Gov. Bob. Taylor\'s Tales

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"Tread softly 'round this sacred heap,
It guards ambition's restless sleep;
Whose greed for place ne'er did forsake him,
Don't mention office, or you'll wake him!"

I reached the goal of my visions and dreams under that collossal dome
whose splendors are shadowed in the broad river that flows by the shrine
of Mt. Vernon. I sat amid the confusion and uproar of the parliamentary
struggles of the lower branch of the Congress of the United States.
"Sunset" Cox, with his beams of wit and humor, convulsed the house and
shook the gallaries. Alexander Stephens, one of the last tottering
monuments of the glory of the Old South, still lingering on the floor,
where, in by-gone years the battles of his vigorous manhood were fought.
I saw in the Senate an assemblage of the grandest men since the days
of Webster and Clay. Conkling, the intellectual Titan, the Apollo of
manly form and grace, thundered there. The "Plumed Knight," that grand
incarnation of mind and magnetism, was at the zenith of his glory.
Edmunds, and Zack Chandler, and the brilliant and learned Jurist, Mat.
Carpenter, were there. Thurman the "noblest Roman of them all" was there
with his famous bandana handkerchief. The immortal Ben Hill, the idol
of the South, and Lamar, the gifted orator and highest type of Southern
chivalry were there. Garland, and Morgan, and Harris, and Coke, were
there; and Beck with his sledge-hammer intellect. It was an arena of
opposing gladiators more magnificent and majestic than was ever
witnessed in the palmiest days of the Roman Empire. There were giants
in the Senate in those days, and when they clashed shields and measured
swords in debate, the capitol trembled and the nation thrilled in every
nerve.

But how like the ocean's ebb and flow are the restless tides of politics!
These scenes of grandeur and glory soon dissolved from my view like a
dream. I "saved the country" for only two short years. My competitor
proved a lively corpse. He burst forth from the tomb like a locust from
its shell, and came buzzing to the national capital with "war on his
wings." I went buzzing back to the mountains to dream again under the
sycamores; and there a new ambition was kindled in my soul. A new
vision opened before me. I saw another capitol rise on the bank of the
Cumberland, overshadowing the tomb of Polk and close by the Hermitage
where reposes the sacred dust of Andrew Jackson. And I thought if I
could only reach the exalted position of Governor of the old "Volunteer
State" I would then have gained the sum of life's honors and happiness.
But lo! another son of my father and mother was dreaming there under the
same old sycamore. We had dreamed together in the same trundle-bed and
often kicked each other out. Together we had seen visions of pumpkin pie
and pulled hair for the biggest slice. Together we had smoked the first
cigar and together learned to play the fiddle. But now the dreams of our
manhood clashed. Relentless fate had decreed that "York" must contend
with "Lancaster" in the "War of the Roses." And with flushed cheeks and
throbbing hearts we eagerly entered the field; his shield bearing the
red rose, mine the white. It was a contest of principles, free from the
wormwood and gall of personalities, and when the multitude of partisans
gathered at the hustings, a white rose on every Democratic bosom, a red
rose on every Republican breast, in the midst of a wilderness of flowers
there was many a tilt and many a loud huzzah. But when the clouds of war
had cleared away, I looked upon the drooping red rose on the bosom of
the vanquished Knight, and thought of the first speech my mother ever
taught me:

"Man's a vapor full of woes,
Cuts a caper--down he goes!"

The white rose triumphed. But the shadow is fairer than the substance.
The pathway of ambition is marked at every mile with the grave of some
sweet pleasure slain by the hand of sacrifice. It bristles with thorns
planted by the fingers of envy and hate, and as we climb the rugged
heights, behind us lie our bloody footprints, before us tower still
greater heights, scarred by tempests and wrapped in eternal snow. Like
the edelweiss of the Alps, ambition's pleasures bloom in the chill air
of perpetual frost, and he who reaches the summit will look down with
longing eyes, on the humbler plain of life below and wish his feet had
never wandered from its warmer sunshine and sweeter flowers.

FROM THE CAVE-MAN TO THE "KISS-O-PHONE."

But let us not forget that it is better for us, and better for the
world, that we dream, and that we tread the thorny paths, and climb
the weary steeps, and leave our bloody tracks behind in the pursuit
of our dreams. For in their extravagant conceptions lie the germs
of human government, and invention, and discovery; and from their
mysterious vagaries spring the motive power of the world's progress.
Our civilization is the evolution of dreams. The rude tribes of primeval
men dwelt in caves until some unwashed savage dreamed that damp caverns
and unholy smells were not in accord with the principles of hygiene.
It dawned upon his _mighty_ intellect that one flat stone would lie on
top of another, and that a little mud, aided by Sir Isaac Newton's law
of gravitation, would hold them together, and that walls could be built
in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And
thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was
evolved the home, the best and sweetest evolution of man's civilisation.

John Howard Payne touched the tenderest chord that vibrates in the
great heart of all humankind when he gave to immortality his song of
"Home, Sweet Home;" and thank God, the grand mansions and palaces of the
rich do not hold all the happiness and nobility of this world. There
are millions of humble cottages where virtue resides in the warmth and
purity of vestal fires, and where contentment dwells like perpetual
summer.

The antediluvians plowed with a forked stick, with one prong for the
beam and the other for the scratcher; and the plow boy and his sleepy
ox had no choice of prongs to hitch to. It was all the same to Adam
whether "Buck" was yoked to the beam or the scratcher. But some noble
Cincinnatus dreamed of the burnished plowshare; genius wrought his dream
into steel and now the polished Oliver Chill slices the earth like a
hot knife plowing a field of Jersey butter, and the modern gang plow,
bearing upon its wheels the gloved and umbrella'd leader of the Populist
Party, plows up the whole face of the earth in a single day.

What a wonderful workshop is the brain of man! Its noiseless machinery
cuts, and carves, and moulds, in the imponderable material of ideas.
It works its endless miracles through the brawny arm of labor, and the
deft fingers of skill, and the world moves forward by its magic. Aladdin
rubbed his lamp and the shadowy genii of fable performed impossible
wonders. The dreamer of to-day rubs his fingers through his hair and the
genii of his intellect work miracles which eclipse the most extravagant
fantasies of the "Arabian Nights."

A dreamer saw the imprisoned vapor throw open the lid of a teakettle,
and lo! a steam engine came puffing from his brain. And now many a huge
monster of Corliss, beautiful as a vision of Archimedes and smooth in
movement as a wheeling planet, sends its thrill of life and power
through mammoth plants of humming machinery. The fiery courser of the
steel-bound track shoots over hill and plain, like a mid-night meteor
through the fields of heaven, outstripping the wind.

A dreamer carried about in his brain a great Leviathan. It was launched
upon the billows, and like some collossal swan the palatial steamship
now sweeps in majesty through the blue wastes of old ocean.

Six hundred years before Christ, some old Greek discovered electricity
by rubbing a piece of amber, and unable to grasp the mystery, he called
it soul. His discovery slept for more than two thousand years until it
awoke in the dreams of Galvani, and Volta, and Benjamin Franklin. In the
morning of the nineteenth century the sculptor and scientist, Morse, saw
in his dreams, phantom lightnings leap across continents, and oceans,
and felt the pulse of thunder beat as it came bounding over threads of
iron that girdled the earth. In each throb he read a human thought. The
electric telegraph emerged from his brain, like Minerva from the brow of
Jove, and the world received a fresh baptism of light and glory.

In a few more years we will step over the threshold of the twentieth
century. What greater wonders will the dreamers yet unfold? It may be
that another magician, greater even than Edison, the "Wizzard of Menloe
Park," will rise up and coax the very laws of nature into easy compliance
with his unheard-of dreams. I think he will construct an electric
railway in the form of a huge tube, and call it the "electro-scoot,"
and passengers will enter it in New York and touch a button and arrive
in San Francisco two hours before they started! I think a new discovery
will be made by which the young man of the future may stand at his
"kiss-o-phone" in New York, and kiss his sweetheart in Chicago with all
the delightful sensations of the "aforesaid and the same." I think some
Liebig will reduce foods to their last analyses, and by an ultimate
concentration of their elements, will enable the man of the future to
carry a year's provisions in his vest pocket. The sucking dude will
store his rations in the head of his cane, and the commissary department
of a whole army will consist of a mule and a pair of saddlebags. A train
load of cabbage will be transported in a sardine box, and a thousand fat
Texas cattle in an oyster can. Power will be condensed from a forty
horse engine to a quart cup. Wagons will roll by the power in their
axles, and the cushions of our buggies will cover the force that propels
them. The armies of the future will fight with chain lightning, and the
battlefield will become so hot and unhealthy that,

"He who fights and runs away
Will never fight another day."

Some dreaming Icarus will perfect the flying machine, and upon the
aluminium wings of the swift Pegassus of the air the light-hearted
society girl will sail among the stars, and

"Behind some dark cloud, where no one's allowed,
Make love to the man in the moon."

The rainbow will be converted into a Ferris wheel; all men will be bald
headed; the women will run the Government--_and then I think the end of
time will be near at hand_.

DREAMS.

I heard a song of love, and tenderness, and sadness, and beauty, sweeter
than the song of a nightingale. It was breathed from the soul of Robert
Burns. I heard a song of deepest passion surging like the tempest-tossed
waves of the sea. It was the restless spirit of Lord Byron.

I heard a mournful melody of despairing love, full of that wild, mad,
hopeless longing of a bereaved soul which the mid-night raven mocked at
with that bitterest of all words--"Nevermore!" It was the weird threnody
of the brilliant, but ill-starred Poe, who, like a meteor, blazed but
for a moment, dazzling a hemisphere, and then went out forever in the
darkness of death.

Then I was exalted, and lifted into the serene sunlight of peace, as
I listened to the spirit of faith, pouring out in the songs of our own
immortal Longfellow.

With Milton I walked the scented isles of long lost Paradise, and caught
the odor of its bloom, and the swell of its music. He led me through
its rose brakes, and under the vermilion and flame of its orchids and
honeysuckles, down to the margin of the limpid river, where the water
lilies slept in fadeless beauty, and the lotus nodded to the rippling
waves; and there, under a bridal arch of orange blossoms, cordoned by
palms and many-colored flowers, I saw a vision of bliss and beauty from
which Satan turned away with an envy that stabbed him with pangs unfelt
before in hell! It was earth's first vision of wedded love.

But the horizon of Shakespeare was broader than them all. There is no
depth which he has not sounded, no height which he has not measured.
He walked in the gardens of the intellectual gods and gathered sweets
for the soul from a thousand unwithering flowers. He caught music from
the spheres, and beauty from ten thousand fields of light. His brain was
a mighty loom. His genius gathered and classified, his imagination spun
and wove; the flying shuttle of his fancy delivered to the warp of
wisdom and philosophy the shining threads spun from the fibres of human
hearts and human experience; and with his wondrous woof of pictured
tapestries, he clothed all thought in the bridal robes of immortality.
His mind was a resistless flood that deluged the world of literature
with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as by the ark,
and, like the ancient dove, they gather and weave into garlands only
the "flotsam" of beauty which floats on the bosom of the Shakespearean
flood.

Oh, Shakespeare, archangel of poetry! The light from thy wings drowns
the stars and flashes thy glory on the civilizations of the whole world!

"Unwearied, unfettered, unwatched, unconfined,
Be my spirit like thee, in the world of the mind;
No leaning for earth e'er to weary its flight;
But fresh as thy pinions in regions of light."

All honor to the poets and philosophers and painters and sculptors and
musicians of the world! They are its honeybees; its songbirds; its
carrier doves, its ministering angels.

VISIONS OF DEPARTED GLORY.

[Illustration]

I walked with Gibbon and Hume, through the sombre halls of the past, and
caught visions of the glory of the classic Republics and Empires that
flourished long ago, and whose very dust is still eloquent with the
story of departed greatness. The spirit of genius lingers there still
like the fragrance of roses faded and gone.

I thought I heard the harp of Pindar, and the impassioned song of the
dark-eyed Sappho. I thought I heard the lofty epic of the blind Homer,
rushing on in the red tide of battle, and the divine Plato discoursing
like an oracle in his academic shades.

The canvas spoke and the marble breathed when Apelles painted and
Phidias carved.

I stood with Michael Angelo and saw him chisel his dreams from the
marble.

I saw Raphael spread his visions of beauty in immortal colors.

I sat under the spirit of Paganini's power. The flow of his melody
turned the very air into music. I thought I was in the presence of
Divinity as I listened to the warbles, and murmurs, and the ebb and flow
of the silver tides, from his violin. And I said: Music is the dearest
gift of God to man. The sea, the forest, the field, and the meadow, are
the very fountain heads of music.

I believe that Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Schubert, and Verdi, and all
the great masters, caught their sweetest dreams from nature's musicians.
I think their richest airs of mirth, and gladness, and joy, were stolen
from the purling rivulet and the rippling river. I believe their
grandest inspirations were born of the tempest, and the thunder, and the
rolling billows of the angry ocean.

NATURE'S MUSICIANS.

[Illustration]

I sat on the grassy brink of a mountain stream in the gathering twilight
of evening. The shadowy woodlands around me became a great theatre. The
greensward before me was its stage.

The tinkling bell of a passing herd rang up the curtain, and I sat there
all alone in the hush of the dying day and listened to a concert of
nature's musicians who sing as God hath taught them to sing. The first
singer that entered my stage was Signor Grasshopper. He mounted a
mullein leaf and sang, and sang, and sang, until Professor Turkey
Gobbler slipped up behind him with open mouth, and Signor Grasshopper
vanished from the footlights forevermore. And as Professor Turkey
Gobbler strutted off my stage with a merry gobble, the orchestra opened
before me with a flourish of trumpets. The katydid led off with a
trombone solo; the cricket chimed in with his E. flat cornet; the
bumblebee played on his violoncello, and the jay-bird, laughed with his
piccolo. The music rose to grandeur with the deep bass horn of the big
black beetle; the mocking bird's flute brought me to tears of rapture,
and the screech-owl's fife made me want to fight. The tree-frog blew
his alto horn; the jar-fly clashed his tinkling cymbals; the woodpecker
rattled his kettledrum, and the locust jingled his tambourine. The music
rolled along like a sparkling river in sweet accompaniment with the
oriole's leading violin. But it suddenly hushed when I heard a ripple
of laughter among the hollyhocks before the door of a happy country
home. I saw a youth standing there in the shadows with his arm around
"something" and holding his sweetheart's hand in his. He bent forward;
lip met lip, and there was an explosion like the squeak of a new boot.
The lassie vanished into the cottage; the lad vanished over the hill,
and as he vanished he swung his hat in the shadows, and sang back to her
his happy love song.

[Illustration: LOVE AMONG THE HOLLYHOCKS.]

Did you never hear a mountain love song? This is the song he sang:

"Oh, when she saw me coming she rung her hands and cried,
She said I was the prettiest thing that ever lived or died.
Oh, run along home Miss Nancy, get along home Miss Nancy,
Run along home Miss Nancy, down in Rockinham."

The birds inclined their heads to listen to his song as it died away on
the drowsy summer air.

That night I slept in a mansion; but I "closed my eyes on garnished
rooms to dream of meadows and clover blooms," and love among the
hollyhocks. And while I dreamed I was serenaded by a band of mosquitoes.
This is the song they sang:

[Illustration]

"Hush my dear, lie still and slumber;
Holy angels guard thy bed;
Heavenly 'skeeters without number
Buzzing 'round your old bald head!!!"

PREACHER'S PARADISE.

There is no land on earth which has produced such quaint and curious
characters as the great mountainous regions of the South, and yet no
country has produced nobler or brainier men.

When I was a barefooted boy my grandfather's old grist mill was the
Mecca of the mountaineers. They gathered there on the rainy days to
talk politics and religion, and to drink "mountain" dew and fight.
Adam Wheezer was a tall, spindle-shanked old settler as dark as an
Indian, and he wore a broad, hungry grin that always grew broader at the
sight of a fat sheep. The most prominent trait of Adam's character, next
to his love of mutton, was his bravery. He stood in the mill one day
with his empty sack under his arm, as usual, when Bert Lynch, the bully
of the mountains, with an eye like a game rooster's, walked up to him
and said: "Adam, you've bin a-slanderin' of me, an' I'm a-gwine to give
you a thrashin'." He seized Adam by the throat and backed him under
the meal spout. Adam opened his mouth to squall and it spouted meal
like a whale. He made a surge for breath and liberty and tossed Bert
away like a feather. Then he shot out of the mill door like a rocket,
leaving his old battered plug hat and one prong of his coat tail in the
hands of the enemy. He ran through the creek and knocked it dry as he
went. He made a bee line for my grandfather's house, a quarter of a mile
away, on the hill. He burst into the sitting-room, covered with meal and
panting like a bellowsed horse, frightening my grandmother almost into
hysterics. The old lady screamed and shouted: "What in the world is the
matter, Adam?" Adam replied: "That there durned Bert Lynch is down
yander a-tryin' to raise a fuss with me."

But every dog has his day. Brother Billy Patterson preached from the
door of the mill on the following Sunday. It was his first sermon in
that "neck of the woods," and he began his ministrations with a powerful
discourse, hurling his anathemas against Satan and sin and every kind of
wickedness. He denounced whiskey. He branded the bully as a brute and a
moral coward, and personated Bert, having witnessed his battle with Adam.
This was too much for the champion. He resolved to "thrash" Brother
Patterson, and in a few days they met at the mill. Bert squared himself
and said: "Parson, you had your turn last Sunday; it's mine to-day.
Pull off that broadcloth an' take your medicine. I'm a-gwine to suck
the marrow out'n them ole bones o' yourn." The pious preacher plead for
peace, but without avail. At last he said: "Then, if nothing but a fight
will satisfy you, will you allow me to kneel down and say my prayer
before we fight?" "O yes, that's all right parson," said Bert. "But cut
yer prayer short, for I'm a-gwine to give you a good sound thrashin'."

The preacher knelt and thus began to pray: "Oh Lord, Thou knowest that
when I killed Bill Cummings, and John Brown, and Jerry Smith, and Levi
Bottles, that I did it in self defense. Thou knowest, Oh Lord, that when
I cut the heart out of young Sliger, and strewed the ground with the
brains of Paddy Miles, that it was forced upon me, and that I did it in
great agony of soul. And now, Oh Lord, I am about to be forced to put in
his coffin, this poor miserable wretch, who has attacked me here to-day.
Oh Lord, have mercy upon his soul and take care of his helpless widow
and orphans when he is gone!"

And he arose whetting his knife on his shoe-sole, singing:

"Hark, from the tomb a doleful sound,
Mine ears attend the cry."

But when he looked around, Bert was gone. There was nothing in sight but
a little cloud of dust far up the road, following in the wake of the
vanishing champion.

[Illustration]

BROTHER ESTEP AND THE TRUMPET.

During the great revival which followed Brother Patterson's first
sermon and effective prayer, the hour for the old-fashioned Methodist
love feast arrived. Old Brother Estep, in his enthusiasm on such
occasions sometimes "stretched his blanket." It was his glory to get
up a sensation among the brethren. He rose and said: "Bretheren, while
I was a-walkin' in my gyardin late yisterday evenin', a-meditatin' on
the final eend of the world, I looked up, an' I seed Gabrael raise his
silver trumpet, which was about fifty foot long, to his blazin' lips,
an' I hearn him give it a toot that knocked me into the fence corner
an' shuck the very taters out'n the ground."

"Tut, tut," said the old parson, "don't talk that way in this meeting;
we all know you didn't hear Gabrael blow his trumpet." The old man's
wife jumped to her feet to help her husband out, and said: "Now parson,
you set down there. Don't you dispute John's word that-away--He mout
a-hearn a toot or two."

"WAMPER-JAW" AT THE JOLLIFICATION.

The sideboard of those good old times would have thrown the prohibition
candidate of to-day into spasms. It sparkled with cut glass decanters
full of the juices of corn, and rye, and apple. The old Squire of the
mill "Deestrict" had as many sweet, buzzing friends as any flower garden
or cider press in Christendom. The most industrious bee that sucked at
the Squire's sideboard was old "Wamper-jaw." His mouth reached from ear
to ear, and was inlaid with huge gums as red as vermilion; and when he
laughed it had the appearance of lightning. On the triumphant day of the
Squire's re-election to his great office, when everything was lovely and
"the goose hung high," he was surrounded by a large crowd of his fellow
citizens, and Thomas Jefferson, in his palmiest days, never looked
grander than did the Squire on this occasion. He was attired in his
best suit of homespun, the choicest product of his wife's dye pot.
His immense vest with its broad luminous stripes, checked the rotundity
of his ample stomach like the lines of latitude and longitude, and
resembled a half finished map of the United States. His blue jeans coat
covered his body as the waters cover the face of the great deep, and
its huge collar encircled the back of his head like the belts of light
around a planet.

The Squire was regaling his friends with his latest side-splitting
jokes. Old "Wamper-jaw" threw himself back in his chair and exploded
with peal after peal of laughter. But suddenly he looked around and
said: "Gen-tul-men, my jaw's flew out'n jint!"

His comrades seized him and pulled him all over the yard trying to get
it back. Finally old "Wamper-jaw" mounted his mule, and with pounding
heels, rode, like Tam O'Shanter, to the nearest doctor who lived two
miles away. The doctor gave his jaw a mysterious yank and it popped back
into socket. "Wamper-jaw" rushed back to join in the festivities at the
Squire's. The glasses were filled again; another side-splitting joke was
told, another peal of laughter went 'round, when "Wamper-jaw" threw his
hand to his face and said: "Gen-tul-men, she's out agin!!!" There was
another hasty ride for the doctor. But in the years that followed;
"Wamper-jaw" was never known to laugh aloud. On the most hilarious
occasions he merely showed his gums.

[Illustration: "WAMPER-JAW."]

THE TINTINNABULATION OF THE DINNER BELLS.

How many millions dream on the lowest planes of life! How few ever reach
the highest and like stars of the first magnitude, shed their light upon
the pathway of the marching centuries! What multitudes there are whose
horizons are lighted with visions and dreams of the flesh pots and soup
bowls,--whose Fallstaffian aspirations never rise above the fat things
of this earth, and whose ear flaps are forever inclined forward,
listening for the dinner bells!

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