originality that he was then aiming to become a professor in some
college, and was diligently training himself for the calling in all the
leisure he could get from his work. The usual thing would have been to
read law and crowd forward in political life, but my friend despised
this common ideal. We were both studying Latin, he quite by himself, as
he studied Greek and German, and I with such help as I could find in
reciting to a kindly old minister, who had forgotten most of his own
Latin, and whom I do not now wish to blame for falling asleep over the
lessons in my presence; I did not know them well enough to keep him up
to the work. My friend and I read the language, he more and I less, and
we tried to speak it together, to give ourselves consequence, and to
have the pleasure of saying before some people’s faces what we should
otherwise have said behind their backs; I should not now undertake to
speak Latin to achieve either of these aims. Besides this, we read a
great deal together, mainly Shakespeare and Cervantes. I had a task of
a certain number of thousand ems a day, and when I had finished that I
was free to do what I liked; he would stop work at the same time, and
then we would take our Don Quixote into some clean, sweet beech-woods
there were near the village, and laugh our hearts out over it. I can
see my friend’s strange face now, very regular, very fine, and smooth
as a girl’s, with quaint blue eyes, shut long, long ago, to this _dolce
lome_; and some day I should like to tell all about him; but this is
not the place. When the war broke out he left the position he had got
by that time in some college or academy farther west and went into
the army. One morning, in Louisiana, he was killed by a guerrilla
who got a shot at him when he was a little way from his company, and
who was probably proud of picking off the Yankee captain. But as yet
such a fate was unimaginable. He was the first friend of my youth;
he was older than I by five or six years; but we met in an equality
of ambition and purpose, though he was rather more inclined to the
severity of the scholar’s ideal, and I hoped to slip through somehow
with a mere literary use of my learning.


VII.

As I have tried to say, the printers of that day had nearly all some
affinity with literature, if not some love of it; it was in a sort
always at their fingers-ends, and they must have got some touch of
it whether they would or not. They thought their trade a poor one,
moneywise, but they were fond of it and they did not often forsake
it. Their hope was somehow to get hold of a country paper and become
editors and publishers; and my friend and I, when he was twenty-four
and I eighteen, once crossed over into Pennsylvania, where we had
heard there was a paper for sale; but we had not the courage to offer
even promises to pay for it. The craft had a repute for insolvency
which it merited, and it was at odds with the community at large by
reason of something not immediately intelligible in it, or at least not
classifiable. I remember that when I began to write a certain story
of mine, I told Mark Twain, who was once a printer, that I was going
to make the hero a printer, and he said, “Better not. People will not
understand him. Printing is something every village has in it, but
it is always a sort of mystery, and the reader does not like to be
perplexed by something that he thinks he knows about.” This seemed
very acute and just, though I made my hero a printer all the same,
and I offer it to the public as a light on the anomalous relation the
country printer bears to his fellow-citizens. They see him following
his strange calling among them, but to neither wealth nor worship,
and they cannot understand why he does not take up something else,
something respectable and remunerative; they feel that there must be
something weak, something wrong in a man who is willing to wear his
life out in a vocation which keeps him poor and dependent on the favor
they grudge him. It is like the relation which all the arts bear to
the world, and which is peculiarly thankless in a purely commercial
civilization like ours; though I cannot pretend that printing is an
art in the highest sense. I have heard old journeymen claim that it
was a profession and ought to rank with the learned professions, but
I am afraid that was from too fond a pride in it. It is in one sort a
handicraft, like any other, like carpentering or stone-cutting; but it
has its artistic delight, as every handicraft has. There is the ideal
in all work; and I have had moments of unsurpassed gladness in feeling
that I had come very near the ideal in what I had done in my trade.
This joy is the right of every worker, and in so far as modern methods
have taken it from him they have wronged him. I can understand Ruskin
in his wish to restore it to some of the handicrafts which have lost it
in the “base mechanical” operations of the great manufactories, where
men spend their lives in making one thing, or a part of a thing, and
cannot follow their work constructively. If that were to be the end,
the operative would forever lose the delight in work which is the best
thing in the world. But I hope this is not to be the end, and that when
people like again to make things for use and not merely for profit, the
workman will have again the reward that is more than wages.

I know that in the old-fashioned country printing-office we had this,
and we enjoyed our trade as the decorative art it also is. Questions of
taste constantly arose in the arrangement of a title-page, the display
of a placard or a handbill, the use of this type or that. They did
not go far, these questions, but they employed the critical faculty
and the æsthetic instinct, and they allied us, however slightly and
unconsciously, with the creators of the beautiful.

But now, it must be confessed, printing has shared the fate of all
other handicrafts. Thanks to united labor, it is better paid in each
of its subdivisions than it once was as a whole. In my time, the hire
of a first-rate country printer, who usually worked by the week, was
a dollar a day; but of course this was not so little in 1852 as it
would be in 1892. My childish remembrance is of the journeymen working
two hours after supper, every night, so as to make out a day of twelve
hours; but at the time I write of the day of ten hours was the law and
the rule, and nobody worked longer, except when the President’s Message
was to be put in type, or on some other august occasion.

The pay is not only increased in proportion to the cost of living, but
it is really greater, and the conditions are all very much better.
But I believe no apprentice now learns the whole trade, and each of
our printers, forty years ago, would have known how to do everything
in the kind of office he hoped to own. He would have had to make a
good many things which the printer now buys, and first among them the
rollers, which are used for inking the type on the press. These were
of a composition of glue and molasses, and were of an india-rubbery
elasticity and consistency, as long as they were in good condition. But
with use and time they became hard, the ink smeared on them, and they
failed to impart it evenly to the type; they had to be thrown away, or
melted over again. This was done on the office stove, in a large bucket
which they were cut up into, with fresh glue and molasses added. It
seems in the retrospect to have been rather a simple affair, and I do
not now see why casting a roller should have involved so much absolute
failure, and rarely have given a satisfactory result. The mould was a
large copper cylinder, and the wooden core of the roller was fixed in
place by an iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled away, as it
now seems to me, for days, and far into the sleepy nights, when as a
child I was proud of sitting up with it very late. Then at some weird
hour, my father or my brother poured it into the mould, and we went
home and left the rest with fate. The next morning the whole office
crowded round to see the roller drawn from the mould, and it usually
came out with such long hollows and gaps in its sides that it had to
be cut up at once and melted over again. At present, all rollers are
bought somewhere in New York or Chicago, I believe, and a printer would
no more think of making a roller than of making any other part of his
press. “And you know,” said my brother, who told me of this change,
“we don’t wet the paper now.” “Good heavens,” said I, “you don’t print
it _dry_!” “Yes, and it doesn’t blur any more than if it were wet.” I
suppose wetting the paper was a usage that antedated the invention of
movable type. It used to be drawn, quire by quire, through a vat of
clear water, and then the night before publication day it was turned
and sprinkled. Now it was printed dry, I felt as if it were time to
class Benjamin Franklin with the sun-myths.


VIII.

Publication day was always a time of great excitement. We were busy
all the morning getting the last editorials and the latest news in
type, and when the paper went to press in the afternoon the entire
force was drafted to the work of helping the engine and the press
through their various disabilities and reluctances. Several hands were
needed to run the press, even when it was in a willing frame; others
folded the papers as they came from it; as many more were called from
their wonted work to address them to the subscribers; for with the
well-known fickleness of their sex, the young ladies of the village
ceased to do this as soon as the novelty of the affair wore off.
Still, the office was always rather a lively scene, for the paper
was not delivered at the village houses, and each subscriber came
and got his copy; the villagers began to come about the hour we went
to press, the neighboring farmers called next day and throughout the
week. Nearly everybody who witnessed the throes of our machinery had
advice or sympathy to offer, and in a place where many people were of a
mechanical turn the spectacular failure of the editor’s additions and
improvements was naturally a source of public entertainment; perhaps
others got as much pleasure out of his inventions as he did.

Of course, about election time the excitement was intensified; we had
no railroad or telegraphic communication with the outer world, but it
was felt that we somehow had the news, and it was known that we had
the latest papers from Cleveland, and that our sheet would report the
intelligence from them. After all, however, there was nothing very
burning or seething in the eagerness of our subscribers. They could
wait; their knowledge of the event would not change it, or add or
take away one vote either way. I dare say it is not so very different
now, when the railroad and the telegraph have made the little place
simultaneous with New York and London. We people who fret our lives
out in cities do not know how tranquil life in the country still is.
We talk of the whirl and rush, as if it went on everywhere, but if you
will leave the express train anywhere and pass five miles into the
country, away from the great through lines, you will not find the whirl
and rush. People sometimes go mad there from the dulness and ennui, as
in the cities they sometimes go mad from the stress and the struggle;
and the problem of equalizing conditions has no phase more interesting
than that of getting the good of the city and the country out of the
one into the other. The old-fashioned country newspaper formed almost
the sole intellectual experience of the remote and quiet folks who
dwelt in their lonely farmsteads on the borders of the woods, with
few neighbors and infrequent visits to the township centre, where the
church, a store or two, and a tavern constituted a village. They got
it out of the post-office there once a week, and read it in the scanty
leisure left them by their farm-work or their household drudgery, and
I dare say they found it interesting. There were some men in every
neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, who, when they called on us,
seemed to have got it by heart, and who were ready to defend or combat
its positions with all comers; this sort usually took some other paper,
too, an agricultural paper, or the New York _Trybune_, as they called
it; or a weekly edition of a Cleveland journal. It was generally
believed that Horace Greeley wrote everything in the _Trybune_, and
when a country subscriber unfolded his _Trybune_, he said, with
comfortable expectation, “Well, let’s see what old Horace says _this_
week.” But by far the greater number of our subscribers took no paper
but our own. I do not know whether there is much more reading done now
on the farms, but I doubt it. In the villages, however, the circulation
of the nearest city dailies is pretty general, and there is a large
sale of the Sunday editions. I am not sure that this is an advantage,
but in the undeniable decay of interest in the local preaching, some
sort of mental relish for the only day of leisure is necessary. It is
not so much a pity that they read the Sunday papers, as that the Sunday
papers are so bad. If they were carefully and conscientiously made up,
they would be of great use; they wait their reformer, and they do not
seem impatient for him.

In the old time, we printers were rather more in touch with the world
outside on the journalistic lines than most of our fellow-villagers,
but otherwise we were as remote as any of them, and the weekly issue
of the paper had not often anything tumultuously exciting for us. The
greatest event of our year was the publication of the President’s
Message, which was a thrill in my childish life long before I had
any conception of its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, now
so universally used by the country papers, originated in the custom
which the printers within easy reach of a large city had of supplying
themselves with an edition of the President’s Message, to be folded
into their own sheet, when they did not print their outside on the
back of it. There was always a hot rivalry between the local papers
in getting out the Message, whether it was bought ready printed, or
whether it was set up in the office and printed in the body of the
paper. We had no local rival, but all the same we made haste when it
was a question of the Message. The printers filled their cases with
type, ready for the early copy of the Message, which the editor used
every device to secure; when it was once in hand they worked day and
night till it was all up, and then the paper was put to press at once,
without regard to the usual publication day; and the community was as
nearly electrified as could be with our journalistic enterprise, which
was more important in our eyes than the matters the Message treated of.

There is no longer the eager popular expectation of the President’s
Message that there once seemed to be; and I think it is something of
a loss, that ebb of the high tide of political feeling which began
with the era of our immense material prosperity. It was a feeling that
formed a solidarity of all the citizens, and if it was not always, or
often, the highest interest which can unite men, it was at least not
that deadly and selfish cult of business which centres each of us in
his own affairs and kills even our curiosity about others. Very likely
people were less bent on the pursuit of wealth in those days, because
there was less chance to grow rich, but the fact remains that they
_were_ less bent in that direction, and that they gave their minds to
other things more than they do now. I think those other things were
larger things, and that our civic type was once nobler than it is. It
was before the period of corruption, when it was not yet fully known
that dollars can do the work of votes, when the votes as yet rather
outnumbered the dollars, and more of us had the one than the other.
The great statesman, not the great millionaire, was then the American
ideal, and all about in the villages and on the farms the people were
eager to know what the President had said to Congress. They are not
eager to know now, and that seems rather a pity. Is it because in
the war which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy died, and by
operation of the same fatal anomaly the American Plutocracy, which
Lincoln foreboded, was born; and the people instinctively feel that
they have no longer the old interest in President or Congress?

There are those that say so, and, whether they are right or not, it
is certain that into the great centres where money is heaped up the
life of the country is drained, and the country press has suffered
with the other local interests. The railroads penetrate everywhere,
and carry the city papers seven times a week, where the home paper
pays its tardy visit once, with a patent inside imported from the
nearest money-centre, and its few columns of neighborhood gossip,
too inconsiderable to be gathered up by the correspondents of the
invasive dailies. Other causes have worked against the country press.
In counties where there were once two or three papers, there are now
eight or ten, without a material increase of population to draw upon
for support. The county printing, which the paper of the dominant
party could reckon upon, is now shared with other papers of the same
politics, and the amateur printing-offices belonging to ingenious boys
in every neighborhood get much of the small job-work which once came to
the publisher.

It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, for which no one
is more to blame than another, though human nature loves a scapegoat,
and from time to time we load up some individual with the common
sins, and drive him into a wilderness where he seems rather to enjoy
himself than otherwise. I suppose that even if the conditions had
continued favorable, the country press could never have become the
influence which our editor fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make
it. Like all of us who work at all, the country printer had to work
too hard; and he had little time to think or to tell how to make life
better and truer in any sort. His paper had once perhaps as much
influence as the country pulpit; its support was certainly of the
same scanty and reluctant sort, and it was without consecration by an
avowed self-devotion. He was concerned with the main chance first, and
after that there was often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I
should not instance him as an exemplary man, and I should be very far
from idealizing him; I should not like even to undertake the task of
idealizing a city journalist; and yet, in the retrospect at least, the
country printer has his pathos for me--the pathos of a man who began
to follow a thankless calling because he loved it, and kept on at it
because he loved it, or else because its service had warped and cramped
him out of form to follow any other.




POLICE REPORT.


One day in summer, when people whom I had been urging to behave in
some degree like human beings persisted in acting rather more like
the poor creatures who pass for men and women in most stage-plays, I
shut my manuscript in a drawer, and the next morning took an early
train into the city. I do not remember just what whim it was that led
me to visit the police court: perhaps I went because it was in the
dead vast and middle of the summer, and the town afforded little other
amusement; perhaps it was because, in my revolt against unreality, I
was in the humor to see life whose reality asserts itself every day in
the newspapers with indisputable force. If this was so, I was fated to
a measure of disappointment, for when the court opened this reality
often appeared no more substantial than the fiction with which I had
lost my patience at home. But I am bound to say that it was much more
entertaining, and that it was, so to speak, much more artistically
treated. It resolved itself into melodrama, or romantic tragedy,
having a prevailing comic interest, with moments of intensity, and
with effects so thrilling that I came away with a sense of the highest
theatrical illusion.


I.

The police court in Boston is an upper room of the temple of justice,
and is a large, square, dismal-complexioned chamber, with the usual
seams and cracks configuring its walls and ceilings; its high,
curtainless windows were long glares of sunless light, crossed with
the fine drizzle of an easterly rain on the morning of my visit. About
one-third of the floor is allotted to spectators, and supplied with
benches of penitential severity; the remaining space is occupied by a
series of curved tables set in a horse-shoe, and by a raised platform,
railed off from the auditorium, as I may call it, and supporting in
successive gradations the clerk’s desk, on a very long, narrow table,
and the judge’s table and easy-chair. At either end of the table on
which the clerk’s desk was placed was a bar, representing in one case
the witness stand, and in the other the prisoner’s box; midway, the
clerk stood within a screen of open iron-work, hemmed in with books of
record and tin boxes full of docketed papers.

Outside of the railing were the desks of two officers of the court,
whose proper titles my unfamiliarity with the place disables me from
giving. They were both well in flesh, as I remember, and in spite of
their blue flannel suits and the exercise of a wise discretion, by
which one of them had discarded his waistcoat and neckcloth, they
visibly suffered from the moist, close heat which the storm outside had
driven into the court-room. From time to time one of them cried out,
“Silence!” to quell a restive movement in the audience; and once the
cravatless officer left his place, and came down to mine near the door,
and drove out the boys who were sitting round me. “Leave!” he shouted.
“This is no place for boys!” They went out obediently, and some others
just like them came in immediately and took their places. They might
have been the same boys, so far as any difference for the better in
their looks went. They were not pleasant to the eye, nor to any other
sense; and neither were the young men nor old men who for the rest
formed the audience of this free dramatic spectacle. Their coat-collars
came up above their shirt-collars; but, greasy as they were, the
observer could not regret this misfit when chance gave an occasional
glimpse of their linen--or their cotton, to be exact. For the most
part, they wore their hair very short, and exposed necks which I
should, I believe, have preferred to have covered. Under the influence
of the humid heat, and with the wet they brought from the outside,
they sent up a really deplorable smell. I do not know that I have a
right to criticise the appearance of some of their eyes--they seemed
perfectly good eyes to see with, in spite of their sinister or vacant
expression and gloomy accessories; and certain scars and mutilations of
the face and fingers were the affair of their owners rather than mine.
Whenever they fell into talk, an officer of the court marched upon
them and crushed them to silence. “This is no place for conversation,”
he said; and the greater part of them had evidently no disposition or
capacity for that art. I believe they were men and boys whose utmost
mental effort sufficed to let their mouths hang open in the absorption
of the performance, and was by no means equal to comment upon it.
I fancied that they came there, day after day, the year round, and
enjoyed themselves in their poor way, realizing many of the situations
presented by experience of like predicaments, more than by sympathy or
an effort of the imagination.

I had taken my place among them next the door, so that if my courage
failed me at any time I could go out without disturbing the others.
One need not be a very proud man to object to classing himself with
them, and there were moments when I doubted if I could stand my
fellow-spectators much longer; but these accesses of arrogance passed,
as I watched the preparations for the play with the interest of a
novice. There were already half a dozen policemen seated at the tables
in semicircle, and chatting pleasantly together; and their number was
constantly increased by new arrivals, who, as they came in, put their
round-topped straw hats on one end of the semicircle, and sat down to
fill out certain printed forms, which I suppose related to the arrests
they had made, for they were presently handed to the clerk, who used
them in calling up the cases. A little apart from the policemen was
a group of young men, whom I took to be the gentlemen of the bar;
among them, rather more dapper than the rest, was a colored lawyer,
who afterwards, by an irony of Nemesis, appeared for some desperate
and luckless defendants of the white race and of Irish accent. By and
by two or three desks, placed conveniently for seeing and hearing
everything against the railing on the clerk’s right, were occupied
by reporters, unmistakable with their pencil and paper. Looking from
them I saw that the judge’s chair was now filled by a quiet-looking
gentleman, who seemed, behind his spectacles, to be communing with
himself in a sad and bored anticipation. At times he leaned forward and
spoke with the clerk or one of the gentlemen of the bar, and then fell
back in sober meditation.

Like all other public exhibitions, the police court failed a little in
point of punctuality. It was advertised to open at nine o’clock, but it
was nearer ten when, after several false alarms, the clerk in a rapid,
inarticulate formula declared it now opened, and invoked the blessing
of God on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even then there was a
long wait before we of the audience heard the scuffling of the feet
of the prisoners on what seemed a broad stairway behind the barrier
at the judge’s right, and before any of them came in sight they were
commanded by the attendant policeman to sit down, and apparently did
so, on the top of the stairs. The clerk now turned towards them with a
sheaf of the forms which the policemen had filled out in his hand, and
successively addressed them by name:--

“Larry McShane!”

“Here, sor.”

“Complained of for being drunk. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty, sor.”

“Pay a fine of one dollar and costs, and stand committed to the House
of Industry.”

He jotted something down on the back of each indictment, and half
turned to toss it on to his desk, and then resumed the catalogue of
these offenders, accusing and dooming them all in the same weary and
passionless monotone.

I confess that I had at the time the strongest curiosity to see them,
but it has since struck me that it was a finer effect merely to hear
their voices in response, and to leave their figures and faces to
the fancy. Sometimes the voice that answered “Guilty” was youthful,
and sometimes, I grieve to say, it was feminine, though under the
circumstances it had naturally that subdued tone which is thought such
an excellent thing in woman. Usually, however, the voices were old
and raucous, as if they had many times made the same plea in the same
place, and they pronounced sir _sor_. The clerk’s sheaf of accusations
being exhausted, they all apparently scuffled downstairs again. But a
number must have remained, for now, after this sort of overture, the
entertainment began in earnest, the actors on the scene appearing as
they were summoned from the same invisible space behind the railing,
which I think was probably sunk a little lower than the level of the
auditorium, and which might, to humor the theatrical illusion, be
regarded as the green-room.


II.

The first piece was what I may call a little Police Pastoral,
in recognition of the pretty touch of poetry which graced it. A
half-grown, baddish-looking boy was arraigned for assault and battery,
and took his place at one end of that long table on which rested the
clerk’s desk, while a young girl of thirteen or fourteen advanced from
the audience, and placed herself at the other end. She was dressed in a
well-fitting ready-made suit, which somehow suggested itself as having
been “marked down” to come within her means; and she wore a cheap yet
tasteful hat, under which her face, as honest as it was comely, looked
modestly up at the judge when he questioned her. It appeared that she
was passing the apple-stand which the defendant was keeping for his
mother, when he had suddenly abandoned his charge, followed her into a
gate where she had taken refuge, and struck her; her cries attracted
the police, and he was arrested. The officer corroborated her story,
and then the judge made a signal to the prisoner, by which it seemed
that he was privileged to cross-question his accuser. The injured
youth seized the occasion, and in a loud-bullying, yet plaintive tone
proceeded as best he could to damage the case against him.

_He_: “Didn’t you pass my mother’s stand with them girls the day
before?”

_She_, frankly: “Yes, I _did_.”

_He_: “And didn’t you laugh at me, and call me an apple-woman?”

_She_, as before: “Yes, I _did_.”

_He_: “And hain’t you hit _me_, sometimes, before this?”

_She_, evasively: “I’ve never hit you to hurt you.”

_He_: “Now, that hain’t the question! The question is whether you’ve
ever hit me.”

_She_: “Yes, I have--when you were trying to hold me. It was the other
girls called you names. I only called you names once.”

_He_: “I want to know whether I hurt you any when you hollered out that
way?”

_She_: “Yes, you _did_. And if I hadn’t screamed you _would_ have done
it. I don’t suppose you’d have hurt me a great _deal_, but you have
hurt _some_ of the girls.”

_The Judge_: “Did he bruise you severely when he struck you?”

_She_, with a relenting glance, full of soft compassion, at her enemy:
“Well, he didn’t bruise me _very_ much.”

_The Judge_: “Has he been in the habit of assaulting the other young
girls?”

_She_: “He never did _me_ before.” Then, with a sudden burst, “And I
think I was every bit as much to blame as he was! I had no business to
tease him.”

Here the judge, instead of joining the hands of these children, and
sending them forward with his blessing, to dance and sing a little duet
together, as would have happened on any other stage, said that he would
fine the defendant seven dollars. The defendant gave way to a burst
of grief, and the plaintiff, astonished at this untoward conclusion,
threw the judge a pathetic and reproachful look, and left the stand in
painful bewilderment. I felt sorry for her, but I could not share her
pity for the defendant, and my light mind was quickly distracted by the
next piece.


III.

I may say here that the features of the performance followed one
another rapidly, as at a variety theatre, without any disagreeable
waits or the drop of a curtain. If I had anything to complain of it
was the swiftness of their succession. I was not yet habituated to
this, when I found the scene occupied by the two principal actors in
a laughable little interlude of Habitual Drunkenness. A powerfully
built, middle-aged Irishman, with evidences of coal-heaving thick
upon his hands and ground into his face to the roots of his hair, was
standing at one end of that long table, and listening to the tale of
the policeman who, finding him quarrelsomely and noisily drunk, and not
being able to prevail with him to go home, had arrested him. When he
finished, the judge said to the defendant, who had stood rolling his
eyes--conspicuous from the black around them--upon the spectators, as
if at a loss to make out what all this might be about, that he could
ask any questions he liked of the plaintiff.

“I don’t want to ask him anything, sor,” replied the defendant, like
one surprised at being expected to take an interest in some alien
affair.

“Have you ever seen the defendant drunk before?” asked the judge.

“Yes, your honor; I’ve seen him drunk half a dozen times, and I’ve
taken him home to keep him out of harm’s way. He’s an industrious man
when he isn’t in drink.”

“Is he usually disorderly when drunk?”

“Well, he and his wife generally fight when he gets home,” the
policeman suggested.

The judge desisted, and the defendant’s counsel rose, and signified
his intention to cross-question the plaintiff: the counsel was that
attorney of African race whom I have mentioned.

“Now, we don’t deny that the defendant was drunk at the time of his
arrest; but the question is whether he is an habitual drunkard. How
many times have you seen him drunk the past month?”

“About half a dozen times.”

“Seven times?”

“I can’t say.”

“Three times?”

“More than three times.”

“More than twice you will swear to?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I wish you to be very careful, please: can you state, under oath,
that you have seen him drunk four times?”

“Yes,” said the policeman, “I can swear to that.”

“Very good,” said the counsel, with the air of having caught the
witness tripping. “That is all.”

Aside from the satisfaction that one naturally feels in seeing any
policeman bullied, I think it did me good to have my learned colored
brother badger a white man. The thing was so long the other way, in
every walk of life, that for the sake of the bad old times, when the
sight would have been something to destroy the constitution and subvert
social order, I could have wished that he might have succeeded better
in browbeating his witness. But it was really a failure, as far as
concerned his object.

“The question, your honor,” the lawyer added, turning to the judge,
“is, what _is_ habitual drunkenness? I should like to ask the defendant
a query or two. Now, Mr. O’Ryan, how often do you indulge yourself in a
social glass?”

“Sor?”

“How often do you drink?”

“Whenever I can get it, sor.”

The audience appreciated this frankness, and were silenced by a
threatening foray of the cravatless officer.

“You mean,” suggested the attorney, smoothly, “that you take a drink of
beer, now and then, when you are at work.”

“I mane that, sor. A horse couldn’t do widout it.”

“Very good. But you deny that you are habitually intoxicated?”

“Sor?”

“You are not in the habit of getting drunk?”

“No, sor!”

“Very good. You are not in the habit of getting drunk.”

“I never get dhrunk whin I’m at work sor. I get dhrunk Saturday nights.”

“Yes; when you have had a hard week’s work. I understand that”--

“I have a hard wake’s worruk every wake!” interrupted the defendant.

“But this is a thing that has grown upon you of late, as I understand.
You were formerly a sober, temperate man, as your habits of industry
imply.”

“Sor?”

“You have lately given way to a fondness for liquor, but up to within
six months or a year ago you never drank to excess.”

“No, sor! I’ve dhrunk ever since I was born, and I’ll dhrink till I
die.”

The officer could not keep us quiet, now. The counsel looked down at
his table in a futile way, and then took his seat after some rambling
observations, amid smiles of ironical congratulation from the other
gentlemen of the bar.

The defendant confronted the judge with the calm face of a man who has
established his innocence beyond cavil.

“What is the reputation of this man in his neighborhood?” inquired the
judge of the policeman.

“He’s an ugly fellow. And his wife is full as bad. They generally get
drunk together.”

“Any children?”

“No, sir.”

The defendant regarded the judge with heightened satisfaction in this
confirmation of his own declaration. The judge leaned over, and said in
a confidential way to the clerk, “Give him six months in the House of
Correction.”

A wild lament broke from the audience, and a woman with a face bruised
to a symphony in green, yellow, and black thus identified herself as
the wife of the defendant, who stood vacantly turning his cap round in
his hand while sympathizing friends hurried her from the room. The poor
creature probably knew that if in their late differences she had got
more than she deserved, she had not got more than she had been willing
to give, and was moved by this reflection. Other moralists, who do not
like to treat woman as a reasonable being, may attribute her sorrow
to mere blind tenderness, or hysterical excitement. I could not see
that it touched the spectators in any way; and I suspect that, whatever
was thought of her escape from a like fate, there was a general
acquiescence in the justice of his. He was either stunned by it, or
failed to take it in, for he remained standing at the end of the table
and facing the judge, till the policeman in charge took him by the arm
and stood him aside.


IV.

He sat down, and I saw him no more; but I had no time to regret him,
for his place was instantly occupied by a person who stepped within the
bar from the audience. I had already noticed him coming in and going
out of the court-room, apparently under strong excitement, and hovering
about, now among the gentlemen of the bar, and now among friends in
the audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and yet he looked
like a gentleman--a gentleman in distress of mind; I had supposed that
he could not be one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have
been allowed so much at large. At the same time that he took his place
he was confronted from the other end of the long table by a person whom
I will call a lady, because I observed that every one else did so.
This lady’s person tended to fat; she had a large, red face, and I
learned without surprise that she was a cook. She wore a crimson shawl,
and a bonnet abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking colors,
and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, impressively swathed
in linen; she caressed, as it were, a small water-pitcher, which I
felt, in spite of its ordinary appearance, was somehow historical. In
fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important part in the
assault which the lady accused the gentleman at the other end of the
table of committing upon her.

It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a boarder in the house
where she was cook, and that he was in the habit of intruding upon her
in the kitchen against her will and express command. A week before (I
understood that she had spent the intervening time in suffering and
disability) she had ordered him out, and he had turned furiously upon
her with an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with it, and then
had thrown at her head the pitcher which she now held in her hands.
There were other circumstances of outrage, which I cannot now recall,
but they are not important in view of the leading facts.

Further testimony in behalf of the plaintiff was offered by another
lady, whose countenance expressed second-girl as unmistakably as that
of the plaintiff expressed cook. She was of the dish-faced Irish type,
and whereas the cook was of an Old-World robustness, her witness had
the pallor and flat-chestedness of the women of her race who are born
in America; she preferred several shades of blue in her costume, which
was of ready-made and marked-down effect. This lady with difficulty
comprehended the questions intended to elicit her name and the fact
of her acquaintance with the plaintiff, and I noticed a like density
of understanding in most of the other persons testifying or arraigned
in this court. In fact, I came to wonder if the thick-headedness of
average uneducated people was not much greater than I had hitherto
suspected, in my easy optimism. It was certainly inconceivable why,
with intelligence enough to come in when it rained, the cook should
have summoned this witness. She testified at once that she had not
seen the assault, and did not know that the cook had been hurt; and no
prompting of the plaintiff’s counsel could inspire her with a better
recollection. In the hands of the defendant’s lawyer she developed the
fact that his client was reputed a quiet, inoffensive boarder, and
that she never knew of any displeasures between him and the cook.

“Did you ever see this lady intoxicated?” inquired the lawyer.

The witness reflected. “I don’t understand you,” she answered, finally.

“Have you ever known her to be overcome by drink?”

The witness considered this point also, and in due time gave it up, and
turned a face of blank appeal upon the judge, who came to her rescue.

“Does she drink,--drink liquor? Does she get drunk?”

“_Oh!_ Oh, yes; she’s tipsy sometimes.”

“Was she tipsy,” asked the lawyer, “on the day of the alleged assault?”

The witness again turned to the magistrate for help.

“Was she tipsy on the day when she says this gentleman struck her with
a chair, and threw the pitcher at her head?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the witness, “she was.”

“Was she very tipsy?” the lawyer pursued.

The witness was equal to this question. “Well, yes, sir, she was. Any
way, she hadn’t left anything in the bottle on her bureau.”

“When did you see the bottle full?”

“The night before. Or in the evening. She commenced drinking in the
night.”

“What was in the bottle?”

“A pint of whiskey.”

“That will do,” said the lawyer.

The witness stepped down, and genteelly resumed her place near the
plaintiff. Neither of the ladies changed countenance, or seemed in any
wise aware that the testimony just given had been detrimental to the
plaintiff’s cause. They talked pleasantly together, and were presently
alike interested in the testimony of a witness to the defendant’s good
character. He testified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable
person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, but where or
what I could not make out; he was a college graduate, and it was quite
unimaginable to the witness that he should be the object of this sort
of charge.

When the witness stood aside, the defendant was allowed to testify in
his own behalf, which he did with great energy. He provided himself
with a chair, and when he came to the question of the assault he
dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He described with
vividness the relative positions of himself and the cook when, on the
day given, he went into the kitchen to see if the landlady were there,
and was ordered out by her. “She didn’t give me time to go, but caught
up a chair, and came at me, thus!” Here he represented with the chair
in his hand an assault that made the reporters, who sat near him,
quail before the violence of the mere dumb-show. “I caught the rung
of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinctively pushed it, thus. I
suppose,” he added, in diction of memorable elegance, “that the impact
of the chair in falling back against her wrist may have produced the
contusions of which she complains.”

The judge and the bar smiled; the audience, not understanding, looked
serious.

“And what,” said the judge, “about throwing the pitcher at her?”

“I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it in court. I threw
no pitcher at her, but retreated from the kitchen as quickly as
possible.”

“That will do,” said the judge. The plaintiff’s counsel did the
best that could be done for no case at all in a brief argument. The
judge heard him patiently, and then quietly remarked, “The charge is
dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the next case.”

The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair was going in her
favor. She evidently required the explanation of her counsel that it
had gone against her, and all was over; for she looked at the judge in
some surprise, before she turned and walked out of the court-room with
quiet dignity, still caressing her pitcher, and amicably accompanied by
the other lady, her damaging witness.


V.

Before she was well out of the door, a lady-like young woman in black
was on the stand, testifying against a prisoner, who did not confront
her from the other end of the long table, but stood where he seemed
to have been seated on the top of those stairs I have imagined behind
the railing. He looked twenty one or two years of age, and he had
not at all a bad face, but rather refined; he was well dressed, and
was gentleman-like in the same degree that she was lady-like. From
her testimony it appeared to me that his offense was one that might
fitly be condoned, and in my ignorance I was surprised to find that
it was taken seriously by the court. She had seen him, from the top
of some steps in the shop where she was employed, open a drawer
in the book-keeper’s desk, and take out of it a revolver and some
postage-stamps; but on his discovering her he had instantly replaced
them and tried to make his escape. She gave her evidence in a low
voice, and, as I thought, reluctantly; and one could very well imagine
that she might have regretted causing his arrest; but it was to be
considered that her own reputation was probably at stake, and if his
theft had succeeded she might have been accused of it. When she stood
aside, the judge turned to the defendant, who had kept quite still,
nervously twisting something between his fingers, and questioned him.
He did not attempt to deny the facts; he admitted them, but urged that
he had immediately put the stamps and pistol back into the drawer,
from which, indeed, he had hardly lifted them. The judge heard him
patiently, and the young man went on, with something of encouragement,
to explain that he only meant to take the things to spite the owner of
the shop, on account of some grudge between them, and that he had not
realized that it was stealing. He besought the judge, in terms that
were moving, but not abject, to deal mercifully with him; and he stood
twisting that invisible something between his fingers, and keeping his
eyes fixed on those of the magistrate with a miserable smile, while he
promised that he would not offend again.

The judge passed his hand to and fro over his chin, and now dropped
his eyes, and now glanced at the culprit, who seemed scarcely more
unhappy.

“Haven’t I seen you here before?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” I could hardly hear the prisoner assent.

“How often?”

“Twice.”

“What for?”

“Theft,” gasped the wretched creature.

The judge moved in his chair with a discomfort that he had not shown
throughout the morning’s business. “If this were the first time, or the
second, I should have been glad to let you off with a slight fine. But
I can’t do that now. I must send you to the House of Correction.” He
nodded to the clerk: “Two months.”

The prisoner remained, with that nervous twisting of his fingers, eying
the judge with his vague smile, as if he could not realize what had
befallen. He did not sit down till the next culprit rose and stood near
him. Then a sort of fatal change passed over his face. It looked like
despair. I confess that I had not much heart for his successor. I was
sick, thinking how, so far as this world was concerned, this wretch
had been sent to hell; for the House of Correction is not a purgatory
even, out of which one can hopefully undertake to pray periculant
spirits. To be sure, the police court is not a cure of souls; and
doubtless his doom was as light as the law allowed. But I could have
wished that the judge had distrusted his memory, or taken on his
conscience the merciful sin of ignoring it. He seemed very patient,
and I do not question but he acted according to light and knowledge.
This may have been a hopeless thief. But it was nevertheless a terrible
fate. The chances were a thousand against one that he should hereafter
be anything but a thief, if he were not worse. After all, when one
thinks of what the consequences of justice are, one doubts if there
is any justice in it. Perhaps the thing we call mercy is the divine
conception of justice.


VI.

It was a thief again who was on the stage; but not a thief like that
other, who, for all the reality there was in the spectacle, might have
gone behind the scenes and washed the chalk off his white face. This
thief was of the kind whose fortunes the old naturalistic novelists
were fond of following in fictions of autobiographic form, and who
sometimes actually wrote their own histories; a conventional thief,
of those dear to De Foe and the Spanish picaresque romancers, with
a flavor of good literature about him. Nothing could have been more
classic in incident than the story of the plaintiff, an honest-looking
young fellow, who testified that he had met the prisoner on the street,
and, learning that he was out of work and out of money, had taken him
home to his room and shared his bed with him. I do not know in just
what calling this primitive and trustful hospitality is practiced;
the plaintiff looked and was dressed like a workingman. His strange
bedfellow proved an early riser; he stole away without disturbing
his host, and carried with him all the money that was in his host’s
pockets. By an odd turn of luck the two encountered shortly after
breakfast, and the prisoner ran. The plaintiff followed, but the other
eluded him, and was again sauntering about in safety, when the eye of a
third actor in the drama fell upon him. This was a young man who kept
some sort of small shop, and who was called to the witness-stand in
behalf of the prosecution. He was as stupid as he could well be in some
respects, and very simple questions had to be repeated several times to
him. Yet he had the ferret-like instinct of the thief-catcher, and he
instantly saw that his look fluttered the guilty rogue, who straightway
turned and fled. But this time he had a sharper pursuer than his host,
and he was coursed through all his turns and windings, up stairs and
down, in houses and out, and gripped at last.

“As soon as I saw him start to run,” said the witness, who told his
story with a graphic jauntiness, “I knowed he’d got something.”

“You _didn’t_ know I’d got anything!” exclaimed the thief.

“I knowed you’d get ninety days if I caught up with you,” retorted the
witness, wagging his head triumphantly.

As the officer entered the station-house with his prisoner, the host,
by another odd chance, was coming out, after stating his loss to the
police, and identified his truant guest.

The money, all but thirty cents, was found upon him; and though he
represented that he had lawfully earned it by haying in Dedham, the
fact that it was in notes of the denominations which the plaintiff
remembered was counted against him, and he got the ninety days which
his captor had prophesied. He, too, sat down, and I saw him no more.


VII.

Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came forward from some
of the back seats, and occupied the benches hitherto held by the
plaintiffs and witnesses in the preceding cases. They were of all
shades of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and they
were there in their solemn best clothes, with their faces full of a
decorous if superficial seriousness. I must except from this sweeping
assertion, however, the lady who was the defendant in the case: she
was a young person, with a great deal of what is called style about
her, and I had seen her going and coming throughout the morning in a
high excitement, which she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady
whose lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine outward roll
to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any circumstances; and it may
have been light-heartedness rather than light-mindedness that enabled
her to support so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all the
other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted black walking-dress,
with a waist of perhaps caricatured smallness; her hat was full of red
and yellow flowers; on her hands, which were in drawing with her lips
rather than her waist, were a pair of white kid gloves. As she advanced
to take her place inside the prisoner’s bar she gave in charge to a
very mournful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three
years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and tottering upon
little high-heeled boots. The old man lifted the child in his arms, and
funereally took his seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned
her full-blown smile upon the judge, and confidently pleaded not guilty
to the clerk’s reading of the indictment, in which she was charged with
threatening the person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment a
sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull countenances in
the court-room, which had been growing more and more jaded under the
process of the accusations and condemnations. The soddenest _habitué_
of the place brightened; the lawyers and policemen eased themselves in
their chairs, and I fancied that the judge himself relaxed. I could
not refuse my sympathy to the general content; I took another respite
from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent myself to the hope of
enjoyment from this Laughable After-piece.

The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared
with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to
that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a
crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky
pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fullness nor her skin the
brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous
black.

She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable
family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door
from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a
certain point, and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure
to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should
hold the beating in store for her, and bestow it whenever she caught
her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff,
and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had
invoked the law.

During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting
and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of
the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she
now flung herself half across it.

“What’d I say I’d whip you _for_?”

_The Plaintiff_, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”

_The Defendant_, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I
ast you: what _for_?”

_The Plaintiff_, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”

_The Defendant_: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”

_The Judge_: “She has answered it.”

_The Defendant_, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her
another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a
ball with my husband ag’in I’d”--

_The Plaintiff_: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”

_The Defendant_: “You didn’t go with him! Ah”--

_The Plaintiff_: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”

_The Defendant_: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket!
Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me
or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the
time,--to church, and everywhere.”

_The Judge_: “That will do.”

The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,”
stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took
her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel
black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as
she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the
plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care
of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson
has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a
certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all
quality in her granddaughter-in-law, as no words could have done it. I
suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem
as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices
and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if
this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant
one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the
unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless
character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those
attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage, and
living apart from his wife,--a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both
before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming
with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she
descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who
succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.

The hapless sire--for this was the character he attempted--came upon
the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his
testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always
done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her
fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of
incongruity in the facts--elicited by counsel--to the contrary; and
he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other
things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife
and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account,
and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his
son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.

“You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce
the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”

The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he
was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I--I don’ know
as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.

“Do you mean that the plaintiff--the person whom your daughter
threatened to beat--has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s
affections away from her?”

“Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left
_me_ to support her.”

“Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s
husband away from her?”

“I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter
since he married her.”

“Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”

“With who, judge?”

“With the plaintiff.”

“De ol’ woman. No, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: _she’s his
gran’mother_.”

“Well, does he go with the young woman?”

“Oh, yes! _Yes!_ He goes with the _young_ woman. Goes with _her_ all
the time. That’s the _one_ he goes with!”

He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point
was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared
his pleasure.

I really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which
I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the
_dénoûment_, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to
one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little
difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little
drama were of another complexion how finely the situation would have
served in a certain sort of intense novel: the patrician dowager,
inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and
willing to encourage his _penchant_ for the lady of his own rank, whom
some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar
but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of
her husband’s family,--it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I
commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised
by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.


VIII.

It was nearly a year later that I paid my second visit to the police
court, on a day, like the first, humid and dull, but very close and
suffocatingly hot. It was a Monday morning, and there was a full
dock, as I have learned that the prisoner’s pen at the right of the
clerk’s desk is called. The clerk was standing with that sheaf of
indictments in his hand, and saying, “John O’Brien!” and John O’Brien
was answering, “Here, sor!” and the clerk was proceeding, “Complained
of for being drunk guilty or not guilty pay a fine of one dollar and
costs stand committed to the House of Industry,” and then writing on
the indictment, and tossing it aside. As I modestly took my stand
at the door, till I should gather courage to cross the room to one
of the vacant seats which I saw among the policemen, one of these
officers of the court approached me and said, “No room for you here
to-day, my friend. Go up on the Common.” In spite of my share of that
purely American vanity which delights in official recognition, I could
not be flattered at this, and it was with relief that I found he was
addressing a fellow-habitué behind me. The court-room was in fact very
full, and there were no seats on the benches ordinarily allotted to
spectators; so I at once crossed to my place, and sat down among the
policemen, to whom I authorized my intrusion by taking my notebook from
my pocket. I have some hopes that the spectators thought me a detective
in plain clothes, and revered me accordingly. There was such a person
near me, with his club sticking out of his back-pocket, whom I am sure
_I_ revered.

I had not come to report the events of this session of the court, but
to refresh the impressions of my first visit, and I was glad to find
them so just. There was, of course, some little change; but the same
magistrate was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of visage;
the colored attorney was there, in charge, as before, of a disastrous
Irish case. The officials who tried to keep order had put off their
flannel coats for coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese fan;
neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a little more in
flesh. I think they were even less successful than formerly in quelling
disturbances, though they were even more polished in the terms of
their appeal. “Too much conversation in the court!” they called out to
us collectively. “Conversation _must_ cease,” they added. Then one,
walking up to a benchful of voluble witnesses, would say, “Must cease
that conversation,” and to my fellow-policemen, “Less conversation,
gentlemen;” then again to the room at large, “Stop all conversation in
the court,” and “All conversation must cease entirely.”

The Irish case, which presently came on, was a question of assault and
battery between Mrs. O’Hara and Mrs. MacMannis; it had finally to be
dismissed, after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable character
of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses, were called, principally
young girls, who had come in their best, and with whom one could fancy
this an occasion of present satisfying excitement and future celebrity.
The witnesses were generally more interesting than the parties to the
suits, I thought, and I could not get tired of my fellow-spectators,
I suppose, if I went a great many times. I liked to consider the
hungry gravity of their countenances, as they listened to the facts
elicited, and to speculate as to the ultimate effect upon their moral
natures--or their immoral natures--of the gross and palpable shocks
daily imparted to them by the details of vice and crime. I have tried
to treat my material lightly and entertainingly, as a true reporter
should, but I would not have my reader suppose that I did not feel
the essential cruelty of an exhibition that tore its poor rags from
all that squalid shame, and its mask from all that lying, cowering
guilt, or did not suspect how it must harden and deprave those whom it
daily entertained. As I dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators,
certain spectacles vaguely related themselves to what I saw: the women
who sat and knitted at the sessions of the Revolutionary tribunals of
Paris, and overwhelmed with their clamor the judges’ feeble impulses
to mercy; the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and the Roman
arena. Here the same elements were held in absolute silence,--debarred
even from “conversation,”--but it was impossible not to feel that here
in degree were the conditions that trained men to demand blood, to
rave for the guillotine, to turn down the thumb. This procession of
misdeeds, passing under their eyes day after day, must leave a miasm
of moral death behind it which no prison or work-house can hereafter
cure. We all know that the genius of our law is publicity; but it may
be questioned whether criminal trials may not be as profitably kept
private as hangings, the popular attendance on which was once supposed
to be a bulwark of religion and morality.


IX.

Not that there was any avoidable brutality, or even indecorum, in
the conduct of the trials that I saw. A spade was necessarily called
a spade; but it seemed to me that with all the lapse of time and
foreign alloy the old Puritan seriousness was making itself felt
even here, and subduing the tone of the procedure to a grave decency
consonant with the inquiries of justice. For it was really justice
that was administered, so far as I could see; and justice that was by
no means blind, but very open-eyed and keen-sighted. The causes were
decided by one man, from evidence usually extracted out of writhing
reluctance or abysmal stupidity, and the judgment must be formed and
the sentence given where the magistrate sat, amid the confusion of the
crowded room. Yet, except in the case of my poor thief, I did not see
him hesitate; and I did not doubt his wisdom even in that case. His
decisions seemed to me the result of most patient and wonderfully rapid
cogitation, and in dealing with the witnesses he never lost his temper
amid densities of dullness which it is quite impossible to do more than
indicate. If it were necessary, for example, to establish the fact
that a handkerchief was white, it was not to be done without some such
colloquy as this:--

“Was it a white handkerchief?”

“Sor?”

“Was the handkerchief white?”

“Was it white, sor?”

“Yes, was it white?”

“Was what white, sor?”

“The handkerchief,--was the handkerchief white?”

“What handkerchief, sor?”

“The handkerchief you just mentioned,--the handkerchief that the
defendant dropped.”

“I didn’t see it, sor.”

“Didn’t see the handkerchief?”

“Didn’t see him drop it, sor.”

“Well, did you see the handkerchief?”

“The handkerchief, sor? Oh, yes, sor! _I_ saw it,--I saw the
_handkerchief_.”

“Well, was it _white_?”

“It was, sor.”

A boy who complained of another for assaulting him said that he knocked
him down.

“How did he knock you down?” asked the judge. “Did he knock you down
with his fist or his open hand?”

“Yes, sor.”

“Which did he do it with?”

“Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”

“Then he didn’t _knock_ you down. He _threw_ you down.”

“Yes, sor. He didn’t t’row me down. Put his arms round me and knocked
me down.”

It would be impossible to caricature these things, or to exaggerate the
charitable long-suffering that dealt with such cases. Sometimes, as if
in mere despair, the judge called the parties to him, and questioned
them privately; after which the case seemed to be settled, without
further trial.


X.

I have spoken of the theatrical illusion which the proceedings of the
court produced; but it often seemed to me also like a school where bad
boys and girls were brought up for punishment. They were, indeed, like
children, those poor offenders, and had a sort of innocent simplicity
in their wickedness, as good people have in their goodness. One case
came up on the occasion of my last visit, which I should like to report
verbatim in illustration, but it was of too lurid a sort to be treated
by native realism; we can only bear that sort when imported; and
undoubtedly there is something still to be said in behalf of decency,
at least in the English language. I can only hint that this case was
one which in some form or other has been coming up in the police
courts ever since police courts began. It must have been familiar to
those of Thebes three thousand years ago, and will be so in those of
cities which shall look back on Boston in an antiquity as hoary. A
hard-working old fool with a month’s pay in his pocket and the lost
soul with whom he carouses; the theft; the quarrel between the lost
soul and the yet more fallen spirit who harbored her and traded at
second hand in her perdition as to who stole the fool’s money,--what
stale materials! Yet I was as much interested as if this were the first
case of the kind, and, confronted with the fool and the lost soul and
the yet more fallen spirit, I could not feel that they were--let me
say it in all seriousness and reverence--so very bad. Perhaps it was
because they stood there reduced to the very nakedness of their shame,
and confessedly guilty in what human nature struggles to the last to
deny--stood there, as a premise, far past the hope of lying--that they
seemed rather subjects for pity than abhorrence. The fool and the lost
soul were light and trivial; they even laughed at some of the grosser
facts; but that yet more fallen spirit was ghastly tragical, as bit by
bit the confession of her business was torn from her; it was torture
that seemed hideously out of proportion to any end to be attained; yet
as things are it had to be. If then and there some sort of redemption
might have begun!

The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as in the best and
purest, seemed to be struggling back to some relation and likeness to
our average sinful humanity, insisting that if socially and publicly
we denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our secret
hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that on their hopelessly
sunken level their common humanity kept that symmetry and proportion
which physical deformity shows, one could not doubt that a distorted
kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the midst of their
depravity: the man was like a gray-headed foolish boy; the two women
as simple and cunning as too naughty children. It could be imagined
that they had their friendly moments; that in extremity they might care
for each other; that even such a life as theirs had its reliefs from
perdition, as in disease there is relief from pain, and no suffering,
out of romance, is incessant. They had certainly their decorums, their
criterions. On their plane, everything but the theft and the noisy
quarrel was of custom and for granted; but these were misdemeanors
and disgraceful. Like another hostess of the sort, the fallen spirit
was aggrieved at these. “Do you think I keep thieves in my house?...
The tithe of a hair was never lost in my house before.... I’ll no
swaggerers.... There comes no swaggering here.... I will bar no honest
man my house, nor no cheater; but I do not love swaggering.” This is
the sum of what she said that she had said in rebuke of the lost soul;
that thieving and that swaggering, they incensed her, and roused in her
all the instincts of a moral and respectable person. Humanity adjusts
itself to all conditions, and doubtless God forsakes it in none, but
still shapes it to some semblance of health in its sickness, of order
in its disorder, of righteousness in its sin.

I dare say that it was not a wholesome feeling, this leniency that
acquaintance with sinners produces. There is much to be urged on
that side, and I would like to urge it in considering the effect of
daily attendance at the police court upon these spectators whom I have
tried to study for the reader’s advantage. I must own that the trial
at which I have hinted did not affect them seriously, and I doubt
if they psychologized upon it. They craned their necks forward and
gloated on those women with an unmistakably obscene delight. If they
were not beyond being the worse for anything, they were the worse for
that trial. Why were they present? Theoretically, perhaps to see that
justice was done. But if justice had not been done, how could they
have helped it? The public shame seemed purely depraving both to those
who suffered it and to those who saw it; and it ought to have been no
part of the punishment inflicted. It was horrible, and it sometimes
befell those who were accused of nothing, but were merely there to be
tortured as witnesses. The lawyer who forced that wretched hostess
to confess the character of her house used no unfair means, and he
dealt with her as sparingly as he might; yet it was still a shocking
spectacle; for she was, curiously enough, not lost to shame, but most
alive to it, and, standing there before that brutal crowd, gave up
her name to infamy, with atrocious pain and hate; her face was such
a visage as hell-fire might flash into sight among the newly damned,
but such as our familiar and respectable sunlight would do well not to
reveal to any eyes but magistrates’ and priests’. Till one has seen
such a thing it is incredible that it should be, and then incredible
that it should possibly be of daily occurrence. It was as if the
physicians in charge of a public hospital should permit that rabble
to be present at a clinique for some loathsome disease, to see that
there was no malpractice. If the whole trial could have taken place
with closed doors, and with none present but the parties, the lawyers,
and the court, what possible harm could have been done? I think none
whatever, and I am so sure of this that I would not only have all the
police trials secret, but I would never have another police report in
print--after this! Then the decency of mystery, and perhaps something
of its awe, would surround the vulgar shame and terror of the police
court, and a system which does no good would at least do less harm than
at present.


XI.

It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am going too far. I
begin with demanding secrecy in police trials, and I end by suggesting
that they be abolished altogether. But in fact nothing struck me more
forcibly in the proceedings of the police court than their apparent
futility. It was all a mere suppression of symptoms in the vicious
classes, not a cure. This one or that one would not steal, or assault
and batter, for the given term of his imprisonment, but this was
ludicrously far from touching even the tendency to theft and violence.
These bad boys and girls came up and had their thrashing or their rap
over the knuckles, and were practically bidden by the conditions of our
civilization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there is no cure for vice
and crime. Perhaps there is nothing but prevention, in the application
of which there is always difficulty, obscurity, and uncertainty.

The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad vehicle which is
called the Black Maria was driving away from the high portal into which
it backs to receive its dead. (The word came inevitably; it is not so
far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria may still be Maria (the
reason why it should ever have been I do not know), but it is black no
longer. On the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful salmon color,
with its false sash picked out in drab; and at first glance, among the
rattling express wagons, it looked not unlike an omnibus of the living,
and could have passed through the street without making the casual
observer realize what a dreary hearse it was. I dare say it was on
its way to the House of Industry, or the House of Correction, or Deer
Island, or some of those places where people are put to go from bad to
worse; and it was fulfilling its function with a merciful privacy, for
its load of convicts might have been dragged through the streets on
open hurdles, for the further edification of the populace. Yet I could
not help thinking--or perhaps the thought only occurs to me now--that
for all reasonable hope as to the future of its inmates the Black Maria
might as well have been fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of
mechanism sometimes employed by the Enemies of Society, and driven
out to some wide, open space where the explosion could do no harm to
the vicinity, and so when the horses and driver had removed to a safe
distance--

But this is perhaps pessimism.

It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and almost any honest
expression concerning the monotonous endeavor and failure of society
to repress the monotonous evolution of the criminal in conditions
that render his evolution inevitable, must seem pessimistic. I do not
suppose that we ought to kill him merely because we cannot hope to cure
him, though society goes to this extreme in certain extreme cases.
Is it right to kill the criminal at one stage of his career, and not
at another? After the first conviction the rest is inevitable, and
each succeeding conviction follows as a matter of course. A bleaker
pessimist than myself might say that all criminal courts seem to be
part of the process in the evolution of the criminal. Still, criminal
courts must be.




I TALK OF DREAMS.


But it is mostly my own dreams I talk of, and that will somewhat excuse
me for talking of dreams at all. Every one knows how delightful the
dreams are that one dreams one’s self, and how insipid the dreams of
others are. I had an illustration of the fact, not many evenings ago,
when a company of us got telling dreams. I had by far the best dreams
of any; to be quite frank, mine were the only dreams worth listening
to; they were richly imaginative, delicately fantastic, exquisitely
whimsical, and humorous in the last degree; and I wondered that when
the rest could have listened to them they were always eager to cut in
with some silly, senseless, tasteless thing, that made me sorry and
ashamed for them. I shall not be going too far if I say that it was on
their part the grossest betrayal of vanity that I ever witnessed.

But the egotism of some people concerning their dreams is almost
incredible. They will come down to breakfast and bore everybody with
a recital of the nonsense that has passed through their brains in
sleep, as if they were not bad enough when they were awake; they will
not spare the slightest detail; and if, by the mercy of Heaven, they
have forgotten something, they will be sure to recollect it, and go
back and give it all over again with added circumstance. Such people do
not reflect that there is something so purely and intensely personal
in dreams that they can rarely interest any one but the dreamer,
and that to the dearest friend, the closest relation or connection,
they can seldom be otherwise than tedious and impertinent. The habit
husbands and wives have of making one another listen to their dreams
is especially cruel. They have each other quite helpless, and for this
reason they should all the more carefully guard themselves from abusing
their advantage. Parents should not afflict their offspring with the
rehearsal of their mental maunderings in sleep, and children should
learn that one of the first duties a child owes its parents is to spare
them the anguish of hearing what it has dreamed about overnight. A like
forbearance in regard to the community at large should be taught as the
first trait of good manners in the public schools, if we ever come to
teach good manners there.


I.

Certain exceptional dreams, however, are so imperatively significant,
so vitally important, that it would be wrong to withhold them from the
knowledge of those who happened not to dream them, and I feel some such
quality in my own dreams so strongly that I could scarcely forgive
myself if I did not, however briefly, impart them. It was only the
last week, for instance, that I found myself one night in the company
of the Duke of Wellington, the great Duke, the Iron one, in fact; and
after a few moments of agreeable conversation on topics of interest
among gentlemen, his Grace said that now, if I pleased, he would like
a couple of those towels. We had not been speaking of towels, that I
remember, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he
should mention them in the connection, whatever it was, and I went at
once to get them for him. At the place where they gave out towels, and
where I found some very civil people, they told me that what I wanted
was not towels, and they gave me instead two bath-gowns, of rather
scanty measure, butternut in color and Turkish in texture. The garments
made somehow a very strong impression upon me, so that I could draw
them now, if I could draw anything, as they looked when they were
held up to me. At the same moment, for no reason that I can allege, I
passed from a social to a menial relation to the Duke, and foresaw that
when I went back to him with these bath-gowns he would not thank me
as one gentleman would another, but would offer me a tip as if I were
a servant. This gave me no trouble, for I at once dramatized a little
scene between myself and the Duke, in which I should bring him the
bath-gowns, and he should offer me the tip, and I should refuse it with
a low bow, and say that I was an American. What I did not dramatize,
or what seemed to enter into the dialogue quite without my agency, was
the Duke’s reply to my proud speech. It was foreshown me that he would
say, He did not see why that should make any difference. I suppose
it was in the hurt I felt at this wound to our national dignity that
I now instantly invented the society of some ladies, whom I told of
my business with those bath-gowns (I still had them in my hands),
and urged them to go with me and call upon the Duke. They expressed,
somehow, that they would rather not, and then I urged that the Duke was
very handsome. This seemed to end the whole affair, and I passed on to
other visions, which I cannot recall.

I have not often had a dream of such international import, in
the offence offered through me to the American character, and its
well-known superiority to tips, but I have had others quite as
humiliating to me personally. In fact, I am rather in the habit of
having such dreams, and I think I may not unjustly attribute to them
the disciplined modesty which the reader will hardly fail to detect
in the present essay. It has more than once been my fate to find
myself during sleep in battle, where I behave with so little courage
as to bring discredit upon our flag and shame upon myself. In these
circumstances I am not anxious to make even a showing of courage; my
one thought is to get away as rapidly and safely as possible. It is
said that this is really the wish of all novices under fire, and that
the difference between a hero and a coward is that the hero hides it,
with a duplicity which finally does him honor, and that the coward
frankly runs away. I have never really been in battle, and if it is
anything like a battle in dreams, I would not willingly qualify myself
to speak by the card on this point. Neither have I ever really been
upon the stage, but in dreams I have often been there, and always in
a great trouble of mind at not knowing my part. It seems a little odd
that I should not sometimes be prepared, but I never am, and I feel
that when the curtain rises I shall be disgraced beyond all reprieve.
I dare say it is the suffering from this that awakens me in time, or
changes the current of my dreams so that I have never yet been actually
hooted from the stage.


II.

But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social
experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one should
dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is what I
have done more than once, though never perhaps so signally as in the
instance I am about to give. I found myself in a large room, where
people were sitting at lunch or supper around small tables, as is the
custom, I am told, at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry.
I was feeling very well; not too proud, I hope, but in harmony with the
time and place. I was very well dressed, for me; and as I stood talking
to some ladies at one of the tables I was saying some rather brilliant
things, for me; I lounged easily on one foot, as I have observed men of
fashion do, and as I talked, I flipped my gloves, which I held in one
hand, across the other; I remember thinking that this was a peculiarly
distinguished action. Upon the whole I comported myself like one in the
habit of such affairs, and I turned to walk away to another table,
very well satisfied with myself and with the effect of my splendor
upon the ladies. But I had got only a few paces off when I perceived
(I could not see with my back turned) one of the ladies lean forward,
and heard her say to the rest in a tone of killing condescension and
patronage, “_I_ don’t see why that person isn’t as well as another.”

I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I never would have
them if I could help. They make me ask myself if I am really such a
snob when I am waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I
am, I cannot help hoping that it will not be found out; and in my
dreams I am always less sorry for the misdeeds I commit than for their
possible discovery. I have done some very bad things in dreams which I
have no concern for whatever, except as they seem to threaten me with
publicity, or bring me within the penalty of the law; and I believe
this is the attitude of most other criminals, remorse being a fiction
of the poets, according to the students of the criminal class. It is
not agreeable to bring this home to one’s self, but the fact is not
without its significance in another direction. It implies that both in
the case of the dream-criminal and the deed-criminal there is perhaps
the same taint of insanity; only in the deed-criminal it is active,
and in the dream-criminal it is passive. In both, the inhibitory clause
that forbids evil is off, but the dreamer is not bidden to do evil as
the maniac is, or as the malefactor often seems to be. The dreamer is
purely unmoral; good and bad are the same to his conscience; he has
no more to do with right and wrong than the animals; he is reduced to
the state of the merely natural man; and perhaps the primitive men
were really like what we all are now in our dreams. Perhaps all life
to them was merely dreaming, and they never had anything like our
waking consciousness, which seems to be the offspring of conscience,
or else the parent of it. Until men passed the first stage of being,
perhaps that which we call the soul, for want of a better name, or a
worse, could hardly have existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul is
mostly absent now. The soul, or the principle that we call the soul,
is the supernal criticism of the deeds done in the body, which goes
perpetually on in the waking mind. While this watches, and warns or
commands, we go right; but when it is off duty we go neither right nor
wrong, but are as the beasts that perish.

A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those we
have in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I do not
altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof of
it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but there is no proof that
we did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is quite
as vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should
think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the
drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and
I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to
be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without
our souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind
keeps on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both
experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we
may know what the state of the habitual criminal is, what the state of
the lunatic, the animal, the devil is. In them the personal character
ceases; the dreamer is remanded to his type.


III.

It is very strange, in the matter of dreadful dreams, how the body
of the terror is, in the course of often dreaming, reduced to a mere
convention. For a long time I was tormented with a nightmare of
burglars, and at first I used to dramatize the whole affair in detail,
from the time the burglars approached the house, till they mounted the
stairs, and the light of their dark-lanterns shone under the door into
my room. Now I have blue-pencilled all that introductory detail; I have
a light shining in under my door at once; I know that it is my old
burglars; and I have the effect of nightmare without further ceremony.
There are other nightmares that still cost me a great deal of trouble
in their construction, as for instance the nightmare of clinging to the
face of a precipice or the eaves of a lofty building; I have to take
as much pains with the arrangement of these as if I were now dreaming
them for the first time, and were hardly more than an apprentice in the
business.

Perhaps the most universal dream of all is that disgraceful dream of
appearing in public places, and in society, with very little or nothing
on. This dream spares neither age nor sex, I believe, and I dare say
the innocency of wordless infancy is abused by it, and dotage pursued
to the tomb. I have not the least doubt Adam and Eve had it in Eden;
though up to the moment the fig-leaf came in, it is difficult to
imagine just what plight they found themselves in that seemed improper;
probably there was some plight. The most amusing thing about this
dream is the sort of defensive process that goes on in the mind, in
search of self-justification or explanation. Is there not some peculiar
circumstance or special condition, in whose virtue it is wholly right
and proper for one to come to a fashionable assembly clad simply in a
towel, or to go about the street in nothing but a pair of kid gloves,
or of pyjamas at the most? This, or something like it, the mind of the
dreamer struggles to establish, with a good deal of anxious appeal to
the bystanders and a final sense of the hopelessness of the cause.

One may easily laugh off this sort of dream in the morning, but there
are other shameful dreams, whose inculpation projects itself far into
the day, and whose infamy often lingers about one till lunch-time.
Every one, nearly, has had them, but it is not the kind of dream that
any one is fond of telling: the gross vanity of the most besotted
dream-teller keeps that sort back. During the forenoon, at least, the
victim goes about with the dim question whether he is not really that
kind of man harassing him, and a sort of remote fear that he may be. I
fancy that as to his nature and as to his mind, he is so, and that but
for the supernal criticism, but for his soul, he might be that kind of
man in very act and deed.

The dreams we sometimes have about other people are not without a
curious suggestion; and the superstitious (of those superstitious who
like to invent their own superstitions) might very well imagine that
the persons dreamed of had a witting complicity in their facts, as
well as the dreamer. This is a conjecture that must of course not be
forced to any conclusion. One must not go to one of these persons and
ask, however much one would like to ask, “Sir, have you no recollection
of such and such a thing, at such and such a time and place, which
happened to us in my dream?” Any such person would be fully justified
in not answering the question. It would be, of all interviewing, the
most intolerable species. Yet a singular interest, a curiosity not
altogether indefensible, will attach to these persons in the dreamer’s
mind, and he will not be without the sense, ever after, that he and
they have a secret in common. This is dreadful, but the only thing
that I can think to do about it is to urge people to keep out of other
people’s dreams by every means in their power.


IV.

There are things in dreams very awful, which would not be at all so in
waking; quite witless and aimless things, which at the time were of
such baleful effect that it remains forever. I remember dreaming when
I was quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, a dream which
is vivider in my mind now than anything that happened at the time.
I suppose it came remotely from my reading of certain Tales of the
Grotesque and the Arabesque, which had just then fallen into my hands;
and it involved simply an action of the fire-company in the little town
where I lived. They were working the brakes of the old fire-engine,
which would seldom respond to their efforts, and as their hands rose
and fell they set up the heart-shaking and soul-desolating cry of “Arms
Poe, arms Poe, arms Poe!” This and nothing more was the body of my
horror; and if the reader is not moved by it the fault is his and not
mine; for I can assure him that nothing in my experience has been more
dreadful to me.

I can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a clown, whom I once
saw, somewhat later in life, rise through the air in a sitting posture,
and float lightly over the house-roof, snapping his fingers, and
vaguely smiling, while the antennæ on his forehead, which clowns have
in common with some other insects, nodded elastically. I do not know
why this portent should have been so terrifying, or indeed that it was
a portent at all, for nothing ever came of it; what I know is that it
was to the last degree threatening and awful. I never got anything but
joy out of the circuses where this dream must have originated, but the
pantomime of Don Giovanni, which I saw at the theatre, was as grewsome
to me waking as it was to me dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore,
in getting down from his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I think
that is what he gets down for), set an example by which a long line
of statues afterwards profited in my dreams. For many years, and I do
not know but quite up to the time when I adopted burglars as the theme
of my nightmares, I was almost always chased by a marble statue with
an uplifted arm, and almost always I ran along the verge of a pond to
escape it. I believe that I got this pond out of my remote childhood,
and that it may have been a fish-pond embowered by weeping-willows
which I used to admire in the door-yard of a neighbor. I have somehow
a greater respect for the material of this earlier nightmare than I
have for that of the later ones, and no doubt the reader will agree
with me that it is much more romantic to be pursued by a statue than
to be threatened by burglars. It is but a few hours ago, however, that
I saved myself from these inveterate enemies by waking up just in
time for breakfast. They did not come with that light of dark-lanterns
shining under the door, or I should have known them at once, and not
had so much bother; but they intimated their presence in the catch of
the lock, which would not close securely, and there was some question
at first whether they were not ghosts. I thought of tying the door-knob
on the inside of my room to my bedpost (a bedpost that has not been
in existence for fifty years), but after suffering awhile I decided
to speak to them from an upper window. By this time they had turned
into a trio of harmless, necessary tramps, and at my appeal to them,
absolutely nonsensical as I now believe it to have been, to regard the
peculiar circumstances, whatever they were or were not, they did really
get up from the back porch where they were seated and go quietly away.

Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. On one occasion,
when I found a party of them digging at the corner of my house on
Concord Avenue in Cambridge, and opened the window over them to
expostulate, the leader looked up at me in well-affected surprise. He
lifted his hand, with a twenty-dollar note in it, toward me, and said:
“Oh! Can you change me a twenty-dollar bill?” I expressed a polite
regret that I had not so much money about me, and then he said to the
rest, “Go ahead, boys,” and they went on undermining my house. I do not
know what came of it all.

Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can remember; in fact,
I have never dreamed of the kind of ghosts that we are all more or
less afraid of, though I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of
departed friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the reader, who has
never died yet, may be interested to know what it is like. According to
this experience of mine, which I do not claim is typical, it is like
a fire kindling in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings; the
gathering smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame, and puff the door
out, and all is over.

I have not yet been led to execution for the many crimes I have
committed in my dreams, but I was once in the hands of a barber, who
added to the shaving and shampooing business the art of removing his
customers’ heads in treatment for headache. As I took my seat in his
chair I had some lingering doubts as to the effect of a treatment so
drastic, and I ventured to mention the case of a friend of mine, a
gentleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after several weeks was
still going about without his head. The barber did not attempt to
refute my position. He merely said, “Oh, well, he had such a very thick
sort of a head, anyway.”

This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a reason, though it
may not have been. We rarely bring away from sleep the things that
seem so brilliant to us in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to
fade away, or turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty sayings
which we contrive to remember will hardly bear the test of daylight.
The most perfect thing of the kind out of my own dreams was something
that I seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears. It was after
a certain dinner, which had been rather uncommonly gay, with a good
deal of very good talk, which seemed to go on all night, and when I
woke in the morning some one was saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t at all mind
his robbing Peter to pay Paul, if I felt sure that Paul would get the
money.” This I think really humorous, and an extremely neat bit of
characterization; I feel free to praise it, because it was not I who
said it.


V.

Apparently the greater part of dreams have no more mirth than sense
in them. This is perhaps because the man is in dreams reduced to
the brute condition, and is the lawless inferior of the waking man
intellectually, as the lawless in waking are always the inferiors of
the lawful. Some loose thinkers suppose that if we give the rein to
imagination it will do great things, but it will really do little
things, foolish and worthless things, as we witness in dreams, where it
is quite unbridled. It must keep close to truth, and it must be under
the law if it would work strongly and sanely. The man in his dreams is
really lower than the lunatic in his deliriums. These have a logic of
their own; but the dreamer has not even a crazy logic.


     “Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,”


and probably his dreams and the dog’s are not only alike, but are of
the same quality. In his wicked dreams the man is not only animal, he
is devil, so wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians
say. The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of detection and
punishment steals in upon him. Even then he is not sorry for his
misdeed, as I have said before; he is only anxious to escape its
consequences.

It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to
waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the thing is
only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always just
about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but still more
strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of others,
when they not merely say things to us which are wholly unexpected,
but think things that we know they are thinking, and that they do not
express in words. A great many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed
that my father, who was in another town, came into the room where I was
really lying asleep, and stood by my bed. He wished to greet me, after
our separation, but he reasoned that if he did so, I should wake, and
he turned and left the room without touching me. This process in his
mind, which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had apparently
gone on in my own, was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as
anything could be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.

Of course it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream,
and it was something like the operation of the novelist’s intention
through the mind of his characters. But in this there is the author’s
consciousness that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream,
this reasoning in the mind of another was something that I felt
myself mere witness of. In fact there is no analogy, so far as I can
make out, between the process of literary invention and the process
of dreaming. In the invention, the critical faculty is vividly and
constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems altogether absent. It seems
absent, too, in what we call day-dreaming, or that sort of dramatizing
action which perhaps goes on perpetually in the mind, or some minds.
But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more like night-dreaming
than invention is; for the man is never more actively and consciously a
man, and never has a greater will to be fine and high and grand than in
his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he is quite willing to be a
miscreant of any worst sort.

It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and
then, though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic as
those others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let
into his goods (the word is Swedenborg’s again), instead of his evils?
It may be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive, while his
proper soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal, have
free access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one
case, and use it in his behalf in the other.

That would be an explanation, but nothing seems quite to hold in regard
to dreams. If it is true, why should the dreamer’s state so much
oftener be imbued with evil than with good? It might be answered that
the evil forces are much more positive and aggressive than the good;
or, that the love of the dreamer, which is his life, being mainly evil,
invites the wicked spirits oftener. But that is a point which I would
rather leave each dreamer to settle for himself. The greater number of
every one’s dreams, like the romantic novel, I fancy, concern incident
rather than character, and I am not sure, after all, that the dream
which convicts the dreamer of an essential baseness is commoner than
the dream that tells in his favor morally.

I dare say every reader of this paper has had dreams so amusing that he
has wakened himself from them by laughing, and then not found them so
very funny, or perhaps not been able to recall them at all. I have had
at least one of this sort, remarkable for other reasons, which remains
perfect in my mind, though it is now some ten years old. One of the
children had been exposed to a very remote chance of scarlet-fever at
the house of a friend, and had been duly scolded for the risk, which
was then quite forgotten. I dreamed that this friend, however, was
giving a ladies’ lunch, at which I was unaccountably and invisibly
present, and the talk began to run upon the scarlet-fever cases in
her family. She said that after the last she had fumigated the whole
house for seventy-two hours (the period seemed very significant and
important in my dream), and had burned everything she could lay her
hands on.

“And what did the nurse burn?” asked one of the other ladies.

The hostess began to laugh: “The nurse didn’t burn a thing!”

Then all the rest burst out laughing at the joke, and the laughter woke
me, to see the boy sitting up in his bed, and hear him saying, “Oh, I
am so sick!”

It was the nausea which announces scarlet-fever, and for six weeks
after that we were in quarantine. Very likely the fear of the contagion
had been in my nether mind all the time, but, so far as consciousness
could testify of it, I had wholly forgotten it.


VI.

One rarely loses one’s personality in dreams; it is rather intensified,
with all the proper circumstances and relations of it, but I have had
at least one dream in which I seemed to transcend my own circumstance
and condition with remarkable completeness. Even my epoch, my precious
present, I left behind (or ahead, rather), and in my unity with the
persons of my dream I became strictly mediæval. In fact, I have always
called it my mediæval dream, to such as I could get to listen to it;
and it had for its scene a feudal tower, in some waste place; a tower
open at the top, and with a deep, clear pool of water at the bottom,
so that it instantly became known to me, as if I had always known it,
for the Pool Tower. While I stood looking into it, in a mediæval dress
and a mediæval mood, there came flying in at the open door of the ruin
beside me the duke’s hunchback, and after him, furious and shrieking
maledictions, the swarthy beauty whom I was aware the duke was tired
of. The keeping was now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and
it was suggested somehow to my own subtle Italian perception that the
hunchback had been set on to tease the girl, and provoke her so that
she would turn upon him, and try to wreak her fury on him, and chase
him into the Pool Tower, and up the stone stairs that wound round its
hollow to the top, where the solemn sky showed. The fearful spire of
the steps was unguarded, and when I had lost the pair from sight,
with the dwarf’s mocking laughter and the girl’s angry cries in my
ears, there came fluttering from the height, like a bird wounded and
whirling from a lofty tree, the figure of the girl, while far aloof
the hunchback peered over at her fall. Midway in her descent her head
struck against the edge of the steps, with a _kish_, such as an
egg-shell makes when broken against the edge of a platter, and then
plunged into the dark pool at my feet, where I could presently see her
lying in the clear depths, and the blood curling upward from the wound
in her skull, like a dark smoke. I was not sensible of any great pity;
I accepted the affair, quite mediævally, as something that might very
well have happened, given the girl, the duke and the dwarf, and the
time and place.

I am rather fond of a mediæval setting for those


     “Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,”


just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to my vision a wide
landscape, with a cold wintry afternoon light upon it, and over this
plain I have bands and groups of people scurrying, in mediæval hose
of divers colors, and mediæval leathern jerkins, hugging themselves
against the frost, and very miserable. They affect me with a profound
compassion; they represent to me, somehow, the vast mass of humanity,
the mass that does the work, and earns the bread, and goes cold and
hungry through all the ages. I should be at a loss to say why this was
the effect, and I am utterly unable to say why these fore-dreams, which
I partially solicit, should have such a tremendous significance as they
seem to have. They are mostly of the most evanescent and intangible
character, but they have one trait in common. They always involve the
attribution of ethical motive and quality to material things, and
in their passage through my brain they promise me a solution of the
riddle of the painful earth in the very instant when they are gone
forever. They are of innumerable multitude, chasing each other with
the swiftness of light, and never staying to be seized by the memory,
which seems already drugged with sleep before their course begins. One
of these dreams, indeed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure
8, but lying on its side, and in that posture involving the mystery and
the revelation of the mystery of the universe. I leave the reader to
imagine why.

As we grow older, I think we are less and less able to remember our
dreams. This is perhaps because the experience of youth is less dense,
and the empty spaces of the young consciousness are more hospitable
to these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life stand out in
strong relief, but for the most part they blend in an indistinguishable
mass, and pass away with the actualities into a common oblivion. I
should say that they were more frequent with me than they used to be;
it seems to me that now I dream whole nights through, and much more
about the business of my waking life than formerly. As I earn my
living by weaving a certain sort of dreams into literary form, it might
be supposed that I would sometime dream of the personages in these
dreams, but I cannot remember that I have ever done so. The two kinds
of inventing, the voluntary and the involuntary, seem absolutely and
finally distinct.

Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes have I have mentioned
the only one of mine which had any dramatic interest, but I have
verified in my own experience the theory of Ribot that approaching
disease sometimes intimates itself in dreams of the disorder impending,
before it is otherwise declared in the organism. In actual sickness I
think that I dream rather less than in health. I had a malarial fever
when I was a boy, and I had a sort of continuous dream in it that
distressed me greatly. It was of gliding down the school-house stairs
without touching my feet to the steps, and this was indescribably
appalling.

The anguish of mind that one suffers from the imaginary dangers of
dreams is probably of the same quality as that inspired by real peril
in waking. A curious proof of this happened within my knowledge not
many years ago. One of the neighbor’s children was coasting down a long
hill with a railroad at the foot of it, and as he neared the bottom
an express train rushed round the curve. The flag-man ran forward and
shouted to the boy to throw himself off his sled, but he kept on, and
ran into the locomotive, and was so hurt that he died. His injuries,
however, were to the spine, and they were of a kind that rendered
him insensible to pain while he lived. He talked very clearly and
calmly of his accident, and when he was asked why he did not throw
himself off his sled, as the flag-man bade him, he said, “_I thought
it was a dream_.” The reality had, through the mental stress, no doubt
transmuted itself to the very substance of dreams, and he had felt the
same kind and quality of suffering as he would have done if he had been
dreaming. The Norwegian poet and novelist, Björnstjerne Björnson, was
at my house shortly after this happened, and he was greatly struck by
the psychological implications of the incident; it seemed to mean for
him all sorts of possibilities in the obscure realm where it cast a
fitful light.

But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness thickens round us
again. It is not with the blindfold sense of sleep that we shall ever
find out the secret of life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem
personal to us each one, or those universal dreams which we apparently
share with the whole race. Of the race-dream, as I may call it, there
is one hardly less common than that dream of going about insufficiently
clad, which I have already mentioned, and that is the dream of suddenly
falling from some height, and waking with a start. The experience
before the start is extremely dim, and latterly I have condensed this
dread almost as much as the preliminary passages of my burglar-dream.
I am aware of nothing but an instant of danger, and then comes the jar
or jolt that wakens me. Upon the whole, I find this a great saving of
emotion, and I do not know but there is a tendency, as I grow older,
to shorten up the detail of what may be styled the conventional dream,
the dream which we have so often that it is like a story read before.
Indeed, the plots of dreams are not much more varied than the plots of
romantic novels, which are notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would
be interesting, and possibly important, if some observer would note
the recurrence of this sort of dreams, and classify their varieties.
I think we should all be astonished to find how few and slight the
variations were.


VII.

If I come to speak of dreams concerning the dead, it must be with a
tenderness and awe that all who have had them will share with me.
Nothing is more remarkable in them than the fact that the dead, though
they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with them, quite like
all other living persons. We may recognize, and they may recognize,
that they are no longer in the body, but they are as verily living as
we are. This may be merely an effect from the doctrine of immortality
which we all hold or have held, and yet I would fain believe that it
may be something like proof of it. No one really knows, or can know,
but one may at least hope, without offending science, which indeed no
longer frowns so darkly upon faith. This persistence of life in those
whom we mourn as dead, may not it be a witness of the fact that the
consciousness cannot accept the notion of death at all, and,


     “Whatever crazy sorrow saith,”


that we have never truly felt them lost? Sometimes those who have died
come back in dreams as parts of a common life which seems never to have
been broken; the old circle is restored without a flaw; but whether
they do this, or whether it is acknowledged between them and us that
they have died, and are now disembodied spirits, the effect of life is
the same. Perhaps in those dreams they and we are alike disembodied
spirits, and the soul of the dreamer, which so often seems to abandon
the body to the animal, is then the conscious entity, the thing which
the dreamer feels to be himself, and is mingling with the souls of the
departed on something like the terms which shall hereafter be constant.

I think very few of those who have lost their beloved have failed to
receive some sign or message from them in dreams, and often it is
of deep and abiding consolation. It may be that this is our anguish
compelling the echo of love out of the darkness where nothing is, but
it may be that there is something there, which answers to our throe
with pity and with longing like our own. Again, no one knows, but in a
matter impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the comfort
which belief can give. Unbelief can be no gain, and belief no loss. But
those dreams are so dear, so sacred, so interwoven with the finest and
tenderest tissues of our being that one cannot speak of them freely,
or indeed more than most vaguely. It is enough to say that one has had
them, and to know that almost every one else has had them too. They
seem to be among the universal dreams, and a strange quality of them
is, that though they deal with a fact of universal doubt, they are, to
my experience at least, not nearly so fantastic or capricious as the
dreams that deal with the facts of every-day life, and with the affairs
of people still in this world.

I do not know whether it is common to dream of faces or figures strange
to our waking knowledge, but occasionally I have done this. I suppose
it is much the same kind of invention that causes the person we dream
of to say or do a thing unexpected to us. But this is rather common,
and the creation of a novel aspect, the physiognomy of a stranger, in
the person we dream of, is rather rare. In all my dreams I can recall
but one presence of the kind. I have never dreamed of any sort of
monster foreign to my knowledge, or even of any grotesque thing made
up of elements familiar to it; the grotesqueness has always been in
the motive or circumstance of the dream. I have very seldom dreamed of
animals, though once, when I was a boy, for a time after I had passed a
corn-field where there were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knotted
together in the cold of an early spring day, I had dreams infested by
like images of these loathsome reptiles. I suppose that every one has
had dreams of finding his way through unnamable filth, and of feeding
upon hideous carnage; these are clearly the punishment of gluttony, and
are the fumes of a rebellious stomach.

I have heard people say they have sometimes dreamed of a thing, and
awakened from their dream, and then fallen asleep and dreamed of the
same thing; but I believe that this is all one continuous dream; that
they did not really awaken, but only dreamed that they awakened. I
have never had any such dream, but at one time I had a recurrent
dream, which was so singular that I thought no one else had ever had
a recurrent dream till I proved that it was rather common by starting
the inquiry in the Contributors’ Club in the _Atlantic Monthly_, when
I found that great numbers of people have recurrent dreams. My own
recurrent dreams began to come during the first year of my consulate
at Venice, where I had hoped to find the same kind of poetic dimness
on the phases of American life, which I wished to treat in literature,
as the distance in time would have given. I should not wish any such
dimness now; but those were my romantic days, and I was sorely baffled
by its absence. The disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as
my days, and a dream repeated itself from week to week for a matter
of eight or ten months to one effect. I dreamed that I had gone home
to America, and that people met me and said, “Why, you have given up
your place!” and I always answered: “Certainly not; I haven’t done
at all what I mean to do there, yet. I am only here on my ten days’
leave.” I meant the ten days which a consul might take each quarter
without applying to the Department of State; and then I would reflect
how impossible it was that I should make the visit in that time. I saw
that I should be found out, and dismissed from my office and publicly
disgraced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul at Venice, and had not
been, but consul at Delhi in India; and the distress I felt would
all end in a splendid Oriental phantasmagory of elephants and native
princes, with their retinues in procession, which I suppose was mostly
out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream, with no variation that
I can recall, persisted till I broke it up by saying, in the morning
after it had recurred, that I had dreamed that dream again; and so
it began to fade away, coming less and less frequently, and at last
ceasing altogether.

I am rather proud of that dream; it is really my battle-horse among
dreams, and I think I will ride away on it.




AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE.


The New Yorkers, following the custom of Europe, often fence themselves
about with a great deal of ceremony in social matters, even such small
social matters as making calls.

Some ladies have days when they receive calls; others have no specified
day, and then you take your chance of being turned from the door
without seeing them, or if you find them, of finding them reluctant and
preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often felt as if he had been
admitted through the error of the man or the maid who opened the door
to him at such houses, and who returned, after carrying up his name, to
say, with a frightened air, that the lady would be down in a moment.

But when there are days there is never any misgiving about letting
you in. The door is whisked open before you have had time to ring,
sometimes by a servant who has the effect of not belonging to the
house, but hired for the afternoon. Then you leave your card on a
platter of some sort in the hall to attest the fact of your visit, and
at the simpler houses find your way into the drawing-room unannounced,
though the English custom of shouting your name before you is very
common and is always observed where there is any pretense to fashion.
Certain ladies receive once a week throughout the season; others
receive on some day each week of December or January or February, as
the case may be. When there is this limit to a month, the reception
insensibly takes on the character of an afternoon tea, and, in fact,
it varies from that only in being a little less crowded. There is
tea or chocolate or mild punch and a table spread with pastries and
sweets, which hardly any one touches. A young lady dedicates herself
to the service of each urn and offers you the beverage that flows from
it. There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter of female
voices, a constant flutter of greeting and leave-taking and a general
sense of amiable emptiness and bewildered kindness when you come away.
The genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informality, but
at some houses where you enjoy such informalities you find two men in
livery on the steps outside, a third opens the door for you, a fourth
takes your hat and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat and a sixth
catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing room.


I.

But I must not give too exclusive an impression of ceremony in the
New-Yorkers. I made some calls about Christmas-time last year in a
quarter of the city where the informalities are real and where the
hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere as in the
houses where the informalities are more apparent. The sort of calls
I made were rather fashionable some years ago, but are so no longer.
It was a fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads,
came from England, and perhaps it has now died out here because it has
died out there. At any rate, it seems certain that there is now less
interest, less curiosity, concerning the home life of the poor than
there was then among the comfortable people. I do not say there is less
sympathy--there must be still a good deal of sympathy--but I should
say there was less hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition
of the ill-to-do; some philosophers even warn us against indulging a
feeling of commiseration, lest it should encourage the poor to attempt
themselves to better their condition.

Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of the poor, whom I
found as tame and peaceful, apparently, when I went the rounds of their
unceremonious at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire.
My calls were by no means of the nature of a perquisition, but they
left very little unknown to me, I fancy, of the way the poor live, so
frank and simple is their life. They included some tenements of the
American quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, and
a rather greater number on the East Side, in the heart of the district
abandoned chiefly to the Russian Jews, though there are no doubt
other nationalities to be found there. It is said to be more densely
populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom,
for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty
thousand men, women and children. One can imagine from this fact
alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and
decencies of life may be. But I must not hurry to the region of these
homes before I have first tried to show the interiors of that quarter
called American, where I found the Americans represented, as they are
so often, by Irish people. The friend who went with me on my calls led
me across the usual surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks,
and suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about two feet wide.
This crept under houses fronting on the squalid street we had left and
gave into a sort of court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or
forty feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and very old.
One of them was a stable, which contributed its stench to the odors
that rose from the reeking pavement and from the closets filling an
end of the court, with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that
supplied the water of the whole inclosure. It is from this court that
the inmates of the tenements have their sole chance of sun and air.
What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on
the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which
my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August.
I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one
of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I
almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must
be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid
breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage
through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole
family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed.

We had our choice which door to knock at on the narrow landing, a
yard wide at most, which opened into such tenements to the right and
left, as many stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once in
the presence of the hostess; there was no ceremony of sending in our
cards here, or having our names called to her. In one case we found
her over the washtub, with her three weeks’ babe bundled in a chair
beside it. A table, with a half-eaten loaf, that formed her breakfast,
on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, to crowd the place past any
possibility of sitting down, if there had been chairs to sit in; so
we stood, as people do at an afternoon tea. At sight of us the woman
began to cry and complain that her man had been drunk and idle for a
month and did nothing for her; though in these times he might have been
sober and idle and done as little. Some good soul was paying the rent
for her, which was half as great as would have hired a decent flat in a
good part of the town; but how her food came or the coal for her stove
remained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She wiped her tears
at the exhibition of a small coin, which she had perhaps dimly foreseen
through them from the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, perhaps,
to give her money, but it was not very wrong, perhaps, for the money
was not very much, and if it pauperized her it could not have been said
that she was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These are very
difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, and the right is
something that does not show itself at once, especially in economical
affairs.

In another tenement we found a family as gay and hopeful as this was
dismal and desperate. An Irish lady with a stylish fringe of red hair
decorating her forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the
apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself very proud of,
for she said that if people were not comfortable in their houses it was
because they were slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was
neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She had a florid taste
in pictures, and half a dozen large colored prints went far to hide the
walls, which, she said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though
to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. The whitewashing
was the sole repairs which had been put upon her tenement since she
came into it, but she seemed to think it quite enough; and her man, who
sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days’ beard which seems
inseparable from idle poverty, was quite boastful of its advantages.
He said that he had lived in that court for thirty years and there
was no such air anywhere else in this world. I could readily believe
him, being there to smell it and coming away with the taste of it in my
mouth. Like other necessaries of life, it must have been rather scanty
in that happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell outside and
a double dark thickened in the small bin which stood open to our gaze
at the end of the room. The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to
this lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rickety bedstead.
The beds in these sleeping-holes were never made up; they were rounded
into a heap and seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They had
always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied them astir with a
certain life which, if there had been a consensus of it to that effect,
might have walked off with them.

All the tenements here were of this size and shape--a room with windows
opening upon the court and at the rear the small black bin or pen
for the bed. The room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was
six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars a month. If
he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some thirty thousand evictions
have taken place in the past year. But an eviction is by no means the
dreadful hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be sure,
it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with his poor household
gear in any weather and at any hour; but if it is very cold or very
wet weather, the evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night
there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take them in, and their
life begins again on the old terms; or the charities come to their aid,
and they are dispersed into the different refuges until the father or
mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. Still, natural as
it all is, I should think it must surprise an Irishman, who supposed he
had left eviction behind him in his native land, to find it so rife in
the country of his adoption.


II.

My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but
I thought that if what I had seen was typical, I had seen enough in
that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in
upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in
upon without any ceremony but the robust “Good-morning!” my companion
gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little
interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite
ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They
may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or
journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose
and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and
made us as much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been
that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board
of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.

I had not realized before how much this noble institution can befriend
the poor, so potently sustained as it is in the discharge of its duties
by the popular sentiment in a land where popular sentiment is so often
so weak. It has full power, in the public interest, to order repairs
and betterments necessary for the general health in any domicile, rich
or poor, in the city, and no man’s pleasure or profit may hinder it.
In cases of contagion or infection, it may isolate the neighborhood
or vacate the premises, or, in certain desperate conditions, destroy
them. As there are always pestilences of some sort preying upon the
poor (as if their poverty were not enough), my companion could point
out a typhus quarter, which the Board had shut up and which we must
not approach. Such minor plagues as smallpox, scarlet-fever, and
diphtheria are quickly discovered and made known, and the places that
they have infested are closed till they can be thoroughly purified.
Any tenant believing his premises to be in an unwholesome or dangerous
state may call in the Board, and from its decision the landlord has no
appeal. He must make the changes the Board ordains, and he must make
them at his own cost, though no doubt, when the tenant can pay, he
contrives somehow to make him pay in the end. The landlord, especially
if he battens on the poorer sort of tenants, is always in fear of the
Board, and the tenant is in love with it, for he knows that, in a
community otherwise delivered over to the pursuit of pelf or pleasure,
it stands his ready friend, whose mandate private interest obeys as it
obeys no other. It seems to have more honor than any other institution
among us, and, amid the most frightful corruption of every kind, to
remain incorruptible. Very likely the landlord may sometimes think
that it abuses its power, but the tenant never thinks so, and the
public seems always to agree with the tenant. The press, which is so
keen to scent out paternalism in municipal or national affairs, has
not yet perceived any odor of it in the Board of Health, and stands
its constant friend, though it embodies in the most distinctive form
the principle that, in a civilized community, the collective interest
is supreme. Even if such an extension of its powers were not in the
order of evolution, it would not be so illogical for the Board of
Health to command the abatement of poverty when the diseases that flow
from poverty cannot be otherwise abated. I should not like to prophesy
that it will ever do so, but stranger things have happened through the
necessity that knows no law, not even the law of demand and supply--the
demand of Moloch and the supply of Misery.


III.

I do not know whether the Hebrew quarter, when I began to make my calls
there, seemed any worse than the American quarter or not. But I noticed
presently a curious subjective effect in myself, which I offer for the
reader’s speculation.

There is something in a very little experience of such places that
blunts the perception, so that they do not seem so dreadful as they
are; and I should feel as if I were exaggerating if I recorded my
first impression of their loathsomeness. I soon came to look upon the
conditions as normal, not for me, indeed, or for the kind of people I
mostly consort with, but for the inmates of the dens and lairs about
me. Perhaps this was partly their fault; they were uncomplaining, if
not patient, in circumstances where I believe a single week’s sojourn,
with no more hope of a better lot than they could have, would make
anarchists of the best people in the city. Perhaps the poor people
themselves are not so thoroughly persuaded that there is anything
very unjust in their fate, as the compassionate think. They at least
do not know the better fortune of others, and they have the habit of
passively enduring their own. I found them usually cheerful in the
Hebrew quarter, and they had so much courage as enabled them to keep
themselves noticeably clean in an environment where I am afraid their
betters would scarcely have had heart to wash their faces and comb
their hair. There was even a decent tidiness in their dress, which
I did not find very ragged, though it often seemed unseasonable and
insufficient. But here again, as in many other phases of life, I was
struck by men’s heroic superiority to their fate, if their fate is
hard; and I felt anew that if prosperous and comfortable people were
as good in proportion to their fortune as these people were they would
be as the angels of light, which, I am afraid they now but faintly
resemble.

One of the places we visited was a court somewhat like that we had
already seen in the American quarter, but rather smaller and with
more the effect of a pit, since the walls around it were so much
higher. There was the same row of closets at one side and the hydrant
next them, but here the hydrant was bound up in rags to keep it from
freezing, apparently, and the wretched place was by no means so
foul under foot. To be sure, there was no stable to contribute its
filth, but we learned that a suitable stench was not wanting from
a bakery in one of the basements, which a man in good clothes and
a large watch-chain told us rose from it in suffocating fumes at a
certain hour, when the baker was doing some unimaginable thing to
the bread. This man seemed to be the employer of labor in one of the
rooms above, and he said that when the smell began they could hardly
breathe. He caught promptly at the notion of the Board of Health,
and I dare say that the baker will be duly abated. None of the other
people complained, but that was perhaps because they had only their
Yiddish to complain in, and knew that it would be wasted on us. They
seemed neither curious nor suspicious concerning us; they let us go
everywhere, as if they had no thought of hindering us. One of the
tenements we entered had just been vacated; but there was a little
girl of ten there, with some much smaller children, amusing them in the
empty space. Through a public-spirited boy, who had taken charge of us
from the beginning and had a justly humorous sense of the situation, we
learned that this little maid was not the sister but the servant of the
others, for even in these low levels society makes its distinctions.
I dare say that the servant was not suffered to eat with the others
when they had anything to eat, and that when they had nothing her
inferiority was somehow brought home to her. She may have been made
to wait and famish after the others had hungered some time. She was a
cheerful and friendly creature and her small brood were kept tidy like
herself.

The basement under this vacant tenement we found inhabited, and though
it was a most preposterous place for people to live, it was not as
dirty as one would think. To be sure, it was not very light and all
the dirt may not have been visible. One of the smiling women who were
there made their excuses, “Poor people; cannot keep very nice,” and
laughed as if she had said a good thing. There was nothing in the room
but a table and a few chairs and a stove, without fire, but they were
all contentedly there together in the dark, which hardly let them see
one another’s faces. My companion struck a match and held it to the
cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large as the room we were
in, where it winked and paled so soon that I had only a glimpse of the
bed, with the rounded heap of bedding on it; but out of this hole, as
if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, a young girl came,
rubbing her eyes and vaguely smiling, and vanished up-stairs somewhere.


IV.

I found no shape or size of tenement but this. There was always the
one room, where the inmates lived by day, and the one den, where they
slept by night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably the
children were strewn about the floor. If the tenement were high up the
living-room had more light and air than if it were low down; but the
sleeping-hole never had any light or air of its own. My calls were
made on one of the mild days which fell before last Christmas, and
so I suppose I saw these places at their best; but what they must be
when the summer is seven times heated without, as it often is in New
York, or when the arctic cold has pierced these hapless abodes and the
inmates huddle together for their animal heat, the reader must imagine
for himself. The Irish-Americans had flaming stoves, even on that soft
day, but in the Hebrew tenements I found no fire. They were doubtless
the better for this, and it is one of the comical anomalies of the
whole affair that they are singularly healthy. The death rate among
them is one of the lowest in the city, though whether for their final
advantage it might not better be the highest, is one of the things
one must not ask one’s self. In their presence I should not dare to
ask it, even in my deepest thought. They are then so like other human
beings and really so little different from the best, except in their
environment, that I had to get away from this before I could regard
them as wild beasts.

I suppose there are and have been worse conditions of life, but if I
stopped short of savage life I found it hard to imagine them. I did not
exaggerate to myself the squalor that I saw, and I do not exaggerate
it to the reader. As I have said, I was so far from sentimentalizing
it that I almost immediately reconciled myself to it, as far as its
victims were concerned. Still, it was squalor of a kind which, it
seemed to me, it could not be possible to outrival anywhere in the life
one commonly calls civilized. It is true that the Indians who formerly
inhabited this island were no more comfortably lodged in their wigwams
of bark and skins than these poor New-Yorkers in their tenements.
But the wild men pay no rent, and if they are crowded together upon
terms that equally forbid decency and comfort in their shelter, they
have the freedom of the forest and the prairie about them; they have
the illimitable sky and the whole light of day and the four winds
to breathe when they issue into the open air. The New York tenement
dwellers, even when they leave their lairs, are still pent in their
high-walled streets, and inhale a thousand stenches of their own and
others’ making. The street, except in snow and rain, is always better
than their horrible houses, and it is doubtless because they pass so
much of their time in the street that the death rate is so low among
them. Perhaps their domiciles can be best likened for darkness and
discomfort to the dugouts or sod huts of the settlers on the great
plains. But these are only temporary shelters, while the tenement
dwellers have no hope of better housing; they have neither the prospect
of a happier fortune through their own energy as the settlers have,
nor any chance from the humane efforts and teachings of missionaries,
like the savages. With the tenement dwellers it is from generation to
generation, if not for the individual, then for the class, since no
one expects that there will not always be tenement dwellers in New York
as long as our present economical conditions endure.


V.

When I first set out on my calls I provided myself with some small
silver, which I thought I might fitly give, at least to the children,
and in some of the first places I did this. But presently I began to
fancy an unseemliness in it, as if it were an indignity added to the
hardship of their lot, and to feel that unless I gave all my worldly
wealth to them I was in a manner mocking their misery. I could not give
everything, for then I should have had to come upon charity myself, and
so I mostly kept my little coins in my pocket; but when we mounted into
the court again from that cellar apartment and found an old, old woman
there, wrinkled and yellow, with twinkling eyes and a toothless smile,
waiting to see us, as if she were as curious in her way as we were in
ours, I was tempted. She said in her Yiddish, which the humorous boy
interpreted, that she was eighty years old, and she looked a hundred,
while she babbled unintelligibly but very cheerfully on. I gave her
a piece of twenty-five cents and she burst into a blessing, that I
should not have thought could be bought for money. We did not stay to
hear it out, but the boy did, and he followed to report it to me, with
a gleeful interest in its beneficent exaggerations. If it is fulfilled
I shall live to be a man of many and prosperous years, and I shall die
possessed of wealth that will endow a great many colleges and found a
score of libraries. I do not know whether the boy envied me or not,
but I wish I could have left that benediction to him, for I took a
great liking to him, his shrewd smile, his gay eyes, his promise of a
Hebrew nose, and his whole wise little visage. He said that he went to
school and studied reading, writing, geography and everything. All the
children we spoke to said that they went to school, and they were quick
and intelligent. They could mostly speak English, while most of their
elders knew only Yiddish.

The sound of this was around us on the street we issued into, and
which seemed from end to end a vast bazaar, where there was a great
deal of selling, whether there was much buying or not. The place is
humorously called the pig-market by the Christians, because everything
in the world but pork is to be found there. To me its activity was a
sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic
civilization. These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed upon
one another in their commerce, as if they could be enriched by selling
dear or buying cheap. So far as I could see they would only impoverish
each other more and more, but they trafficked as eagerly as if there
were wealth in every bargain. The sidewalks and the roadways were
thronged with peddlers and purchasers, and everywhere I saw splendid
types of that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the knowledge
of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in heathen darkness. There were
women with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent
as evening pools, and men with long beards of jetty black or silvery
white, and the noble profiles of their race. I said to myself that it
was among such throngs that Christ walked, it was from such people that
he chose his Disciples and his friends; but I looked in vain for him in
Hester street. Probably he was at that moment in Fifth Avenue.


VI.

After all, I was loath to come away. I should have liked to stay and
live awhile with such as they, if the terms of their life had been
possible, for there were phases of it that were very attractive. That
constant meeting and that neighborly intimacy were superficially at
least of a very pleasant effect, and though the whole place seemed
abandoned to mere trade, it may have been a necessity of the case, for
I am told that many of these Hebrews have another ideal, and think
and vote in the hope that the land of their refuge shall yet some day
keep its word to the world, so that men shall be equally free in it
to the pursuit of happiness. I suppose they are mostly fugitives from
the Russian persecution, and that from the cradle their days must have
been full of fear and care, and from the time they could toil that they
must have toiled at whatever their hands found to do. Yet they had not
the look of a degraded people; they were quiet and orderly, and I saw
none of the drunkenness or the truculence of an Irish or low American
neighborhood among them. There were no policemen in sight, and the
quiet behavior that struck me so much seemed not to have been enforced.
Very likely they may have moods different from that I saw, but I only
tell of what I saw, and I am by no means ready yet to preach poverty
as a saving grace. Though they seemed so patient and even cheerful in
some cases, I do not think it is well for human beings to live whole
families together in one room with a kennel out of it, where modesty
may survive, but decency is impossible. Neither do I think they can
be the better men and women for being insufficiently clothed and fed,
though so many of us appear none the better for being housed in palaces
and clad in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day.

I have tried to report simply and honestly what I saw of the life of
our poorest people that day. One might say it was not so bad as it is
painted, but I think it is quite as bad as it appeared; and I could
not see that in itself or in its conditions it held the promise or the
hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, it must endure; if it is
intolerable, still it must endure. Here and there one will release
himself from it, and doubtless numbers are always doing this, as in the
days of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the great mass the
captivity remains. Upon the present terms of leaving the poor to be
housed by private landlords, whose interest it is to get the greatest
return of money for the money invested, the very poorest must always
be housed as they are now. Nothing but public control in some form or
other can secure them a shelter fit for human beings.




TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER.


Some months ago, as I was passing through a down-town street on my way
to the elevated station, I saw a man sitting on the steps of a house.
He seemed to be resting his elbows on his knees, and holding out both
his hands. As I came nearer I perceived that he had no hands, but only
stumps, where the fingers had been cut off close to the palms, and
that it was these stumps he was holding out in the mute appeal which
was his form of begging. Otherwise he did not ask charity. When I
approached him he did not look up, and when I stopped in front of him
he did not speak. I thought this rather fine, in its way; except for
his mutilation, which the man really could not help, there was nothing
to offend the taste; and his immobile silence was certainly impressive.

I decided at once to give him something; for when I am in the presence
of want, or even the appearance of want, there is something that says
to me, “Give to him that asketh,” and I have to give, or else go away
with a bad conscience--a thing I hate. Of course I do not give much,
for I wish to be a good citizen as well as a good Christian; and as
soon as I obey that voice which I cannot disobey, I hear another voice
reproaching me for encouraging street beggary. I have been taught that
street beggary is wrong, and when I have to unbutton two coats and go
through three or four pockets before I can reach the small coin I mean
to give in compliance with that imperative voice, I certainly feel it
to be wrong. So I compromise, and I am never able to make sure that
either of those voices is satisfied with me. I am not even satisfied
with myself; but I am better satisfied than if I gave nothing. That was
the selfish reason I now had for deciding to yield to my better nature,
and to obey the voice which bade me “Give to him that asketh”; for, as
I said, I hate a bad conscience, and of two bad consciences I always
choose the least, which in a case like this, is the one that incensed
political economy gives me.


I.

I put my hand into my hip-pocket, where I keep my silver, and found
nothing there but half a dollar. This at once changed the whole current
of my feelings; and it was not chill penury that repressed my noble
rage, but chill affluence. It was manifestly wrong to give half a
dollar to a man who had no hands, or to any sort of beggar. I was
willing to commit a small act of incivism, but I had not the courage
to flout political economy to the extent of fifty cents; and I felt
that when I was bidden “Give to him that asketh,” I was never meant to
give so much as a half-dollar, but a cent, or a half-dime, or at the
most a quarter. I wished I had a quarter. I would gladly have given
a quarter, but there was nothing in my pocket but that fatal, that
inexorably indivisible half-dollar, the continent of two quarters,
but not practically a quarter. I would have asked anybody in sight to
change it for me, but there was no one passing; it was a quiet street
of brown-stone dwellings, and not a thronged thoroughfare at any time.
At that hour of the late afternoon it was deserted, except for the
beggar and myself; and I am not sure that he had any business to be
sitting there, on the steps of another man’s house, or that I had the
right to encourage his invasion by giving him anything. For a moment I
did not know quite what to do. To be sure, I was not bound to the man
in any way. He had not asked me for charity, and I had barely paused
before him; I could go on and ignore the incident. I thought of doing
this, but then I thought of the bad conscience I should be certain to
have, and I could not go on. I glanced across the street, and near the
corner I saw a decent-looking restaurant; and “Wait a minute,” I said
to the man, as if he were likely to go away, and I ran across to get my
half-dollar changed at the restaurant.

I was now quite resolved to give him a quarter, and be done with it;
the thing was getting to be a bore. But when I entered the restaurant
I saw no one there but a young man quite at the end of a long room;
and when he had come all the way forward to find what I wanted, I was
ashamed to ask him to change my half-dollar, and I pretended that I
wanted a package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes, which I did not want, and
which it was a pure waste for me to buy, since I do not smoke, though
doubtless it was better to buy them and encourage commerce than to give
the half-dollar and encourage beggary. At any rate, I instinctively
felt that I had political economy on my side in the transaction, and I
made haste to go back to the man on the steps, and secure myself with
Christian charity too. On the way over to him, however, I decided that
I would not give him a quarter, and I ended by poising fifteen cents on
one of his outstretched stumps.

He seemed very grateful, and thanked me earnestly, with a little note
of surprise in his voice, as if he were not used to such splendid
charity as that; and in fact, I suppose very few people gave so
handsomely to him. He spoke with a German accent; and when I asked
him how he had lost his hands, he answered, “Frost. Frozen off, here
in the city.” I could not go on and ask him for further particulars,
for I thought it but too likely that he had been drunk when exposed to
weather that would freeze one’s hands off, and that he was now paying
the penalty of his debauchery. I was in no wise so much at peace with
myself as I had expected to be; and I was still less so when a young
girl halted as she came by, and, seeing what I had done, and hearing
what the man said, put a dime on the other stump. She looked poor
herself; her sack was quite shabby about the seams. I did not think she
could afford to give so much to a single beggar, and I was aware of
having tempted her to the excess by my own profusion. If she had seen
me giving the man only a nickel, she would perhaps have given him a
cent, which was probably all she could afford.


II.

I came away feeling indescribably squalid. I perceived now that I
could have taken my stand upon the high ground of discouraging street
beggary, and given nothing; but having once lowered myself to the level
of the early Christians, I ought to have given the half-dollar. It
did not console me to remember the surprise in the man’s gratitude,
and to reflect that I had probably given him at least three times as
much as he usually got from the tenderest-hearted people. I perceived
that I had been the divinely appointed bearer of half a dollar to his
mutilation and his misery, and I had given him fifteen cents out of it,
and wasted ten, and kept the other twenty-five; in other words, I had
embezzled the greater part of the money intrusted to me for him.

When I got home and told them at dinner just what I had done, they all
agreed that I had done a mighty shabby thing. I do not know whether
the reader will agree with them or not--perhaps I would rather not
know; and on the other hand, I shall not ask him what he would have
done in the like case. Now that it is laid before him in all its
shameless nakedness, I dare say he will pretend that he would have
given the half-dollar. But I doubt if he would; and there is a curious
principle governing this whole matter of giving, which I would like him
to consider with me. Charity is a very simple thing when you look at
it from the standpoint of the good Christian, but it is very complex
when you look at it from the standpoint of the good citizen; and there
seems to be an instinctive effort on our part to reconcile two duties
by a certain proportion which we observe in giving. Whether we say so
to ourselves or not, we behave as if it would be the wildest folly to
give at all in the measure Christ bade; and by an apt psychological
juggle we adjust our succor to the various degrees of need that present
themselves. To the absolutely destitute it is plain that anything will
be better than nothing, and so we give the smallest charity to those
who need charity most. I dare say people will deny this, but it is
true, all the same, as the reader will allow when he thinks about it.
We act upon a kind of logic in the matter, though I do not suppose many
act consciously upon it. Here is a man whispering to you in the dark
that he has not had anything to eat all day, and does not know where to
sleep. Shall you give him a dollar to get a good supper and a decent
lodging? Certainly not: you shall give him a dime, and trust that some
one else will give him another; or if you have some charity tickets
about you, then you give him one of them, and go away feeling that you
have at once befriended and outwitted him; for the supposition is that
he is a fraud, and has been trying to work you.

This is not a question which affects the excellence of the charities
system. I know how good and kind and just that is; but it is a question
that affects the whole Christian philosophy of giving. A friend, whom
I was talking the matter over with, was inclined to doubt whether
Christ’s doctrine was applicable, in its sweeping simplicity, to our
complex modern conditions; whether it was final, whether it was the
last word, as we say. Of course it does seem a little absurd to give to
him that asketh, when you do not know what he is going to do with the
money, and when you do not know whether he has not come to want by his
own fault, or whether he is really in want.


III.

I must say that his statement of his own case is usually incoherent.
The poor fellows have very little imagination or invention; they might
almost as well be realistic novelists. I find that those who strike me
for a night’s lodging, when they stop me in the street at night, come
as a rule from Pittsburg, and are ironworkers of some sort; the last
one said he was a puddler, “A skilled mechanic,” he explained--“what is
called a skilled mechanic”; and of course he was only watching for some
chance to get back to Pittsburg, though there was no chance of work,
from what he told me, after he got there. On the other hand, I find
that most of those who ask by day for money to get a dinner are from
Philadelphia, or the rural parts of eastern Pennsylvania, though within
six months I have extended hospitality (I think that is the right
phrase) to two architectural draftsmen from Boston. They were both
entirely decent-looking, sober-looking young men, who spoke like men of
education, and they each gratefully accepted a quarter from me. I do
not attempt to account for them, for they made no attempt to account
for themselves; and I think the effect was more artistic so.

I am rarely approached by any professed New-Yorker, which is perhaps
a proof of the superior industry or prosperity of our city; but now
and then a fellow-citizen who has fallen out asks me for money in the
street, and perhaps goes straight and spends it for drink. Drink,
however, is as necessary in some forms as food itself, and a rich,
generous port wine is often prescribed for invalids. These men, without
exception, look like invalids, and I dare say that they would prefer
to buy a rich, generous port wine if I gave them money enough. I
never do that, though I have a means of making my alms seem greater,
to myself at least, by practising a little cordiality with the poor
fellows. I do not give grudgingly or silently, but I say, if I give
at all, when they ask me, “Why, of course!” or “Yes, certainly”; and
sometimes I invite them to use their feeble powers of invention in my
behalf, and tell how they wish me to think they have come to the sad
pass of beggary. This seems to flatter them, and it makes me feel much
better, which is really my motive for doing it.

Now and then they will offer me some apology for begging, in a tone
that says, “I know how it is myself”; and once there was one who began
by saying, “I know it’s a shame for a strong man like me to be begging,
but--” They seldom have any devices for working me, beyond the simple
statement of their destitution; though there was a case in which I
helped a poor fellow raise a quarter upon a postal order, which he then
kept as a pledge of my good faith. Their main reliance seems to be
lead-pencils, which they have in all inferior variety. I find that they
will take it kindly if you do not want any change back when you have
given them a coin worth more than they asked for the pencil, and that
they will even let you off without taking the pencil after you have
bought it. In the end you have to use some means to save yourself from
the accumulation of pencils, unless you are willing to burn them for
kindling-wood; and I find the simplest way is not to take them after
you have paid for them. It is amusing how quickly you can establish a
comity with these pencil people; they will not only let you leave your
pencils with them, but they will sometimes excuse you from buying if
you remind them that you have bought of them lately. Then, if they do
not remember you, they at least smile politely and pretend to do so.


IV.

Ought one to give money to a hand-organist, who is manifestly making
himself a nuisance before the door of some one else? I have asked
myself this when I have been tempted, and I am not yet quite clear
about it. At present, therefore, I give only to the inaudible street
minstrels, who earn an honest living, and make no noise about it. I
cannot think that a ballad-singer on Sixth Avenue, who pours forth his
artless lay amid the roar and rattle of the elevated trains, the jangle
and clatter of the horse-cars, the bang of the grocers’ carts, and the
thunder of the express-wagons, is practically molesting anybody; and
I believe that one can reward his innocent efforts without wronging
his neighbors. It is always amusing to have him stop in his most
effective phrase to say, “Thank you, thank you, sir,” and then go on
again. The other day, as I dropped my contribution into the extended
hat, I asked, “How is business?” and the singer interrupted himself to
answer, “Nothing-to-brag-of-sir-thank-you,” and resumed with continuous
tenderness the “ditty of no tone” that he was piping to the inattentive
uproar of the street.

It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not making himself heard
is earning his money; but, on the other hand, it may be asked if he
is not less regrettable for that reason. A great many good people do
not earn their money, and yet by universal consent they seem to have a
right to it. We cannot oblige the poor to earn their money, any more
than the rich, without attacking the principle on which society is
based, and classing ourselves with its enemies. If people get money
out of other people, we ought not to ask how they get it, whether it
is much or little; and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the
honesty of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will I
question the gains of those silentious minstrels who grind small, mute
organs at the corners of the pavement, with a little tin cup beside
them to receive tribute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose
Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively anything. How they
can sit upon the cold stone all day long without taking their deaths,
passes me to say; and I am inclined to think that they do really earn
their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments of human endurance.
The average American grandmother would sneeze in five seconds, under
the same conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. But
these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or wet, light or dark.
One night I came upon one sleeping on her curbstone,--such a small,
dull wad of out-worn womanhood!--her gray old head bent upon her knees,
and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. It was very chill that
night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department
had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her
trying to imagine her short and simple annals; a dim, far-off childhood
in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood
with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains--the whole round of
woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this last result of
houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more--if,
indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! I sighed, as
people of feeling used to do in the eighteenth century, and dropped a
dime into the tin cup. The sound startled the beldame, and I hope that
before she woke and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and
luxury for the rest of her life. “_Bella musica!_” I said, with a fine
irony, and she smiled and shrugged, and began to feel for the handle of
her organ, as if she were willing to begin giving me my money’s worth
on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day how impossible
they would seem!


V.

The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible. As soon as you
cease to have it before your eyes,--even when you have it before your
eyes,--you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many
people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the
sentimentalist. When I get back into my own comfortable room, among my
papers and books, I remember it as I remember something at the theatre.
It seems to be turned off, as Niagara does, when you come away. The
difficulty here in New York is that the moment you go out again, you
find it turned on, full tide. I used to live in a country supposed to
be peculiarly infested by beggars; but I believe I was not so much
asked for charity in Venice as I am in New York. There are as many
beggars on our streets as in Venice, and as for the organized efforts
to get at one’s compassion, there is no parallel for New York anywhere.
The letters asking aid for air funds, salt and fresh, for homes and
shelters, for reading-rooms and eating-rooms, for hospitals and
refuges, for the lame, halt, and blind, for the old, for the young, for
the anhungered and ashamed, of all imaginable descriptions, storm in
with every mail, so that one hates to open one’s letters nowadays; for
instead of finding a pleasant line from a friend, one finds an appeal,
in print imitating typewriting, from several of the millionaires in the
city for aid of some good object to which they have lent the influence
of their signatures, and inclosing an envelope, directed but not
stamped, for your subscription. You do not escape from the proof of
poverty even by keeping indoors amidst your own luxurious environment;
besides, your digestion becomes impaired, and you have to go out, if
you are to have any appetite for your dinner; and then the trouble
begins on other terms.

One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on confessing myself to
the reader, is a very small pattern of newsboys, whom I am tempted to
make keep the change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give them
a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well brushed, with the
air of being exemplary citizens, fathers of families, and pillars of
churches, wait patiently or impatiently, while these little fellows
search one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to some
comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I cannot help feeling that I
may be doing something very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing
to demand my change. At first I used to pass on without apparently
noticing that I had given too much, but I perceived that then these
small wretches sometimes winked to their friends, in the belief that
they had cheated me; and now I let them offer to get the change before
I let them keep it. I may be undermining society, and teaching them
to trust in a fickle fortune rather than their own enterprise, by
overpaying them; but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them
think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If the reader will not
whisper it again, I will own that I have sometimes paid as high as ten
cents for a one-cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been
offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight; and I have done this
in conscious defiance of the well-known fact that it is a ruse of very
minute newsboys to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, or
at _the_ Home (which seems different), in order to work the sympathies
of unwary philanthropists. The statistics in regard to these miscreants
are as unquestionable as those relating to street beggars who have
amassed fortunes and died amidst rags and riches of dramatic character.
I am sorry that I cannot say where the statistics are to be found.


VI.

The actual practice of fraud, even when you discover it, must give you
interesting question, unless you are cock-sure of your sociology. I was
once met by a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter
of the town, who burst into tears at sight of me, and asked for money
to buy her sick mother bread. The very next day I was passing through
the same street, and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at
the sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly she asked
for money for the same good object. The benevolent-looking lady gave
her nothing, and she tried her woes upon several other people, none
of whom gave her anything. I was forced to doubt whether, upon the
whole, her game was worth the candle, or whether she was really making
a provision for her declining years by this means. To be sure, her time
was not worth much, and she could hardly have got any other work, she
was so young; but it seemed hardly a paying industry. By any careful
calculation, I do not believe she would have been found to have amassed
more than ten or fifteen cents a day; and perhaps she really had a sick
mother at home. Many persons are obliged to force their emotions for
money, whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet I suppose a
really good citizen who found this little girl trying to cultivate the
sympathies of charitable people by that system of irrigation would have
had her suppressed as an impostor.

In a way she was an impostor, though her sick mother may have been
starving, as she said. It is a nice question. Shall we always give to
him that asketh? Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we know
that he has come by his destitution honestly? In other words, what is
a deserving case of charity--or, rather, what is not? Is a starving or
freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious?
What is desert in the poor? What is desert in the rich, I suppose the
reader would answer. If this is so, and if we ought not to succor an
undeserving poor person, then we ought not to succor an undeserving
rich person. It will be said that a rich person, however undeserving
will never be in need of our succor, but this is not so clear. If we
saw a rich person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue
omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although we knew him to
be a man whose life was stained by every vice and excess, and cruel,
wanton, idle, luxurious? I know that I am imagining a quite impossible
rich person; but once imagined, ought not we to save him all the same
as if he were deserving? I do not believe the most virtuous person will
say we ought not; and ought not we, then, to rescue the most worthless
tramp fallen under the wheels of the Juggernaut of want? Is charity the
reward of merit?


VII.

My friend who was not sure that Christ’s doctrine was the last word in
regard to charity, was quite sure that you ought to have a conscience
against dead-beats, whom I suggested for his consideration, especially
the dead-beats who come to your house and try to work you upon one
pretext or another. He said he never gave to them, and I asked what
he answered them when they professed themselves in instant want; and
whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared that he told them he
had other use for his money. I suspect this was a proper answer to
make. It had never occurred to me, but I think I will try it with the
next one who comes, and see what effect it has upon him. Hitherto I
have had no better way than to offer them a compromise: if they ask
twenty, to propose ten; and if they ask ten, to propose five; and so on
down. The first time I did this (it was with an actor, who gave me his
I O U--the first and only I O U that I ever got: I suppose he was used
to giving it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made ten dollars,
and since then it has seemed to me that I made five dollars on several
occasions; but I now think this was an illusion, and that I only saved
the money: I did not actually add to my store.

It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these
imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic
school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle
to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would
be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a gentleman thrown out of
employment by the completion of an encyclopedia he had been at work
on, and he said that he was in absolute want of food for his family,
who had that morning been set out with all his household stuff on the
sidewalk for default of rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and
suggested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetorical account
of his eviction I could probably sell it for him; that this sort of
thing mostly happened to the inarticulate classes; and that he had
the chance of doing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught
at the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I said the sooner
the better. He asked if it would not be well to get the narrative
type-written, and I begged him not to wait for that; but he said that
he knew a person who would typewrite it for him without charge. I
could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow of enterprise. He
left with me the address of a twenty-five cent lodging-house in the
Bowery; for he explained that he had got money enough, by selling his
furniture on the sidewalk to send his family into the country, and
he was living alone and as cheaply as he could. While at work on his
narrative he came for more relief, and then he vanished out of my
knowledge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went down into the
Bowery to his lodging-house, and found that he really lodged there,
but he was then out; and so far as I am concerned he is out still. I am
out myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he was to repay me
from the money for his eviction article. He never wrote it, apparently;
and perhaps his experience of eviction lacked the vital element of
reality. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for he was an
Englishman, and the Englishmen are all romanticists.


VIII.

I was at one time worked for a period of years by a German-born veteran
of our war, whom I was called out to see one night from dinner, when I
was full of good cheer, and, of course, quite helpless against a case
of want like his. He represented that he was the victim of an infirmity
brought on by falling from a burning bridge under the rebel fire,
and was liable to be overtaken by it at any moment; and he showed me
all sorts of surgeons’ certificates in proof of the fact, as well as
kindly notes from college professors and clergymen. I had, therefore, a
double motive for befriending him. I had as little wish that he should
be overtaken by his infirmity in my reception-room as that he should
go on sleeping in unfinished houses and basement areas; and so I gave
him some money at once. He was to have his pension money at the end
of the month, and till then he said he could live on what I gave him.
I hurried him out of the house as fast as I could, for I did not feel
safe from his infirmity while he was there. But he kept coming back,
and always, in view of his threatening infirmity, got money from me;
I am not sure that I always pitied him so much. At last he agreed to
seek refuge in a soldiers’ home, upon my urgence, and I lost sight
of him for several years. When he reappeared, one summer, at the
seaside, as destitute as ever, and as threatening as ever in regard to
his infirmity, it seemed that he had passed the time in working his
way from one soldiers’ home to another, in Maine and in New York, in
Virginia and in Ohio, but everywhere, because of some informality in
his papers, the gates were closed against him. I gave him a suit of
clothes and some more money, and I thought I had done with him at last,
for he said that now, as soon as he got his next pension money, he was
going home to Germany, to spend his last years with his brother,--a
surgeon, retired from the German army,--who could take care of him and
his infirmity, and they could live cheaply together, upon their joint
pensions. I applauded so wise a plan, and we parted with expressions
of mutual esteem. Two or three months later, after I had come from
the seaside place, where he visited me, to New York for the winter, he
presented himself again to me. Heaven knows how he had found me out,
but there he was, with his infirmity, and his story was that now he had
money enough to buy his steamer ticket to Hamburg, but that he lacked
his railroad fare from Hamburg to the little village where his brother
lived. His notion seemed to be that I should subscribe with others to
supply the amount; but I had at last a gleam of worldly wisdom. I said
I thought the subscription business had gone on long enough; and he
assented that it had at least gone on a good while.

“Very well, then,” I added; “you go now with the money you have for
your steamer ticket, and buy it. Come back here with the ticket and I
will not oblige you to wait till you can collect your railroad fare
from different people; I will give you the whole of it myself.”

Will it be credited that this sufferer did not come back with his
steamer ticket? I have never seen him since, though a few weeks later I
went to call upon him at the ten-cent hotel in the Bowery where he said
he slept. The clerk said he was staying there, but he could not throw
any light upon his intention of going back to Germany, for he had never
heard him say anything about it. He was out at the moment, like my
romanticist Englishman.

Whilst I lived in Boston I had a visit from another romanticistic
Englishman, who professed to be no other than the cousin of Mr. Walter
Besant, though he gave me reason to think he was mistaken. It seems
that he had arrived that very morning from Central Africa, and, for all
I know, from the mystic presence of She herself. In that strange land,
he wished me to believe, he had been a playwright and a journalist,
but he really looked and spoke and smelled like a groom. He dropped
his aspirates everywhere, and when he picked them up he put them on in
the wrong places. In his parlance I was a bird of night, or several
such, and I cannot rid myself now of the belated conjecture that he had
possibly mistaken me for Mr. ’Aggard. He was a cheery little creature,
however; and when I put it to him, as between man and man, whether he
did not think he was telling me a rather improbable story, he owned so
sweetly he did that I could not help contributing to pay his expenses
’ome to Hengland. He was not quite clear why he should have come round
by way of Boston, but he said he would send me the money back directly
he got ’ome.

He did not do so, and my experience is that they never do so. They
may forget it, they may never be able to spare the money. Never? I am
wrong. Only last winter I made my usual compromise with a man who asked
ten, and lent him five; and though he was yet another Englishman, and,
for anything I can say, another romanticist, he returned my little loan
with such a manly, honest letter that my heart smote me for not having
made it ten. I looked upon his five-dollar bill as a gift from heaven,
and I made haste to bestow it where I am sure it will never stand the
remotest chance of getting back to me.


IX.

I wish, sometimes, that they would not say they were going to send
the money back; but I wish this rather for their sake than for mine.
I am pretty well inured to the disappointment sure to follow; but I
am afraid that the poor pretense demoralizes them, and, above all, I
do not wish to demoralize them by my connivance. Once, when I was a
visitor for the Associated Charities in Boston, the question came up
in the weekly meeting whether, if one gave money when there was no
hope of getting work, one ought to let the beneficiary suppose that
one expected to get it back. Ought one to say that he was making his
gift a loan? Would it not be better to treat it frankly as a gift? A
man to whose goodness I mentally uncover said he had given that point
some thought, and he believed one ought not to pretend that it was a
loan when it was not; but one might fitly say, “I let you have this
money. If you are ever able to give it back, I shall be glad to have
you do so.” It seems to me that this is the wisest possible word on the
subject.

Of course the reason why we have such a bad conscience in giving
is that we feel we ought not to pauperize people. Perhaps this is
one reason why we give so little to obvious destitution. I am this
moment just in from the street, where I gave alms to a one-armed
tatterdemalion, with something of this obscure struggle in my mind.
As I came up with him, well fenced against the bitter wind that blew
through his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, and
I took from my outside pocket all the change there was in it--three
coppers, a nickel, and a piece of twenty-five. I was ashamed to give
the coppers, and I felt that a good citizen ought not to give a quarter
for fear of pauperizing a man who had already nothing in the world, and
no hopeful appearance of being able to get anything. So I gave him the
nickel, and I am not quite easy in my mind about it.

Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a quarter to this
one-armed man by the behavior of another one-armed man whom I
befriended. I did give him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but
because I had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. The gift
seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe-store, where I had only one
boot on, in the process of trying a pair, and I was quite helpless
against him when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, and
asked my name, apparently that he might pray for me without making a
mistake in the address; and when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or
a mean fear that he might find me out at home and come again to beg of
me, that I would take the chance of the answer of his prayers getting
to me, he told me all about the railroad accident that lost him his
arm; and not content with this, he took his poor stump--as if to prove
that it was real--and rubbed it over me, and blessed me and blessed me
again, till I was quite ashamed of getting so much more than my money’s
worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful man was not
entirely sober?


X.

I dare say poverty and the pangs of hunger and cold do not foster
habits of strict temperance. It is a great pity they do not, since they
are so common. If they did, they could do more than anything else to
advance the cause of prohibition. Still, I will not say that all the
poor I give to are in liquor at the moment, or that drunkenness is
peculiarly the vice of one-armed destitution. Neither is gratitude a
very common or articulate emotion in my beneficiaries. They are mostly,
if thankful at all, silently thankful; and I find this in better taste.
I do not believe that as a rule they are very imaginative, or at least
so imaginative as romantic novelists. Yet there was one sufferer came
up the back elevator on a certain evening not long ago, and burst upon
me suddenly, somehow as if he had come up through a trap in the stage,
who seemed to have rather a gift in that way. He was most amusingly
shabby and dirty (though I do not know why shabbiness and dirt should
be amusing), with a cutaway coat worn down to its ultimate gloss, a
frayed neckcloth, and the very foulest collar I can remember seeing.
But he had a brisk and pleasing address, and I must say an excellent
diction. He called me by name, and at once said that friends whom he
had expected to find in New York were most inopportunely in Europe at
this moment of his arrival from a protracted sojourn in the West. But
he was very anxious to get on that night to Hartford, and complete his
journey home from Denver, where he had fallen a prey to the hard times
in the very hour of the most prosperous speculation; and he proposed,
as an inducement to a loan, borrowing only enough money to take him to
New Haven by the boat--he would walk the rest of the way to Hartford.
I no more believed him than I should believe a ghost if it said it
was a ghost. But I believed that he was in want,--his clothes proved
that,--and I gave him the little sum he asked. He said he would send it
back the instant he reached Hartford; and I am left to think that he
has not yet arrived. But I am sure that even that brief moment of his
airy and almost joyous companionship was worth the money. He was of an
order of classic impostors dear to literature, and grown all too few in
these times of hurry and fierce competition. I wish I had seen more of
him, and yet I cannot say that I wish he would come back; it might be
embarrassing for both of us.

Not long before his visit I had a call from another imaginative
person, whom I was not able to meet so fully in her views. This was
a middle-aged lady who said she had come on that morning from Boston
to see me. She owned we had never met before, and that she was quite
unknown to me; but apparently she did not think this any bar to her
asking me for two hundred and fifty dollars to aid in the education of
her son. I confess that I was bewildered for a moment. My simple device
of offering half the amount demanded would have been too costly: I
really could not have afforded to give her one hundred and twenty-five
dollars, even if she had been willing to compromise, which I was not
sure of. I am afraid the reader will think I shirked. I said that I had
a great many demands upon me, and I ended by refusing to give anything.
I really do not know how I had the courage; perhaps it was only frenzy.
She insisted, with reasons for my giving which she laid before me; but
either they did not convince me, or I had hardened my heart so well
that they could not prevail with me, and she got up and went away. As
she went out of the room, she looked about its appointments, which I
had not thought very luxurious before, and said that she saw I was
able to _live_ very comfortably, at any rate; and left me to the mute
reproach of my carpets and easy-chairs.

I do not remember whether she alleged any inspiration in coming to see
me for this good object; but a summer or two since a lady came to me,
at my hotel in the mountains, who said that she had been moved to do so
by an impulse which seemed little short of mystical. She said that she
was not ordinarily superstitious, but she had wakened that morning in
Boston with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it seemed so
directly related to what she had in view that she could not resist the
suggestion it conveyed that she should come at once to lay her scheme
before me. She took a good deal of time to do this; and romantic as it
appeared, I felt sure that she was working with real material. It was
of a nature so complex, however, and on a scale so vast, that I should
despair of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will not
attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest; but at the end I was
obliged to say that I thought her mystical impulse was mistaken; I was
sorry it had deceived her; I was quite certain that I had not the means
or the tastes to enter upon the æsthetic enterprise which she proposed.
In return, I suggested a number of millionaires whose notorious
softness of heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the public by
their good deeds, ought to make them more available, and we parted the
best of friends. I am not yet quite able to make up my mind that she
was not the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen world, and
altogether innocent in her appeal to me.


XI.

In fact, I am not able to think very ill even of impostors. It is a
great pity for them, and even a great shame, to go about deceiving
people of means; but I do not believe they are so numerous as people
of means imagine. As a rule, I do not suppose they succeed for long,
and their lives must be full of cares and anxieties, which of course
one must not sympathize with, but which are real enough, nevertheless.
People of means would do well to consider this, and at least not plume
themselves very much upon not being cheated. If they have means, it is
perhaps part of the curse of money, or of that unfriendliness to riches
which our religion is full of, that money should be got from them by
unworthy persons. They have their little romantic superstitions, too.
One of these is the belief that beggars are generally persons who will
not work, and that they are often persons of secret wealth, which
they constantly increase by preying upon the public. I take leave to
doubt this altogether. Beggary appears to me in its conditions almost
harder than any other trade; and from what I have seen of the amount
it earns, the return it makes is smaller than any other. I should not
myself feel safe in refusing anything to a beggar upon the theory of
a fortune sewn into a mattress, to be discovered after the beggar has
died intestate. I know that a great many good people pin their faith to
such mattresses; but I should be greatly surprised if one such could
be discovered in the whole city of New York. On the other hand, I feel
pretty sure that there are hundreds and even thousands of people who
are insufficiently fed and clad in New York; and if here and there one
of these has the courage of his misery, and asks alms, one must not be
too cocksure it is a sin to give to him.

Of course one must not pauperize him: that ought by all means to be
avoided; I am always agreeing to that. But if he is already pauperized;
if we know by statistics and personal knowledge that there are hundreds
and even thousands of people who cannot get work, and that they must
suffer if they do not beg, let us not be too hard upon them. Let us
refuse them kindly, and try not to see them; for if we see their
misery, and do not give, that demoralizes us. Come, I say; have not
we some rights, too? No man strikes another man a blow without
becoming in sort and measure a devil; and to see what looks like want,
and to deny its prayer, has an effect upon the heart which is not
less depraving. Perhaps it would be a fair division of the work if
we let the deserving rich give only to the deserving poor, and kept
the undeserving poor for ourselves, who, if we are not rich, are not
deserving, either.


XII.

I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed to cast slight upon
the organized efforts at relieving want, especially such as unite
inquiry into the facts and the provision of work with the relief of
want. All that I contend for is the right--or call it the privilege--of
giving to him that asketh, even when you do not know that he needs, or
deserves to need. Both here and in Boston I have lent myself--sparingly
and grudgingly, I’ll own--to those organized efforts; and I know how
sincere and generous they are, how effective they often are, how
ineffective. They used to let me go mostly to the Italian folk who
applied for aid in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in
their own language; but once they gave me a Russian to manage--I think
because I was known to have a devotion for Tolstoy and for the other
Russian novelists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but a
washer of bags in a sugar-refinery; and at the time I went to make my
first call upon him he had been “laid off,” as the euphemism is, for
two months; that is, he had been without work, and had been wholly
dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. He had a wife and
a complement of children--I do not know just how many; but they all
seemed to live in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted myself
fully with the case, and went about looking for work in his behalf.
In this, I think, I found my only use: but it was use to me only,
for the people of whom I asked work for him treated me with much the
same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself; and it was well
that I should learn just what the exasperated mind of a fellow-being
is when he is asked for work, and has none to give. He regards the
applicant as an oppressor, or at least an aggressor, and he is eager
to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, even by rudeness. After
the unavailing activity of a week or two, I myself began to resent
the Russian’s desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer
intervals to find whether he had got anything to do; for he was looking
after work, too. At last I let a month go by, and when I came he met
me at the street door--or, say, alley door--of the tenement-house
with a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, but now he
smiled joyously. He had got a job--they always call it a job, and the
Italians pronounce it a _giobbe_. His job was one which testified to
the heterogeneous character of American civilization in even amusing
measure. The Jews had come into a neighboring street so thickly that
they had crowded every one else out; they had bought the Congregational
meeting-house, which they were turning into a synagogue, and they had
given this orthodox Russian the job of knocking the nails out of the
old woodwork. His only complaint was that the Jews would not let him
work on Saturday, and the Christians would not let him work on Sunday,
and so he could earn but five dollars a week. He did not blame me for
my long failure to help him; on the contrary, so far as I could make
out from the limited vocabulary we enjoyed in common, he was grateful.
But I have no doubt he was glad to be rid of me; and Heaven knows how
glad I was to be rid of him.

I do not believe I ever found work for any one, though I tried
diligently and I think not unwisely. Perhaps the best effect from my
efforts was that they inspired the poor creatures to efforts of their
own, which were sometimes successful. I had on my hands and heart for
nearly a whole winter the most meritorious Italian family I ever knew,
without being able to do anything but sympathize and offer secret alms
in little gifts to the children. Once I got one of the boys a place in
a book-store, but the law would not allow him to take it because he was
not past the age of compulsory schooling. The father had a peripatetic
fruit-stand, which he pushed about on a cart; and his great aim was to
get the privilege of stationing himself at one of the railroad depots.
I found that there were stations which were considered particularly
desirable by the fruiterers, and that the chief of these was in front
of the old United States court-house. A fruiterer out of place, whose
family I visited for the charities, tried even to corrupt me, and
promised me that if I would get him this _stendio_ (they Italianize
“stand” to that effect, just as they translate “bar” into _barra_, and
so on) he would give me something outright. “_E poi, ci sarà sempre la
mancia_” (“And then there will always be the drink-money”). I lost an
occasion to lecture him upon the duties of the citizen; but I am not a
ready speaker.

The sole success--but it was very signal--of my winter’s work was
getting a young Italian into the hospital. He had got a rheumatic
trouble of the heart from keeping a _stendio_ in a cellarway, and
when I saw him I thought it would be little use to get him into the
hospital. The young doctor who had charge of him, and whom I looked up,
was of the same mind. But I could not help trying for him; and when the
sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of all) said he
could be received, I made favor for an ambulance to carry him to it. It
was a beautiful white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the
ambulance would call; the sky was blue overhead, the canaries sang in
their cages along the street. I left all this behind when I entered the
dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful _poverty-smell_ struck
the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick
man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this
poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen); but when I passed
into his room, he clutched himself up from the bed, and stretched his
arms toward me with gasps of “_Lo spedale, lo spedale!_” The spring,
the coming glory of this world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital
he wanted; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of our conditions,
the hospital is the best we have to give. To be sure, there is also the
grave.




THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL.


It scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed
away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely
conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel
was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast
caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it
hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man
who has been Banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained
as summerlike as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The
conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was
still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety;
there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city
that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean
smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach;
the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry
and dusty. But a certain fiction of the calendar had reported itself
in the human consciousness; and as men are the prey of superstition
and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single
impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September.


I.

Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to
the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a
veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore
of a continent; and when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda
to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St.
Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length,
but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy
takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In
like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I
am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with
four or five persons.

They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious
that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and
I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected
themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of
rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with
its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black
waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that
impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in
greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was
peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the
tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle
of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling
and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring
in its harness, and hailing Cæsar with the warlike devotion inspired by
a munificent donative.

In the early morning there was a hardly less powerfull impression of
numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of
some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others
parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms, and
mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk-bearing
trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble
clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the
fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued
controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all
these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves
in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing
influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was
nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and
the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred
together.


II.

All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude vanished. All at
once, on the verandas, and in the wide office swept with yet cooler
currents from the sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden
decimation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one night at
about half-past eight the great moony electrics which swung in space
high over the floors of the office, the ball-room, and the dining-room
paled their effectual fires, which they never afterward relumed, and
left us to the batlike waverings of the naphtha gas. I remember the
sinking of the heart with which my senses took cognizance of the fact.
No one spoke, or audibly noted it; the talking groups talked on in
fallen tones; the people who were reading books or papers drew them
a little nearer, or put them a little farther; those who were writing
letters at the long tables in the reading-room silently adjusted their
vision to the obscurity. It was like the effect of some august natural
catastrophe; the general disposition was to ignore the fact, as we
shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that the world has begun to burn
up when it begins to burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in
Hoboken or Long Island City that the department will soon have under
control.

It may have been the morning of that day, or the morning of the next,
but it was at least some neighboring morning, that I sauntered down to
one of the forenoon trains and saw a large detachment of our colored
troops departing. They were very gay, as they nearly always are, poor
fellows; and they were exchanging humorous and derisive adieux with
a detachment of those who were to remain, and who pretended on their
part to mock their departing comrades. These helped them off with their
baggage, wheeling the heavy truck-loads of the trunks which the porters
left to them; and, when all was ready, shaking hands again and again,
and telling them to be good to themselves. At the last moment a very
short, stout, little black man appeared with a truck heaped high with
baggage, and rushed it down the long esplanade to the platform beside
the train, amid the wild cheers and wagers of the going and staying
spectators. He had all the cry till the train actually started, when a
young colored brother burst out of the front door of a car from which
it had detached itself, and began to run it down with a heavy grip-sack
flying wildly about and beating his legs and flanks. He had taken his
place in this car unaware of its fate, and had remained in it, exulting
from the open window in his sole possession; and now the secret of
his proprietorship had been revealed to his dismay. But it was a very
kindly train; when his pursuit became known, the locomotive obligingly
slowed to a stand, and he was pulled aboard the rear platform amidst a
jubilation which few real advantages inspire in this world.


III.

An indefinable gloom settled upon me as the train curved out into the
marsh, and the laughing, chattering, cheering, hat-waving remnant came
back to the hotel and dispersed about their work. There were still a
great many of them, and there were still a great many of us, but I felt
that the end had begun. I do not know whether I felt this fact more
keenly or not when the dentist, whose presence I had been tacitly
proud of all through August, abandoned the house which he had helped
to render metropolitan. But I am sure that it was a definite shock to
lose him; and that the tooth which his presence had held in abeyance
asserted itself in a wild throe at his going. Once as I passed the door
of his office his name was on it and his hours; when I returned fifteen
minutes later to ask an appointment with him his name was gone, and
the useless hours alone remained. On his way to take passage in his
cat-boat for the farthermost parts of the Great South Bay, he kindly
stopped and advised about the grumbling tooth. Then he passed out of
the hotel, and left it to ache if it must, with an unrequited longing
for the filling fatally delayed.

The doctor went a week later, but before this other changes had taken
place, among which the most cataclysmal was the passing of the band,
which vanished as it were in a sudden crash of silence. The whole
month long I had heard it playing in the afternoon midway of the long
veranda, and in the evening on its platform in the ballroom, and with
my imperfect knowledge of music had waited each day and night till
it came to that dissolute, melancholy melody to which the Eastern
girls danced their wicked dance at the World’s Fair; not because I
like dissolute and melancholy things, but because I was then able to
make sure what tune the band was playing. I had in this way become
used to the band, and I missed it poignantly, if one can miss a thing
poignantly; which I doubt. Other people seemed to enjoy it, and I like
to see people enjoying themselves. Besides, its going brought the
dancing to a close, which I enjoyed myself.

I mean that I enjoyed looking at the dancing. This was for the most
part, even at the height of our gayety, performed by boys and girls,
and very young children, whom I saw led away to bed heart-broken at
nine o’clock. One small couple of these I loved very much. I fancied
them a little brother and sister, and I delighted in their courage
and perseverance in taking the floor for every dance, and through all
changes of tune and figure turning solemnly round and round with their
arms about each other’s waists. One night there came a bad, bad boy,
who posted himself in front of them, and plagued them, jumping up and
down before them and hindering their serious gyration. Another evening
the little brother was cross and would not dance, and the little sister
had to pull him out on the floor and make him.

Sometimes, however, there were even grown people on the floor. Then
I chose a very pretty young couple, whom I called my couple, and
shared their joy in the waltz without their knowing it. We were by all
odds the best dancers and the best looking. We stayed long enough to
poison the others with jealousy, but we always went away rather early.
When the band left, all this innocent pleasure ended. There was one
delirious evening, indeed, when the floor-manager, in default of other
music, whistled a waltz, and the young ladies, in default of young men,
trod a mad measure with each other to his sibilation. But this was a
dying burst of gayety: it did not and could not happen again.


IV.

I have to accuse myself of giving no just idea of the constant flowing
and dribbling away of the guests, who never ceased departing. The
trains that bore them and their baggage brought no others to replace
them, and the house gradually emptied itself until not more than a poor
three hundred remained. With each defection of a considerable number
of guests there followed a reduction of the helping force, who now no
longer departed laughing, but with a touch of that loneliness falling
upon us all. It must be understood that we were all staying on in our
closing hotel by sufferance. It closed officially on the 10th, but the
landlord was to remain, and such guests as wished might remain too.
This made us eager to linger till the very last moment we were allowed.

Ever since the elevator had ceased to run, there had been a sense of
doom in the air. One day we noted a fine reluctance in the elevator;
when people crowded it full, it would not go up. Then it began to
waver under a few; it made false starts and stops. A placard presently
said, “Elevator not running.” Then this was removed, and the elevator
ran again for a day or two. At last it ceased to run so finally that
no placard was needed. The elevator boys went away; it was as if the
elevator were extinct.

I think it was on the same day that the hall clock stopped. The clock
was started again by the head porter, but after that the hotel ran on
borrowed time. Once it borrowed the time of me, whose watch has not
once been right in thirty-three years, a whole generation!

The temperature of the water ceased to be reported even before the end
of August; the hours of high and low tide were no longer given. Twice
when the reporters came down to see the yacht-race off our beach the
bulletin-board was covered with yellow telegrams from the coast where
it was really seen, boasting the victory and triumphant defeat of the
_Defender_. This quickened our pulses for the moment; and one night the
ladies all put on their best dresses, and assembled for a progressive
euchre party in the vast acreage of the parlor. It was a heroic but
perhaps desperate act of gayety.


V.

One of the most striking natural phenomena of the hotel closing was the
arrival of the gulls on our beach, or rather on the waters beyond the
beach. I had wondered at their absence all August long, but punctually
on the first day of September they came. The weather had not changed
for them any more than it had for the guests who fled the place at the
same date, but perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a
prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with prophetic welcome in
their wings.

Otherwise the premonitions of change were within the hotel itself, and
they were more impressive whenever they assumed an official character.
It was with a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks out
of the number within the office. He was there, and then he was not
there; it was as if he had been lost overboard during his watch. I
had scarcely recovered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose
distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient for the equal
disappointment of letters or no letters, ceased from his ministrations
as if he had all along been a wraith of mist, and had simply melted
away. The room clerk, who was a more definite personality to us, went
next, with a less supernatural effect; he even said he might come back,
but he did not come back, and the office force was reduced to the
cashier and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season.

At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote and problematical
personage, and so it was with ours until the office force began to
thin away around him. Then he became more and more visible, tangible,
conversable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to our circle,
in which the note of an increasing domesticity was struck. I do not
know of anything that gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a
single family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by the need
of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as the invasion of the hotel
by a multitude of crickets. Whether it was the departure of the human
host which tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some such
instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they were all at once
all over the place, piercing its deepening silence with their harsh
stridulation. In the chambers they carked so loud and clear that one
could hardly sleep for them, and in the glooming reaches and expanses
of the corridors, parlors, halls, and dining-room they shrilled in
incessant chorus.


VI.

After the first moment, when the association with the home hearth
and the simple fireside evenings of other days had spent itself, the
crickets were rather awful, and personally I would rather have had the
band back. But their weird music prompted a closer union of the guests,
and our chairs were closer together on the veranda and in the office.
We found that we were very charming and interesting people, and I began
to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever make good by not
seeking the acquaintance of the seven hundred others who were gone.
From day to day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, but
we never spoke of the departures; we instinctively recognized that it
would have been bad form; we were like the garrison of a beleaguered
city, that lost a few men by famine or foray from time to time, but
kept up a heroic pretense that they were as many as ever. Or, we were
like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a water-logged vessel, and caught
from it now and then by a hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping
away into the gulf from mere exhaustion.

These figures are rather violent, and present only a subjective effect
in the more sensitive spirits. As a matter of fact we lived luxuriously
all the time. The time came when we heard that on a certain day the
_chef_ was going, but we should not have known he was gone by any
difference in the table. It grew rather more attractive; if there were
fewer dishes, they were better cooked; one could fancy a touch of
personal attention in them, which one could not have fancied when we
were seven hundred and fifty at table, and the help who served us were
three hundred and fifty.


VII.

The help had gradually dwindled away till there were not more than
fifty. I had kept my waiter through all; he was a quiet elderly man of
formed habits, whom I associated with the idea of permanency in every
way, so that I could scarcely believe that we were to be parted. But
one morning he was seized by the curious foreboding of departure which
seemed really one of its symptoms among his tribe, and he said he did
not know but he should be going soon. I said, Oh, I hoped not; and he
answered bravely that he hoped not too, but he shook his head, and we
both felt that it was best to let a final half-dollar pass between us
in expression of a provisional farewell.

That was indeed the last of him, and that day when I came in to lunch
I found that I was appointed another table, in another place, with
another waiter to take my order. It was a little shock, but I was not
unprepared. I had noted the gradual dismantling of the tables until now
they stretched long rows of barren surfaces down the tenth of a mile
which the dining-room covered, and showed their reverberated labyrinth
in the mirrors of the vast sideboards at either end of the hall. The
remaining guests were snugly grouped on the seaward side of the room,
where our tables commanded the marine views that I had long vainly
envied others.

But after the first transition I was changed to another table with
another waiter, a tall student from Yale, who joined to a scholarly
absence of mind concerning my wants an appreciation of my style of
jokes that went far to console me, though I was not sure that it was
quite decorous for him to laugh at them when they were addressed
to others. I tried to grapple him to me with early and frequent
donatives, and he would have been willing enough to stay; but the
guests kept going and the helpers were cut off, one by one, till the
hour came when we both felt--


     “The first slight swerving of the heart
       That words are powerless to express,
     And leave it still unsaid in part,
       Or say it in too great excess.”


The next morning he told me he was going; and as I sauntered down
to take the train for a brief flight to New York, I saw him on the
platform in citizen’s dress and smoking a cigarette. He was laughing
and joking with some of the waiters who still lingered, and bidding
them take care of themselves, and promising a like vigilance of his own
welfare.

After that there was the short interval of a single meal when I was
served by a detached waiter, before I was handed over to the kindly
helper who next had charge of me. I clung to him anxiously, for I did
not know what day or hour I should lose him; I did not know how soon he
might lose me!

In the passing of the head porter there was something deeply dramatic,
almost tragic for me. We had become acquaintances, friends, even, I
hope, and I had become sensible of the gradual disappearance of his
subordinates until they were reduced to what I may call the tail
porter in contradistinction to the head porter. Then the head porter
said that he had a great mind to be going himself; but when I asked
him why, he could not well say, and he agreed with me that it might be
better for him to stay. We counted up the remaining families together,
and found them twenty, and I convinced him that by the most modest
computation here were twenty dollars in fees before him. I thought
that I had secured his allegiance to the end, but the very morning
before the pensive record of these events I went to look for him in his
accustomed place to get my shoes “shined,” and he was not there. The
barber was there, looking in a vague disoccupation across the marshes
to the northward of the hotel, and I asked him where the porter was.
He closed his eyes that he might open his lips more impressively, and
breathed the word, “Andato.”

“Gone?” I echoed.

The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly languaged Sicilian, and
he responded in an elegant sympathy with my dismay: “Sì; andato. Me ne
vado anch’io, fra pochi giorni. M’impazzo quì. Guardi!” (Yes; gone. I
am going, I myself, in a few days. I madden here. Look!) With the last
word he touched my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the
long plank footway, stilted upon the marshes from one to the other side
of the railroad curve, and leading to the boat-house on the bay beyond
their wide levels. Midway of this I saw a solitary figure, whose lank
length and forward droop I could not mistake. The departing porter
looked like the last citizen abandoning the ruins of Persepolis, and
I--I felt like Persepolis!


VIII.

I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the slowly creeping
desolation, the gradual paresis, that was seizing upon the late full
and happy life of our hotel; and I have not strictly observed the order
of the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift evanescence
of the bell-boys, the first of whom began so jubilantly with me when I
came, covenanting to deliver a pitcher of ice-water at my door every
morning at ten, and every evening at eight. He was faithful to his
trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity of ice-water, which ten
men could hardly have drunk, and lived; but when the economic frame
of our hotel began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that he
might go at any moment. He was No. 18, but he promised me that No. 10
would see that I was daily and nightly deluged with ice-water, and
No. 10 was exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished too,
with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in bestowing a preliminary
half-dollar upon him. But he had made interest for me, I found, with
No. 4, and No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a week. One
morning he told me he was going, and he took a last half-dollar from me
with a true compassion for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last
of the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower number. For one
night the head porter brought my ice-water. Now the night porter brings
it, and if he should leave before I do-- But I will not anticipate,
as the older romancers used to say. I will not look forward, even in
the case of the chambermaids, of whom there have been already three
changes, with the prospect next week of having in some of the laundry
girls to do up the work.


IX.

The laundry itself was attacked ten days ago by the general paralysis
of the hotel’s functions, so far as the guests’ linen was concerned,
which has since had to be sent far inland by the enterprise of one
of the bathing-pavilion men, and precariously returned on a variable
date. I forget whether the laundry succumbed before or after the
closing of the refreshment-room. The hotel sold no strong drinks,
and the magnificent facilities of the bar were inadequately employed
by a soda fountain, a variety of mineral waters in bottles, a supply
of ginger ale, and lemons for lemonade. On an opposite counter were
Huyler’s candies, and a choice of chewing-gum; the salubrious pepsin,
or the merely innocent peppermint. When the moment for dismantling this
festive place arrived, with the unexpectedness of all the other moments
of our slow dehabilitation, I was present, and saw the presiding genius
packing up his stock of lemons. It gave me a peculiar pang. I had never
bought any of them, or wanted any, but I had personally acquainted
myself with almost every example of the fruit; I knew those lemons
apart, and from often study of them on their shelf, as I stood hardily
sipping my ginger ale before the counter, I was almost as intimate with
them as with the stock of the news-dealer.

I must say that as to the books his stock was terribly dull. He owned
himself that it was dull, and when I asked him where in the world he
got together such a lot of stupid books, he could only say that they
were such as were appointed to be sold in summer hotels by the news
company. The newspapers were rather better: if they were not livelier,
they were lighter, or at least more ephemeral. I bought freely of
them; the dailies in the mornings, and the weeklies in the afternoons,
with their longer leisure. I bought the magazines, which are now often
as cheap as the papers, and, unlike the books, are seldom dull all
through. Then I formed the intimacy of many illustrated papers which I
did not buy, but studied on the strings where they hung stretched high
over the counter. In one was the picture of a young lady habited in the
mingled colors of Yale and Princeton, with a Cupid throwing a football
at her heart. She was a great resource, and could not be stared out of
countenance.

Besides, there was on a wire frame over the showcase a platter, of
native decoration, representing the whole of Long Island in a railroad
map. It was a strangely ugly object, like some sort of sad, dissected
fish, but fascinating. The news-dealer and I had often discussed
its price, and I had invariably refused it at $1.25, though it was
originally put upon the market at $2.50.

After he had packed up his stock, I could hold out no longer. I looked
about for him, and found him playing checkers with the ex-keeper of
the refreshment-room. I asked him if that hideous platter had now
got down to a dollar, and he went and hunted it out of his stock.
Upon inspection he seemed to discover that it was still $1.25. In
a desperation I paid the money; and almost at the same moment the
news-dealer’s place knew him no more, and I remained with my platter
for a memorial of one of the weirdest experiences of a life which has
not been barren of weirdness.


X.

“You ought to have seen an old-time closing of this hotel,” said the
clerk one evening toward the last. He had by this time resumed in his
own person almost as many functions as the ancient mariner of the
Bab Ballad who had eaten the former survivors of the _Nancy_ brig,
and claimed to represent them all by virtue of his superior appetite
and digestion. Our clerk was now cashier, postmaster, room-clerk,
night-clerk, and day-clerk, with moments of bell-boy; he spoke with
authority, and we listened with the respect due to his manifold quality.

“The guests,” he continued, “would run down toward the end of August
to about two hundred. Then notice would be put up in the office, ‘The
hotel will close to-morrow after breakfast.’ The band would be still
here, and the bell-boys all on duty; and the night before, all the
guests would gather in the office. The band would play, and the talking
and laughing would go on all through the evening, like the height of
the season, and perhaps there would be a little dancing. Everybody
would say good-night, the same as ever, and as soon as breakfast was
over in the morning you would see them streaming away to the train,
till there wasn’t a soul left in the house but clerks and the help.
Then this stair carpet would come down with a run.” He pointed to the
wide stairway. “The rugs would come up all through the halls; the
dining-room would be cleared before you could look, and all the chairs
would be on the tables with their legs in the air. The help would come
to the desk in a steady file, and get their money and go. Before noon
the cleaners would have the whole house to themselves.”

We owned that it must have been fine, that it was spectacular and
impressive, even dramatic, but in our hearts we felt that there was a
finer poetic quality in our closing, which was like one of the slow
processes of nature, and emulated the pensive close of summer, when the
leaves do not all fall in a night, or the flowers wither or the grass
droop in a single day, but the trees slowly drop their crowns through
many weeks, and the successive frosts lay a chill touch on a blossom
here, and a petal there, and the summer passes in a euthanasy which
suffers you to say at no given moment, “The summer is dead,” till it
has long been dead.

Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape about us seemed
peculiarly to sympathize with the quiet passing of the life of the
great hotel. There could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand
dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish masses, like the
stretched and twisted shape of some vast bisected serpent. The stiff
grasses and arid weeds that clothed them thinly, like a growth of
dreadful green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a sort
of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imperishable lifelessness;
but over them fluttered a multitude of butterflies, thick as the leaves
of autumn, and of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already
released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a gay white and
yellow, like the innocent souls of little ones, haunted the leaf-plant
beds before the hotel, or tried to make friends with the harsh little
evergreens surviving the plantations of a more courageous period of the
enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at the borders of the plank
walks. To the landward the mighty marshes stretched their innumerable
acres to the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one wash
of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began to be splashed as
with flame or blood by the reddening of that certain small weed which
loves the salt of tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhocklike bells of the
marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer flowers, like ox-eye
daisies of taller stem, came to replace them; and still, with the
rising tide, the larger and the lesser craft that plied upon the many
channels of the meadows blew softly back and forth, and seemed to sail
upon their undulant grasses.

In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay,
seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution,
to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness
till the last light should be quenched, of all those that had made it
flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from
veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office
and dining-room.


XI.

There came, indeed, about the middle of September, a sudden rude shock
of cold, which seemed to express an impatience with the dying hotel,
hitherto unknown to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew
for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted and flaccid
frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, as it were; but even then
the sea did not share the harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It
lay smiling as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and
schooners that began to flock before our beach about the end of August
rocked and tilted, like things in a dream, as they had for the last
fortnight. It was said that one of them dragged her anchor and came
ashore in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we knew of it
only by hearsay, after she had got off and sailed away. A day later
they were all there again, and some flew in close to the beach, and
skimmed back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as the
fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above them.

The water remained as warm as ever; warmer, they said, who tried it
in a bath. I did not. The next to the last time I bathed I had for
sole companion a literary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the
beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth Crusade, which the
Venetians so cannily turned aside from the conquest of the Holy Land
to the conquest of Constantinople. The New York Dump was unpleasantly
evident in the sea that day; and the last time the Dump had the sea
all to itself. It is not agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles,
decayed fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and the other
refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out almost before the life-guard
could get ready to throw me a life-preserver.

He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed between the life-lines
at the height of the bathing-season, when twoscore spectators on the
benches provided for them watched a half-dozen men and women weltering
in the surf, or popping up and down after the manner of ladies taking
a sea-bath. But I dare say he was quite as efficient, and as I had the
good fortune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I specially
liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion before he went on duty
with me, in his bare legs and feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights
a cut-away coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial costume.

He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of
bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon
the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in
the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers
of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black
jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast,
where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a
far fitter figure. But for the real bathers, I think the guard in
the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he
was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me
whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never
seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is
sober, serious, sloppy.


XII.

At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one
of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it
was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were
a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were
going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to
time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled;
face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do
not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken
off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till
the last train was taken off, and we could not get away! What should
we do then?

We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we
talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s
conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of
discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the
point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why
should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach
the kitchen fires; and then?

Last night, our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the
newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers
with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests,
he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a
railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he
has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regards us as so many
simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men.

The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the
halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk.

Shall I be able to stay till Friday? We shall see.


XIII.

A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has
blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe
swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the
reaches of space.

The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it,
and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at
it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when
he called it


     “The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”


All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European
steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each
blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon.
To-day there are none: only a few far-off full-sailed ships, and nearer
shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying,
and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the
men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy
sea.

There are twenty-three guests in the house now--the house that holds
a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night, and
re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great
midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies
stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks
freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if
we were normally conditioned?

We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is
Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from
the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing,
and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him.
We wait to see it reach him again, and draw him back, but it does not.
It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and
tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that either; but
he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.


XIV.

It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds,
which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing craft, for
they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little
and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises
steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of
the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted
for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line
of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit
and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against
the tall backs of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if
the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them, and still inaudibly
babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another,
the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies
all winter?

I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor,
three uptown blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing
herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.

The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a gale. The sea
froths and roars and tumbles on the beach, and far out the serried
breakers toss their white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks
abandoning the hotel kitchen.

About three o’clock, the life-guard of the bathing-beach, having cast
his derby and cut-away, appears with three other men in tights, and
pulls in the life-lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the ocean
for its own.

A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the northward came ashore
in the gale last night from some of the fishermen. It is in good
condition, and if the trains should stop running before noon to-morrow
we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our number went away this
morning; and there are now but four of us left. We could easily get
away in that boat.


XV.

The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion broke in tears.
A tempestuous night threatened; but the weather changed its mind as
swiftly as a woman, and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this
morning as a day of young June. The sea is again a shining level,
veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the fishing sail come stealing
silently one after another till again a fleet of them is tilting and
swaying in front of the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained
throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the picture of the
goblin in the Bab Ballad which tries to frighten the image before the
tobacconist’s shop.

The gang of Italians who have toiled for three months to hide the
infamies of the Dump, burying them in the sand as fast as the sea cast
them ashore, are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. The
season is over. The barrel, which formed the outermost buoy, swings
monumentally (if monuments can swing) at anchor among the breakers.

At the station the railroad people have become unnaturally amiable.
They call me by name; they take a personal interest in getting off my
telegrams and express packages. In one of my visits to them, I meet the
life-guard in full citizen’s dress, with even shoes on. He salutes me,
but I have to look twice before I know him.


XVI.

A generous contention has arisen between ourselves and the other
remaining family as to which shall be last to leave the hotel. They go
on the 10.25, and we have outstayed them! We are the last guests in the
house. The landlord’s Italian greyhound seems instinctively to feel our
pathetic distinction. He rushes upon me from far down the veranda, and
fawns upon me.

The cook and a last helper of some unknown function carry our trunks
to the station. But it has now suddenly become a question whether we
shall go on the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally upon our
getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the bathing-beach. We ask,
limiting our demands to a clam chowder. We are answered that there
are still clams, but the man who knows how to make chowder is gone.
The restaurant family are going to lunch upon a ham bone, which is now
being scraped for them. We refuse to share it with many thanks, and
decide to go on the 12.20.

I have paid my last bill.

On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials met me as I alighted
from the train, and contended for the honor and profit of carrying my
umbrella into the hotel.

On the 17th of September I myself carry a heavy satchel in each hand
out through the echoing corridors down the wide veranda stairs to the
train, unattended by a single fee-taker.

The hotel is closed.




GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK.


This morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the most frequented walks
of Central Park, I could almost have touched the sparrows on the sprays
about me; a squirrel, foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees, as if
to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a policeman at every turn
to see that no wrong is done these pretty creatures, and that no sort
of trespass is committed by any in the domain of all; but I like to
think that the security and immunity of the Park is proof of something
besides the vigilance of its guardians; that it is a hint of a growing
sense in Americans that what is common is the personal charge of every
one in the community.

As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see the domes and
spires of its foliage beginning to feel the autumn and taking on the
wonderful sunset tints of the year in its decline; when I stray through
its pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October air;
but, better than these sensuous delights, in everything of it and in
it, I imagine a prophecy of the truer state which I believe America
is destined yet to see established. It cannot be that the countless
thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty,
can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there some
one must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should
not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not
have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his
ownership excludes the ownership of no other. Some workman out of work,
as he trudges aimlessly through its paths must wonder why the city
cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof
from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can
give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it
give him a shop where he can go in extremity, to earn his bread?


I.

I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all.
The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they
suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing
different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not
alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long
out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet
now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of
the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot
anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the
rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that
they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of
poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the
rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as
Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are
“but as pictures” to one another, without vital reality.

Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why
I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets
of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are
glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or
two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been
treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression
in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally
understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if
the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given
the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however,
it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at
Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in
New York. Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture
is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a
mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted,
and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place,
but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the
landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is
in no wise taken away from nature, but is rendered back to her, when
all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into
meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking
among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy
levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart
of the city, a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the
city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the
free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept
drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure.
They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here
and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I
like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon
a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian
garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except
near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare
of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct,
with its sweeping stairways, and carven freestone massiveness; but it
is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of
lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze
angel atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking
her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is,
in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which
I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the
landscape gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the
Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men
came.


II.

This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come
upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s
prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to
the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses.
The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship
which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the
stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and
lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much
for the wallowing hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and
the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as
for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the
American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing
upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open
at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and
unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions
of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western
plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty
left; for of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are
conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned
American mechanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his
citizenship.

In some other enclosures are pairs of beautiful deer, which I wish
might be enlarged to the whole extent of the Park. But I can only
imagine them on the great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs
and prairies, though there is a very satisfactory flock of sheep which
nibbles the herbage there, when these spaces are not thrown open to the
ball-players who are allowed on certain days of the week. I like to
watch them, and so do great numbers of other frequenters of the Park,
apparently; and when I have walked far up beyond the reservoirs of
city-water, which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the landscape,
I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of the woods where the
tennis-players have stretched their nets over a score of courts, and
the art students have set up their easels on the edges of the lawns,
for what effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or the skill
to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and in keeping with the
purpose of the Park, and its frank and simple treatment throughout.


III.

I think this treatment is best for the greatest number of those who
visit the place, and for whom the aspect of simple nature is the
thing to be desired. Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are
concerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I stroll
along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder people take in this
domain of theirs, as they sit on the benches in the woodland ways,
or under the arching trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of
some of the worst of all the bad statues in the world. They are mostly
foreigners, I believe, but I find every now and then an American among
them, who has released himself, or has been forced by want of work,
to share their leisure for the time; I fancy he has always a bad
conscience, if he is taking the time off, from the continual pressure
of our duty to add dollar to dollar, and provide for the future as
well as the present need. The foreigner, who has been bred up without
the American’s hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, and is a
happier man, so far as that goes; but the Park imparts something of its
peace to every one, even to some of the people who drive, and form a
spectacle for those who walk.

For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never cease to marvel at,
with a perpetual hunger of conjecture as to what they really think of
one another. Apparently, they are all, whether they walk or whether
they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to go on forever
in the economy which perpetuates their inequality, and makes a mock of
the polity which assures them their liberty. The difference which money
creates among men is always preposterous, and whenever I take my eyes
from it the thing ceases to be credible; yet this difference is what
the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right
and justice. If I were to go and sit beside some poor man in the Park,
and ask him why a man no better than he was driving before him in a
luxurious carriage, he would say that the other man had the money to
do it; and he would really think he had given me a reason; the man in
the carriage himself could not regard the answer as more full and final
than the man on the bench. They have both been reared in the belief
that it is a sufficient answer, and they would both regard me with the
same misgiving if I ventured to say that it was not a reason; for if
their positions were to be at once reversed, they would both acquiesce
in the moral outlawry of their inequality. The man on foot would think
it had simply come his turn to drive in a carriage, and the man whom
he ousted would think it was rather hard luck, but he would realize
that it was what, at the bottom of his heart, he had always expected.

Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation
from a standpoint outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man
whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant
arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She
had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some
working-woman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which such
people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were
stiffened and hardened with work, but they were clean, except for
the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments
beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and
she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her
concerning the conditions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the
poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the
process of the years and ages, and then sinks again into silence. He
showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because
she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things
as we have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be
thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed
the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom made the friendless woman
happier, but I could not have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if
he had asked, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and
I never saw him again. He was threadbare, but he too was cleanly and
decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom
we have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if merely for the
childish pleasure of reviling it.


IV.

The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me; and yet we must not
romance the poor, or imagine that they are morally better than the
rich; we must not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a poor
man, would be kinder for having been poor. He would perhaps oftener,
and certainly more logically, be unkinder, for there would be mixed
with his vanity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehension
of loss, which the man who had always been rich would not feel. The
self-made man when he has made himself of money, seems to have been
deformed by his original destitution, and I think that if I were in
need I would rather take my chance of pity from the man who had never
been poor. Of course, this is generalization, and there are instances
to the contrary, which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely true
is that our prosperity, the selfish joy of having, at the necessary
cost of those who cannot have, is blighted by the feeling of insecurity
which every man has in his secret soul, and which the man who has known
want must have in greater measure than the man who has never known want.

There is, indeed, no security for wealth, which we think the chief
good of life, in the system that warrants it. When a man has gathered
his millions, he cannot be reduced to want, probably; but while he is
amassing them, while he is in the midst of the fight, or the game, as
most men are, there are ninety-five chances out of a hundred that he
will be beaten. Perhaps it is best so, and I should be glad it was
so if I could be sure that the common danger bred a common kindness
between the rich and the poor, but it seems not to do so. As far as I
can see, the rule of chance, which they all live under, does nothing
more than reduce them to a community of anxieties.

To the eye of the observer they have the monotony of the sea, where
some tenth wave runs a little higher than the rest, but sinks at last,
or breaks upon the rocks or sands, as inevitably as the other nine.
Our inequality is without picturesqueness and without distinction.
The people in the carriages are better dressed than those on foot,
especially the women; but otherwise they do not greatly differ from the
most of these. The spectacle of the driving in the Park has none of
that dignity which characterizes such spectacles in European capitals.
This may be because many people of the finest social quality are
seldom seen there, or it may be because the differences growing out of
money can never have the effect of those growing out of birth; that
a plutocracy can never have the last wicked grace of an aristocracy.
It would be impossible for instance, to weave any romance about the
figures you see in our carriages; they do not even suggest the poetry
of ages of prescriptive wrong; they are of to-day, and there is no
guessing whether they will be of to-morrow or not.

In Europe, this sort of tragi-comedy is at least well played; but in
America, you always have the feeling that the performance is that of
second-rate amateurs, who, if they would really live out the life
implied by America, would be the superiors of the whole world. I
am moved to laughter by some of the things I see among them, when
perhaps I ought to be awed, as, for instance, by the sight of a little,
lavishly dressed lady, lolling in the corner of a ponderous landau,
with the effect of holding fast lest she should be shaken out of it,
while two powerful horses, in jingling, silver-plated harness, with
due equipment of coachman and footman, seated on their bright-buttoned
overcoats on the box together, get her majestically over the ground at
a slow trot. This is what I sometimes see, with not so much reverence
as I feel for the simple mother pushing her baby-carriage on the
asphalt beside me and doubtless envying the wonderful creature in the
landau. Sometimes it is a fat old man in the landau; or a husband and
wife, not speaking; or a pair of grim old ladies, who look as if they
had lived so long aloof from their unluckier sisters that they could
not be too severe with the mere sight of them. Generally speaking, the
people in the carriages do not seem any happier for being there, though
I have sometimes seen a jolly party of strangers in a public carriage,
drawn by those broken-kneed horses which seem peculiarly devoted to
this service.

The best place to see the driving is at a point where the different
driveways converge, not far from the Egyptian obelisk which the
Khedive gave us some years ago, and which we have set up here in one
of the finest eminences of the Park. He had of course no moral right
to rob his miserable land of any one of its characteristic monuments,
but I do not know that it is not as well in New York as in Alexandria.
If its heart of aged stone could feel the continuity of conditions, it
must be aware of the essential unity of the civilizations beside the
Nile and beside the Hudson; and if Cleopatra’s needle had really an eye
to see, it must perceive that there is nothing truly civic in either.
As the tide of dissatisfied and weary wealth rolls by its base here, in
the fantastic variety of its equipages, does the needle discern so much
difference between their occupants and the occupants of the chariots
that swept beneath it in the capital of the Ptolemies two thousand
years ago? I can imagine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in
derision the gilded cap with which the New-Yorkers have lately crowned
it. They pass it in all kinds of vehicles, and there are all kinds of
people in them, though there are sometimes no people at all, as when
the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, for nobody’s
good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that atrocious waste which
runs through our whole life. I have now and then seen a gentleman
driving a four-in-hand, with everything to minister to his vanity in
the exact imitation of a nobleman driving a four-in-hand over English
roads, and with no one to be drawn by his crop-tailed bays or blacks
except himself and the solemn groom on his perch; I have wondered how
much more nearly equal they were in their aspirations and instincts
than either of them imagined. A gentleman driving a pair, abreast or
tandem, with a groom on the rumble, for no purpose except to express
his quality, is a common sight enough; and sometimes you see a lady
illustrating her consequence in like manner. A lady driving, while a
gentleman occupies the seat behind her, is a sight which always affects
me like the sight of a man taking a woman’s arm, in walking, as the man
of an underbred sort is apt to do.

Horsey-looking women, who are, to ladies at least, what horsey-looking
men are to gentlemen, drive together; often they are really ladies,
and sometimes they are nice young girls, out for an innocent dash and
chat. They are all very much and very unimpressively dressed, whether
they sit in state behind the regulation coachman and footman, or
handle the reins themselves. Now and then you see a lady with a dog
on the seat beside her, for an airing, but not often a child; once
or twice I have seen one with a large spaniel seated comfortably in
front of her, and I have asked myself what would happen if, instead
of the dog, she had taken into her carriage some pale woman or weary
old man, such as I sometimes see gazing patiently after her. But the
thing would be altogether impossible. I should be the first to feel
the want of keeping in it; for, however recent wealth may be here, it
has equipped itself with all the apparatus of long-inherited riches,
which it is as strongly bound to maintain intact as if it were really
old and hereditary--perhaps more strongly. I must say that, mostly,
its owners look very tired of it, or of something, in public, and
that our American plutocrats, if they have not the distinction of an
aristocracy, have at least the ennui.


V.

But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the spectacle in the
Park driveways, though they form, perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers
weave their dangerous and devious way everywhere through the roads,
and seem to be forbidden the bridle-paths, where from point to point
you catch a glimpse of the riders. There are boys and girls in
village carts, the happiest of all the people you see; and there are
cheap-looking buggies, like those you meet in the country, with each
a young man and young girl in them, as if they had come in from some
remote suburb; turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about
with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. There are family
carryalls, with friendly-looking families, old and young, getting the
good of the Park together in a long, leisurely jog; and open buggies
with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind their widespread
trotters; or with some sharp-faced young fellow getting all the speed
out of a lively span that the mounted policemen, stationed at intervals
along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles are of all types,
patterned like everything else that is fine in America, upon something
fine in Europe; but just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to
be most in favor; and in fact I get a great deal of pleasure out of
these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly up in them. They make me
think somehow of those eighteenth-century English novels, of the times
when young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons, and were the
passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir Clement Willoughbys.

How far do the New Yorkers publicly carry their travesty of the
European aristocratic life? I should say, from what I have seen of
the driving in the Park, it does not err on the side of excess. The
equipages, when they are fine, are rather simple; and the liveries
are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat-buttons, silver or
gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of the cloth the servants wear;
they are often in brown or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly
cased legs and top-boots and cockaded hat of a groom, but this is
oftenest on a four-in-hand coach, or the rumble of a tandem cart; the
soul of the free-born republican is rarely bowed before it on the box
of a family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt at family
colors in the trappings of the coachman and horses.

I should say that the imitation was quite within the bounds of good
taste. The bad taste is in the wish to imitate Europe at all; but with
the abundance of money, the imitation is simply inevitable. There
is no American life for wealth; there is no native formula for the
expression of social superiority; because America means equality if it
means anything, in the last analysis. But in all this show on the Park
driveways, you get no effect so vivid as the effect of sterility in
that liberty without equality which seems to satisfy us Americans. A
man may come into the Park with any sort of vehicle, so that it is not
for the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil what might
be a fine effect with the intrusion of whatever squalor of turnout
he will. He has as much right there as any one, but the right to be
shabby in the presence of people who are fine is not one that I should
envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable in it, for the
superiority around him puts him to shame, as it puts the poor man to
shame at every turn in life, though some people, with an impudence
that is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him to shame;
that he feels himself as good as any one. We are always talking about
human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but we try in our
blind worship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest knowledge
of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of our own
hearts, as we try even to refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature,
and attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have
ourselves created.

To me the lesson of Central Park is that where it is used in the spirit
of fraternity and equality, the pleasure in it is pure and fine, and
that its frequenters have for the moment a hint of the beauty which
might be perpetually in their lives; but where it is invaded by the
motives of the strife that raves all round it in the city outside, its
joys are fouled with contempt and envy, the worst passions that tear
the human heart. Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never
seen a man in livery; they have never dreamed of such a display as
this in the Park. Yet with our conditions, I fear that at sight of it
ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred would lust for their turn
of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a
place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty, and abash
humility with their pride.




NEW YORK STREETS.


If the reader will look at a plan of New York, he will see that Central
Park is really in the centre of the place, if a thing which has length
only, or is so nearly without breadth or thickness, can be said to
have a centre. South of the Park, the whole island is dense with life
and business; it is pretty solidly built up on either side; but to the
northward the blocks of houses are no longer of a compact succession;
they struggle up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink
again, on the streets pushed beyond them into the simple country, where
even a suburban character is lost. It can only be a few years, at
most, before all the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such
as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since the colonial
period, will have anchored itself fast in the rock that underlies the
larger half of it, and imparted its peculiar effect to every street--an
effect of arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, of
immediate neglect and overuse.


I.

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which
penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the
superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these
avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find
nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward
from the Park, and still farther uptown. These are really very clean;
but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in
fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are
often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with
the river-sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the
decentest cross-streets.

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted,
and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear
so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes
everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part
of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs
and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on
the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw,
fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, littered all the
thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended;
but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.

When I leave Central Park, where I like best to walk, I usually take
one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on
one of the cross-streets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity,
and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues are fifteen
or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others,
up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where
its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted
by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that
intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of
the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets,
they are numbered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or
from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations
that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number, or from
a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must
rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell
you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and
Fifty-seventh street. Toward the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and
shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general
statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth
Avenue; and Second Avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third
Avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East
River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it,
very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as
cleanliness is understood in New York.

But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the
middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and
comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets
that intersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suffered less
from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth
Avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon
the whole its finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York street
fine; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the cross-streets in its better
part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brownstone, which
give something of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at
least not so chaotic as they might be; though they always suggest money
more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an
evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty. There
are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from
the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon
or a provision-store or an apothecary’s shop at the corners where
they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the
residents are aware. Beyond Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on
the west, and Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their
genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses,
and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude
traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable
almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole
neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down-town, which seem to
have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by
its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion
of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly
eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying
its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to
themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with
their families, who keep the sky-scraping edifices where business frets
the time away; and by night in the streets where myriads throng by
day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch.

Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with
a good sky line, and an architectural ideal too good for the uses
of commerce. This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often
there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the
best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and wasteful; it is for the
pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in
these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it;
the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these
thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a
chance passer.

Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid
houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business
presses closer and harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to
say its offspring, and it is only a question of time before it shall
wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the
comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the
Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building
up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their
last stay shall be, Heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the
country.

In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to
come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest,
though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not,
however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it
is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself.
In our conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is
laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions;
it may be better at one time, and worse at another; but it must always
be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to
everlasting.


II.

When I come home from these walks of mine, I have a vision of the
wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease
upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and
deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I
plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all
for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots, I become
hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human
discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a callous indifference
to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the
charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more
picturesque than a street of brownstone residences, which the same
thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of
the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the
fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which
is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows
to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses, and fluttering
with drying clothes as with banners.

The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their
clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the
mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together;
young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the
doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while
they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then
resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place
has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love,
and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama,
with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly
effective, for then you could, he in it, and yet have the distance
on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is
to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet
fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open
doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and
beating each other in the face, and rolling each other in the gutter,
like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn
look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of
the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this
makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings
break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in
the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its
shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank.

I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to
the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could
give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense
of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither
shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind,
than that of all city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with
green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge factories and
foundries, lumber yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses,
abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons,
disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight trains come
and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle portion of New York.
South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river
region is a mere chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper
wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the
shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the
river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic
activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down
the long piers, but on either side the docks are full of leisurely
canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you
would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from
the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal
cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches
for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales
or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and
turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft
recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis, and the
slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers
from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in
their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the
sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at
the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones,
but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure
for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a
little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their
luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling
over the water, and watch the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops
that pass, with now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger
steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts,
fringing either shore, and following the point of the island round
and up into the great channel called the East River. These vessels
seem as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them
over the shore farther than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce
of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the
parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who
cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but
they are of the overworked world, too, as well as the houses; and let
them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the
sorrows of the poor.


III.

The other evening I walked over to the East River through one of the
tenement streets, and I reached the waterside just as the soft night
was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died
from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravined out
of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which
cultivated people are often proud of feeling, in the aspect of the
long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the
buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad
before, could only come out of them worse than before, and doomed to
a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an
image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which men once imagined
that God had prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see
the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only
see the trees along their walks; their dim lawns and gardens, and the
castellated forms of the prisons; and the æsthetic sense, which is
careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable
impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast
steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long
Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between
New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous
masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at bow and stern, floated
with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by,
and came and went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther
shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the misery of
it, fell upon the scene.


IV.

The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this
place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the
New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of
the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the
different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high
and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact,
of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison
Avenue, and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly
built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on
all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but
little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as
the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and
repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not
beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness.
Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators,
there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except
on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the
unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue,
where they have the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the
elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive
of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two
cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar
and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling
express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages,
and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the
uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot
know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take
your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway,
which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till
it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of
the cable cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even
than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus
for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes
wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and
spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons
advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute,
with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to
look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding
one car another roll him under its wheels.

Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has
simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot
be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of every
one. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such
a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on
without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original
horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and
at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer
who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of
the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is
nothing that Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private
property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise
is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time
here, in the most dramatic way.

The street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid
the abutters anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies
are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which
they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering
compensation to the property owners along their route. If the
community had built these roads, it would have indemnified every one,
for the community is always just when it is the expression of the
common honesty; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon
dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.

The elevated roads and the cable road had no right to be, on the terms
that the New-Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of
transit in the city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, they
would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is
especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their
moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and
airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third
story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above,
on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of
overuse, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves;
and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful
iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and
there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.

They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them with an abominable
uproar. Yet traffic goes on underneath, and life goes on alongside and
overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts
himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether they add to the
foulness of the streets they pass through or not; I hardly think they
do. The mud lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels
which they form over the horse-car tracks in the middle of the avenues,
and which you can look through for miles; but the mud does not blow
into your nose and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a
positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I have hinted, is that
they hide so much of the street from sight, and keep you from seeing
all its shabbiness, pitilessly open to the eye in the avenues which
have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that the elevated
railroads are built, and the wrong they have done to persons is mainly
past recall, perhaps the worst that can be said of them is that they
do not serve their purpose. Of course, in our conditions, where ten
men are always doing the work of one man in rivalry with each other,
the passage of people to and from business is enormous: the passage
of men to get money and the passage of women to spend it; and at the
hours of the morning and the afternoon when the volume of travel is the
greatest, the trains of the elevated roads offer a spectacle that is
really incredible.

Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space in the aisles
between the seats is held by people standing, and swaying miserably to
and fro by the leather straps dangling from the roofs. Men and women
are indecently crushed together, without regard for that personal
dignity which we seem to know nothing of and care nothing for. The
multitude overflows from the car, at either end, and the passengers are
as tightly wedged on the platform without as they are within. The long
trains follow each other at intervals of two or three minutes, and at
each station they make a stop of but a few seconds, when those who wish
to alight fight their way through the struggling mass. Those who wish
to mount fight their way into the car or on to the platform, where the
guard slams an iron gate against the stomachs and in the faces of those
arriving too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a man clinging
to the outside of the gate has the life crushed out of his body against
the posts of the station as the train pulls out. But in this land,
where people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any kind, lest
individuality should suffer, the individual is practically nothing in
the regard of the corporate collectivities which abound.


V.

It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights; where
there is a question of interest, there seems to be no question of
rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize
advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to
make the whole situation evident. The avenues to the eastward and
westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any
law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been
pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest
in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut
or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting
upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from
it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or
stone, and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one fourth
as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes,
not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price
the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board
fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on the street,
which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from
the building all round and beyond his property. In the meantime he
pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved
property pays, and gets some meager return for the use of his fence
by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the
bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements,
picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the
players. There are many things which unite to render the avenues
unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness
and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers. But
as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their
tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as
a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I
can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the
land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who most
spoils the sky-line, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in
design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.

Even when the owners begin to build, to improve their real estate, as
the phrase is, it is without regard to the rights of their neighbors,
or the feelings or tastes of the public, so far as the public may be
supposed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier avenues alone,
but of the finest, and of all the streets. If you will look, for
instance, at the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you
will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will be willing
to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a
vacant lot, with its high board fence covered with painted signs, then
a tall mass of apartment houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York
dwellings of the old commonplace brownstone sort; then a stable, and
a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across the next avenue there
rises far aloof the compact bulk of a series of apartment houses, which
in color and design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far
worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward the buildings decline
and fall, till they sink into another two-story drinking-shop on the
corner of another avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of
the elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a large vacant
lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical posters, and then there surges
skyward another series of apartment houses. The highest of these is
nearly fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink again,
till you suddenly drop from their nondescript monotony to the gothic
façade of a house of a wholly different color, in its pale sandstone,
from the red of their brick fronts.

A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on
its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most
agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate
of the Park. With our silly American weakness for something foreign,
this square is called the Plaza; I believe it is not at all like a
Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offense. An irregular space
in the centre is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed
hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy-heads, without the
spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you
get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza.
At the eastern corner of the avenue is a costly new apartment house
of a modified gothic style, and then you come to the second of the
great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of
a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of
brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat
roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or
seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping
a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term
for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There
is no term for the disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this
enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the
roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s
and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the
corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front
and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue
continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors, a
savage anarchy of shapes, which I should think the general experience
of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the
dullest sense.


VI.

There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly as bad as this, but not
quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at
least a handsome uniformity. I have said already that it is still, upon
the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode
of the best--that is the richest--people; we Americans habitually use
best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the
eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings,
as yet little invaded by business. Lexington Avenue is of the same
character, but of a humbler sort. On Second Avenue, down town, there
are large old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still the home
of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are
spared by the elevated roads there are blocks of decent and comfortable
dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of
course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of our system the
same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.

One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering
the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce,
but there are perhaps a score of these at most, in New York; and on
the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred
miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers
levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you
actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of
people taken away from productive labor and solely devoted to marketing
the things made by people who are overworked in making them.

Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human
relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have
already tried to give some notion of the multitude of these; and I must
say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such
effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at
night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to
an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.

The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they all close at six
o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor
beauty as the place has with the superfluity of signs that the minor
traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and
unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want
half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade,
and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will
permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one
thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another
it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety
of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty
in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these
huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized
and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six
or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, one would think bad
enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give any notion of the
horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of
white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?

The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and
shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and
sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis
they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands,
and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not
shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the
electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings the
frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.

The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at
least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary
phase of the economic warfare in which our people live, for the most as
unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought
out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his
vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence
of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it
seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be
so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.


VII.

Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural
shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in the
restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons.
There may not be really more of these in New York, in proportion to
the population, than in other great cities, but apparently there are
more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is
very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in
plain sight; and a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the
spectacle of people everywhere at sumptuous tables. Many of the finest
hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of
the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal
the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry
passer is always present to my imagination; but the New-Yorkers are so
used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit that they do
not seem to mind it.

There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer avenues which has not
its liquor store, and generally there are two; wherever a street
crosses them there is a saloon on at least one of the corners;
sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes even on all four. I had
the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth Avenue, between the Park,
and the point down town where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch
of some two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating houses
where you can buy drink with your meat; and this avenue is probably far
less infested with the traffic than some others.

You may therefore safely suppose that out of the hundred miles of
shops, there are ten, or fifteen, or twenty miles of saloons. They
have the best places on the avenues, and on the whole they make the
handsomest show. They all have a cheerful and inviting look, and if you
step within, you find them cosy, quiet, and, for New York, clean. There
are commonly tables set about in them, where their frequenters can take
their beer or whiskey at their ease, and eat the free lunch which is
often given in them; in a rear room you see a billiard-table. In fact,
they form the poor man’s club-houses, and if he might resort to them
with his family, and be in the control of the State as to the amount
he should spend and drink there, I could not think them without their
rightful place in an economy which saps the vital forces of the laborer
with over-work, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of despair
as to the chances of getting or not getting work when he has lost it.
If you suggested this to the average American, however, he would be
horror-struck. He would tell you that what you proposed was little
better than anarchy; that in a free country you must always leave
private persons free to debauch men’s souls and bodies with drink, and
make money out of their ruin; that anything else was contrary to human
nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of the individual. Here
in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected that
the saloon controls the municipality, and the New-Yorkers think this
is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is
from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in
the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and
it would be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the
solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good
old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks
of the constitution.


VIII.

Without it, there would be far less poverty than there is, but poverty
is a good old American institution, too; there would inevitably be
less inequality, but inequality is as dear to the American heart as
liberty itself. In New York the inequality has that effect upon the
architecture which I have tried to give some notion of; but in fact it
deforms life at every turn, and in nothing more than in the dress of
the people, high and low. New York is, on the whole, without doubt,
the best-dressed community in America, or at least there is a certain
number of people here, more expensively and scrupulously attired than
you will find anywhere else in the country. The rich copy the fashions
set for them in Paris or in London, and then the less rich, and the
still less rich, down to the poor, follow them as they can, until you
arrive at the very poorest, who wear the cast-off and tattered fashions
of former years, and masquerade in a burlesque of the fortunate that
never fails to shock and grieve me. They must all somehow be clothed;
the climate and the custom require it; but sometimes I think their
nakedness would be less offensive; and when I meet a wretched man, with
his coat out at the elbows, or split up the back, in broken shoes,
battered hat, and frayed trousers, or some old woman or young girl in
a worn-out, second-hand gown and bonnet, tattered and threadbare and
foul, I think that if I were a believer in it, I would uncover my head
to them, and ask their forgiveness for the system that condemns some
one always to such humiliation as theirs.

We say such people are not humiliated, that they do not mind it, that
they are used to it; but if we ever look these people in the eye, and
see the shrinking, averted glance of their shame and tortured pride, we
must know that what we say is a cruel lie. At any rate, the presence
of these outcasts must spoil the beauty of any dress near them, and
there is always so much more penury than affluence that the sight of
the crowd in the New York streets must give more pain than pleasure.
The other day on Fifth Avenue it did not console me to meet a young and
lovely girl, exquisitely dressed in the last effect of Paris, after I
had just parted from a young fellow who had begged me to give him a
little money to get something to eat, for he had been looking for work
a week and had got nothing. I suppose I ought to have doubted his word,
he was so decently clad, but I had a present vision of him in rags, and
I gave to the frowzy tramp he must soon become.

Of course, this social contrast was extreme, like some of those
architectural contrasts I have been noting, but it was by no means
exceptional, as those were not. In fact, I do not know but I may say
that it was characteristic of the place, though you might say that the
prevalent American slovenliness was also characteristic of the New
York street crowds; I mean the slovenliness of the men--the women, of
whatever order they are, are always as much dandies as they can be.
But most American men are too busy to look much after their dress,
and when they are very well to do they care very little for it. You
see few men dressed in New York with, the distinction of the better
class of Londoners, and when you do meet them, they have the air of
playing a part, as in fact they are: they are playing the part of men
of leisure in a nation of men whose reality is constant work, whether
they work for bread or whether they work for money, and who, when they
are at work, outdo the world, but sink, when they are at leisure, into
something third rate and fourth rate. The commonness of effect in the
street crowds is not absent from Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue
any more than it is from First Avenue or Tenth Avenue; and the tide
of wealth and fashion, that rolls up and down the better avenues in
the splendid carriages, makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger,
when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. On the far east
side, and on the far west side, the horse-cars, which form the only
means of transit, have got the dirt and grime of the streets and the
dwellings on them and in them, and there is one tone of foulness in the
passengers and the vehicles. I do not wish to speak other than tenderly
of the poor, but it is useless to pretend that they are other than
offensive in aspect, and I have to take my sympathy in both hands when
I try to bestow it upon them. Neither they nor the quarter they live in
has any palliating quaintness; and the soul, starved of beauty, will
seek in vain to feed itself with the husks of picturesqueness in their
aspect.


IX.

As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of
their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already
suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level,
on the avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage of the more
central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by
the water, which is always good. I have noticed this particularly on
the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which
has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere,
so that First Avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than
most parts of Fifth Avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say,
in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village, which,
when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said
of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect
of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild afternoon, when their
Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads
poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words.
But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness,
such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the
same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from
the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show
themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things,
which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all
races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The
Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might
feel at home in it if the filthiness of their native environment could
repatriate them.

As you pass through these streets, there is much to appeal to your pity
in the squalid aspect of the people and the place, but nothing to take
your fancy; and perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing
more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the tenderest-hearted
people the misery of their fellows into something comic or poetic. Only
very rarely have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the
prevalent poverty gives; and perhaps the reader will not be able to
understand how I could find this in the sight of some chickens going
to roost on a row of carts drawn up by the street-side, near a little
hovel where some old people lived in a temporary respite from the
building about them; or from a cottage in outlying suburban fields,
with a tar-roofed shanty for a stable, and an old horse cropping the
pasturage of the enclosure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels.

But in New York you come to be glad of anything that will suggest a
sweeter and a gentler life than that which you mostly see. The life of
the poor here seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field that
I came upon the other day in one of the westward avenues, which had
once been the grounds about a pleasant home. Till I saw this I did not
think any piece of our mother earth could have been made to look so
brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. But every spear of
grass had been torn from it; the hardened and barren soil was furrowed
like a haggard face, and it was all strewn with clubs and stones, as
if it had been a savage battleground. A few trees stood aloof from the
borders next the streets, where some courses of an ancient stone wall
rose in places above the pavement. I found the sight of it actually
depraving; it made me feel ruffianly, and I mused upon it in helpless
wonder as to the influence its ugliness must have had amidst the
structural ugliness all about it, if some wretch had turned to it in
hopes of respite.

But probably none ever does. Probably the people on the shabby streets
and avenues are no more sensible of their hideousness than the people
in the finer streets and avenues are aware of their dulness or their
frantic disproportion. I have never heard a New-Yorker speak of these
things, and I have no doubt that if my words could come to the eyes
of the average New-Yorker he would be honestly surprised that any
one should find his city so ugly as it is. As for that first lesson
of civilization which my words implicate, a civic control of the
private architecture of the place, he would shrink from it with about
as much horror as from civic control of the liquor trade. If he did
not he would still be unable to understand how the individual liberty
that suffers a man to build offensively to his neighbor or to the
public at large is not liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which
puts an end instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and the
personal rights of every one who lives near the offender or passes by
his edifice. We Americans are yet so far lost in the dark ages as to
suppose that there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can
interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest.


THE END.




HARPER’S AMERICAN ESSAYISTS


     OTHER TIMES AND OTHER SEASONS. By LAURENCE HUTTON.

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     AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS, with Other Essays on Other Isms. By
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     AS WE GO. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. With Illustrations.

     AS WE WERE SAYING. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. With Illustrations.

     FROM THE EASY CHAIR. By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

     FROM THE EASY CHAIR. _Second Series._ By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

     FROM THE EASY CHAIR. _Third Series._ By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

     CRITICISM AND FICTION. By WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

     FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE HUTTON.

     CONCERNING ALL OF US. By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

     THE WORK OF JOHN RUSKIN. By CHARLES WALDSTEIN.

     PICTURE AND TEXT. By HENRY JAMES. With Illustrations.


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Certainly, if it were not for its predecessor, we should assign to
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London.

It is a charming story told with exquisite grace and tenderness.--_N.
Y. Tribune._

Mr. Du Maurier has written his tale with such originality,
unconventionality, and eloquence, such rollicking humor and tender
pathos, and delightful play of every lively fancy, all running so
briskly in exquisite English and with such vivid dramatic picturing,
that it is only comparable ... to the freshness and beauty of a spring
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