The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860
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A day came for cleaning my windows, and, as it rained heavily, I could
not give the old woman a clear stage by going out for a couple of hours,
but told her to clean away and be as lively as she could, while I
sat there and wrote. Lodgers, she told me, as she polished up the
brightening panes, came and went week after week, so fast that she
forgot one when another came, and never knew any of their names. She had
an eye for character, though, and told me the peculiarities of some of
them in a quaint way, nailing her sentences, now and then, with odd,
hard words, put in independently of the general text.
"And who lives in the room just under mine? Somebody who raises plants,
I see,--unless the green things on the balcony belong to the house."
"A gentleman as keeps emself quite _to_ emself. Lonesome and friendless,
I reckon, for he looks but poorly. Plants out queer sasses in boxes all
the time, and some of 'em on the balcoany itself. Guess he makes kinder
tea of 'em, or root-drink. Decoctifies."
"And who in the room opposite, on this floor?"
"Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight,--
Jews, I reckon,--and as like one another as two spots of dirt on
this 'ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was
furriners, I guess. Polyanders."
The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days
before from abroad. I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag
and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon.
De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years
previously, was a Belgian and a _savant_, and a man of rare
companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called
himself a naturalist. He had already roamed over the greater part
of America, North and South, investigating the mysteries of Nature,
especially of the animal kingdom, and contributing, as he went, many
specimens of rare animals to the principal collections of Europe. His
latest adventures took him through Africa and the East, whence he
brought to New York a number of living creatures of many species, all
of which, however, he had shipped for Havre before I met him, with the
exception of two or three of the least disreputable kinds, which he
meant to keep about him as pets. The most valued of these treasures were
a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of
white mice.
These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the
rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of
a perfect jet black. They were quite tame and familiar; but, on the
approach of a cat, or any other cause for alarm, the whole family would
concentrate their energies in a very remarkable way into one piercing
squeak.
The Mangouste, an animal somewhat resembling a ferret, but more nearly
allied to the Nilotic ichneumon of Egypt, was a marvellously lithe and
active little creature, perfectly tame, and coming as readily as a dog
to his name, "Mungo," except when overfed, when he would sleep sometimes
for hours, rolled up at the bottom of his cage, or in some dark corner
of the room. There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo
which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had
often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by
those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though
he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white
mice. One piece of mischief he committed, during the few days he was
allowed to run about the rooms: he gnawed holes at the bottom of all the
doors, through which he could let himself in and out. He used to lie in
the sun, on my table, as I sat reading; and was generally companionable
and trustworthy, notwithstanding his insidious look.
Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me
to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a
brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to
deliver a course of traveller's tales. Numerous were the directions I
had from him as to the diet and general treatment most congenial to
the constitutions of white mice; and there was implicit confidence
expressed, that, for safety, the Mangouste should be kept strictly
confined to his cage. There were parrots to be looked after, also,
including an extremely vituperative old macaw, any verbal communication
with whom laid the advancing party open to all manner of insult and
objurgation.
The very first day of my menagerial experience, the Mangouste got out of
his cage while I was feeding him, and glided away into dark nooks and
garrets unknown. I failed of recovering him by a stalking process among
the giddy passes of the upper stairs; nor did he return that day to my
often-repeated call; for I vociferated at intervals throughout the
day the word "Mungo!" in a manner that must have led the mysterious
inhabitants of that silent house to the conclusion that I was a
spiritual medium, inviting revelations from the shade of the mighty
Park.
A hot, clammy night. No balmy essences arise from the kennels of this
hollow street in which I live; whatever comes from that quarter must be
malarious, if anything. The windows are thrown open as far as they were
made to be thrown, and I get as far out of one of them as I safely can,
by tilting my chair back, and extending my legs out into that undefined
everywhere called the wide, wide world. The only newspaper within reach
of my hand is one I have already looked over, but I glance at it again,
reading backwards from the end an account of a terrible poisoning case
lately brought to light in England, which I had already read forwards
from the beginning. Throwing it away from me in disgust, I reach out
my other hand for a book. The one I lay hold of is "Laurel-Water,"
the melancholy drama of Sir Theodosius Boughton by insidious poisoner
killed. I dashed it away, backwards, over my head, and, turning off the
gas, abandoned myself to the strange influences that breathed hotly upon
me from the clammy vegetation festering in the ropy night-air.
Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder
to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful,
certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem.
Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long,
feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are
times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but
a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly
essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls
away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers.
Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy,
carrion smell, which, under the influences of a July night, is but too
perceptible to the dwellers of streets where it abides. The tree at
my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a
proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so
much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom. Sleep
must have overcome me, for I had a troublous dream or vision of which
Poison was the predominant nightmare,--a dream and slumber broken by the
convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination
to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of
half-and-half--half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane--handed
to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in
the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly
be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony
beneath,--the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter
sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird watering-pot
held forth in a fawn-colored hand?
In a particular condition of the nerves,--say, when a man feels
"shaky,"--it takes but little to convince him that anything which may
possibly not be all right is to a moral certainty all wrong. To sleep
another night in that room, with the windows open,--and who would shut
his windows in July?--directly exposed to the exhalations of a rising
forest of upas-antiars of Macassar, nurtured by the unwholesome hand
of a mysterious vegetarian for purposes unavowed, was no longer to be
thought of. De Vonville's room, which was at the back of the house, and
had no fuming ailantus by its windows on which to browse nightmares
of skunkish flavor, afforded a better climate for a night's rest,
notwithstanding the singular ideas which these travelled men, especially
naturalists, have of comfort, in a civilized sense. He invariably slept
on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance
of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian
gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was
comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that
night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and
upas-antiar from following in my wake. The little beasts were all
sleeping tranquilly in their cages, and the birds on their perches
rested quietly, too,--excepting the old macaw, who cursed me in his
sleep, as I lit up the gas. But the Mangouste had not returned, nor did
I quite regret his absence for the present; because, although highly
approving of the culture of four-footed beasts, be they large or small,
I have a prejudice against having my jugular vein breathed, at midnight,
by small animals of the weasel tribe,--an act of which Mungo, probably,
would have been incapable. His relations _will_ do such things, however,
and newspapers recording appalling instances of it may be found.
Shutting the door, I turned the gas down to a mere spark, and stretched
my weary limbs on the mat which served the travelled man for a bed,
drawing over me a gauze-like fabric, which, I suppose, answers in
tropical countries all the purposes of the more voluminous "bed-clothes"
of ours. Sleep soon came upon me,--a heavy, but unquiet sleep, in which
the same influences haunted me as those I felt when slumbering at the
window. The malaria from the trees was there, and the planter of the
balcony watering henbane and hellebore with boiling aquafortis; likewise
the demon-waiter, with his leaden salver and poisoned tankard, wearing
an ophidian smile on his features and a fresh sprig of hemlock in his
third buttonhole.
How long I slept thus I know not. Once I had a vague sense of the
Mangouste gliding across me, but it was only part of a dream; and it was
still night, black and awful, when I started up in good earnest, at a
piercing shriek from the united family of white mice, whose cage stood
upon a low stand, about two yards to the right of where I lay.
The sound which followed this was one which the man is not likely to
forget who has once heard it,--whether beneath his foot, as he steps
upon the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand,
when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is
clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and
hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient
gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake
coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his
infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled fury
at the trembling group in the middle of the cage. This I saw by the
first flash. Grasping a sword from among the weapons with which the
walls were studded, I made a pass to sever the monster; but the
Mangouste was quicker than I, as he darted upon the coils of the
serpent, which, in a moment, fell heavily to the floor, a writhing,
headless mass.
In the heavy dreams which haunted me during the sleep from which I had
just been roused, I had a vision of the planter of the balcony with
a snake coiled round his naked arm. Who so dull as to require an
interpreter for such plain speakings? Rushing down-stairs, I burst open
the door of that person's room with one kick, and there, in the middle
of the floor, half-dressed and bending over a censer of red-hot
charcoal, knelt Mr. Desole Arcubus, the poison-man of Mrs. Silvernails
boarding-house. His features were collapsed and livid, and he held his
left arm, which was much swollen and discolored, close over the red-hot
coals, basting it wildly, the while, with ladlefuls of some hot liquid,
while he crammed into his mouth, at intervals, a handful of herb-fodder
of some kind from a salad-bowl on the floor beside him. He was rapidly
growing faint and sinking, but indicated his wishes by signs, and one
of several strangers who now entered the room continued the fomenting
treatment, while another ran for medical assistance.
There was an open letter on the table, which I had no hesitation in
reading, when I saw at a glance that it threw light on the matter. The
following is an exact copy of it:--
"Hollow Rock----County. N. Y. 17 Jewly. 18--
MR. HARKABUS dear Sir.
a cording to promis i send the sneak by Xpress. He is the Largest and
wust Sneak we have ketched In these parts. Bit a cow wich died in 2.40
likeways her calf of fright. Hope the sneak weed growed up strong and
harty. By eting and drinking of that wede the greatest sneak has no
power. Smeling of it a loan will cure a small sneak ader or the like. I
go in upon the dens tomorough and if we find any Pufing Aders will Xpres
them to you per Xpress.
Yr. oblgd. servt. SILENUS CLUCK."
Here was the whole story in a nutshell. For his experiments in septic
poisons, Mr. Arcubus had hired this apartment, with its convenient
balcony for the cultivation of his antidotes. Having prepared his
decoctions, he had this night caused himself to be bitten by the snake,
which, disgusted probably at its services being then rudely dispensed
with, had followed its guiding instinct up to the room where the
animals were, making its way through the holes nibbled by the Mangouste
underneath the doors. A cold shudder seized me when I guessed the
reality of the sense of something gliding over me in the night. The
hunger of the reptile had steered him straight to the cage of the mice,
whose cry of agony at the presence of the great enemy of mouse-kind had
fortunately roused me from my lethargy,--for the rattle of the snake is
but a drowsy sound, and will not awaken the sleeper. How the Mangouste
came to appear on the scene at the nick of time, I know not. He might
have come in at the open window, or possibly had been sleeping, since I
missed him, among the trappings and traveller's gear with which the room
was lumbered.
And these were the delights of lodgings,--of lodgings without board!
And who could see the end of it all?--for, if snake-poison lurked on the
stairs, probably hydrophobia was tied up in the cupboard. Brief time
I expended in making my arrangements to quit, having first seen Mr.
Arcubus carted away to a hospital, where by skilful treatment he
slowly recovered. For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and
the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a
bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that
I had departed from lodgings forever,--lodgings for single gentlemen,
without board.
But, on leaving the house, I did not forget the dust-colored old
woman, whose last words to me, as I tipped her with a gratuity, were
oracular:--"Forty long years and more have I lived in lodgin'-houses and
never before seen a sarpint. It behooves all on us, now, to be watchful
for what may be coming next, and wakeful. Circumspectangular."
I live in a hotel now, a very noisy life, and fearfully expensive. "But
what do you wish, my friend?" as the French say, in their peculiar
idiom. Believing in the ancient Egyptians, who worshipped the Nilotic
ichneumon, I have privately canonized his cousin, the Mangouste, by the
style and title of St. Mungo; and if ever surplus funds are discovered
to my credit in any solvent bank, at present unknown to me, I will
certainly devote a moiety of them to the foundation of a neat row of
alms-cages, for the reception of decayed members of the family of White
Mice.
FOR CHRISTIE'S SAKE.
Upon us falls the shadow of night,
And darkened is our day:
My love will greet the morning light
Four hundred miles away.
God love her, torn so swift and far
From hearts so like to break!
And God love all who are good to her,
For Christie's sake!
I know, whatever spot of ground
In any land we tread,
I know the Eternal Arms are round,
That heaven is overhead;
And faith the mourning heart will heal,
But many fears will make
Our spirits faint, our fond hearts kneel,
For Christie's sake.
Good bye, dear! be they kind to you,
As though you were their ain!
My daisy opens to the dew,
But shuts against the rain.
Never will new moon glad our eyes
But offerings we shall make
To old God Wish, and prayers will rise
For Christie's sake.
Four years ago we struck our tent;
O'er homeless babes we yearned;
Our all--three darlings--with us went,
But only two returned!
While life yet bleeds into her grave,
Love ventures one more stake;
Hush, hush, poor hearts! if big, be brave,
For Christie's sake!
Like crown to most ambitious brows
Was Christie to us given,
To make our home a holy house
And nursery of heaven.
Oh, softer was her bed of rest
Than lily's on the lake!
Peace filled so deep each billowy breast,
For Christie's sake!
To music played by harps and hands
Invisible were we drawn
O'er charmed seas, through faery lands,
Under a clearer dawn:
We entered our new world of love
With blessings in our wake,
While prospering heavens smiled above,
For Christie's sake.
We gazed with proud eyes luminous
On such a gift of grace,--
All heaven narrowed down to us
In one dear little face!
And many a pang we felt, dear wife,
With hurt of heart and ache
All shut within like clasping knife,
For Christie's sake.
I would no tears might e'er run down
Her patient face, beside
Such happy pearls of heart as crown
Young mother, new-made bride!
For 'tis a face that, looking up
To passing heaven, might make
An angel stop, a blessing drop,
For Christie's sake.
If Love in that child's heart of hers
Should breathe and break its calm,
With trouble sweet as that which stirs
The brooding buds of balm,--
Listening at ear of peeping pearl,
Glistening in eyes that shake
Their sweet dew down,--God bless our girl,
For Christie's sake!
But, Father, if our babe must mourn,
Be merciful and kind!
And if our gentle lamb be shorn,
Attemper thou the wind!
Across the Deluge guide our Dove,
And to thy bosom take
With arm of love, and shield above,
For Christie's sake!
We have had sorrows many and strange:
Poor Christie I when I'm gone,
Some of my words will weirdly change,
If she read sadly on!
Lightnings, from what was dark of old,
With meanings strange will break
Of sorrows hid or dimly told,
For Christie's sake.
Wife, we should still try hard to win
The best for our dear child,
And keep a resting-place within,
When all without grows wild:
As on the winter graves the snow
Falls softly, flake by flake,
Our love should whitely clothe our woe,
For Christie's sake.
For one will wake at midnight drear
From out a dream of death,
And find no dear head pillowed near,
No sound of peaceful breath!
May no weak wailing words arise,
No bitter thoughts awake
To see the tears in Memory's eyes:
For Christie's sake!
And There, where many crownless kings
Of earth a crown shall wear,
The martyrs who have borne the pangs
Their palm at last shall bear,--
When with our lily pure of sin
Our heavenward way we take,
There may we walk with welcome in,
For Christie's sake!
THE NURSERY BLARNEY-STONE.
Where is it kept? We have often longed for a sight of that precious bit
of aerolite, that talismanic moon-stone and bewildering boulder, to
which the lips of all devoted to infantile education must be religiously
pressed.
In vain have we searched in the closet, where the headless dolls and
tailless horses, the collapsed drum and the torn primer, are put away.
We have privately climbed to the summit of the clothes-press, we have
surreptitiously invaded the nurse's own private work-basket, lured by
disappointing lumps of wax and fragments of rhubarb-root; but we did
not find it. We believe in its existence none the less. Real as the
coronation-stone of the Scottish kings now in Westminster Abbey, as the
Caaba at Mecca, as the loadstone mountain against which dear old Sinbad
was wrecked, as the meteor which fell into the State of Connecticut and
the volcanic island which rose out of the Straits of Messina, as the
rock of Plymouth, or the philosopher's stone,--yet we have sought in
vain for it, and only know of it as of the Great Carbuncle, by the light
it sheds.
"Pray, my good Sir," ask legions of fond parents, "what do you mean? Is
it Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Brown's Syrup of Squills, or
White's Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system?
a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock the cradle?"
"Look" not "into your heart," responds our Muse, but into your nursery,
and write!
We invite a general review of all infantry divisions. We may be, for
aught you know, Mrs. Ellis _incog_., warning the mothers of America, as
of yore the Cornelias of England. What is the Nursery Blarney-Stone?
You have none in your own airy and southern-exposed first-pair-back,
(_Nov-Anglice>_, "the keeping-room chamber,") where you daily water
and rake your young olive-sprouts? upon your word of honor, Madam, you
have not? You never tell nursery-tales of ghosts or fairies; you have
conscientiously stripped from the dark closet every vestige of a legend;
you have permitted juvenile inspection of the chimney, to prove that
Santa Claus could not descend its sooty flue without grievous nigritude
of the anticipated doll's frock, and have logically appealed to Miss
Bran Beeswax's satin silveriness in proof of the non-existence of
the saint beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have
actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the
stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From
Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest
a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile
brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are
on your _Index Expurgatorius_. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated
Red Ridinghood as no better than the Bonnet Rouge of domestic
Jacobinism.
You are a model mother, with whom even the late Mr. Gradgrind might be
satisfied. "Truth, crushed to earth" by the whole race of nurses of the
good old time, rises again triumphant at your hearth-stone. Then answer
us,--Why did you tell your little ones to-night, as the sparrows were
making an unusually loquacious preparation for their dormitories,
that the little birds were singing their evening hymns, and exhort,
thereupon, your unwilling nestlings to a rival performance of the verses
of Dr. Watts? You ought to be prepared to explain, also, for the benefit
of any sucking Socrates, why it is that these feathered choristers
have their "revival seasons," and are terrible backsliders during the
moulting period. When you looked out of the nursery-window, into the
poultry-yard, and heard the noisy confabulation of the motherly hens
and pert pullets, you should be prepared to state upon what theological
principles it is that psalmody is not the wont of the Gallinacae. Are
the Biddies given over to a reprobate mind, because you don't happen to
like their vocalization? Is it only the Piccolomini and Linds of the
feathered kingdom who have a right to practise sacred music?
And how about that other stupendous fiction of the harvest-moon? Tell
us, since you are voluntarily in the confessional, tell us why you
kept back that explanation of its dependence on the Precession of the
Equinoxes, which, at Professor Cram's finishing examination, in your
school-girl days, you so glibly recited before your admiring papa and
mamma? Do you really believe that the solar and stellar system was
arranged to accommodate "the reapers reaping early" of the little island
of Great Britain?
We think you said angels! When little Isabel Montgomery, with her long,
sunny curls, and sweet, blue eyes, was taken away, you made a very
touching application of her decease, to illustrate what all good people
were to become in the unknown world. How did you get out of the scrape
which followed the remark of your downright eldest, remembering also the
departure of a good-natured, obese, elderly neighbor,--"Then I thpothe
Mithter Thimmonth ith a big angel"? So he probably is; but Simmons's two
hundred pounds of earthliness did not suit your sentimentality quite as
readily as the little fairy who always wore such clean pantalets and
never tore her pretty white frocks in a game of romps. Is beatification
dependent upon the platform-balance? and what amount of flesh will turn
the scale in favor of the _Avvocato del Diavolo?_
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