Mosses from an old manse
his wooden progeny, and completed it in his own mechanical style, from
which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his
business industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in
the latter part of his life attained to a dignified station in the
church, being remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne,
the carver. One of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over,
stood during the better part of a century on the cupola of the Province
House, bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of
the sun. Another work of the good deacon’s hand—a reduced likeness of
his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant—may be
seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State streets, serving in
the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker.
We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old
figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady,
unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is
imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to
circumstances, may either be developed in this world, or shrouded in a
mask of dulness until another state of being. To our friend Drowne
there came a brief season of excitement, kindled by love. It rendered
him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment,
left him again the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of
appreciating the work that his own hands had wrought. Yet who can doubt
that the very highest state to which a human spirit can attain, in its
loftiest aspirations, is its truest and most natural state, and that
Drowne was more consistent with himself when he wrought the admirable
figure of the mysterious lady, than when he perpetrated a whole progeny
of blockheads?
There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that a young Portuguese
lady of rank, on some occasion of political or domestic disquietude,
had fled from her home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of
Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at whose residence,
she was sheltered until a change of affairs. This fair stranger must
have been the original of Drowne’s Wooden Image.
THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE
Grave figure, with a pair of mysterious spectacles on his nose and a
pen behind his ear, was seated at a desk in the corner of a
metropolitan office. The apartment was fitted up with a counter, and
furnished with an oaken cabinet and a Chair or two, in simple and
business-like style. Around the walls were stuck advertisements of
articles lost, or articles wanted, or articles to be disposed of; in
one or another of which classes were comprehended nearly all the
Conveniences, or otherwise, that the imagination of man has contrived.
The interior of the room was thrown into shadow, partly by the tall
edifices that rose on the opposite side of the street, and partly by
the immense show-bills of blue and crimson paper that were expanded
over each of the three windows. Undisturbed by the tramp of feet, the
rattle of wheels, the hump of voices, the shout of the city crier, the
scream of the newsboys, and other tokens of the multitudinous life that
surged along in front of the office, the figure at the desk pored
diligently over a folio volume, of ledger-like size and aspect, He
looked like the spirit of a record—the soul of his own great volume
made visible in mortal shape.
But scarcely an instant elapsed without the appearance at the door of
some individual from the busy population whose vicinity was manifested
by so much buzz, and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving
mechanic in quest of a tenement that should come within his moderate
means of rent; now, a ruddy Irish girl from the banks of Killarney,
wandering from kitchen to kitchen of our land, while her heart still
hung in the peat-smoke of her native cottage; now, a single gentleman
looking out for economical board; and now—for this establishment
offered an epitome of worldly pursuits—it was a faded beauty inquiring
for her lost bloom; or Peter Schlemihl, for his lost shadow; or an
author of ten years’ standing, for his vanished reputation; or a moody
man, for yesterday’s sunshine.
At the next lifting of the latch there entered a person with his hat
awry upon his head, his clothes perversely ill-suited to his form, his
eyes staring in directions opposite to their intelligence, and a
certain odd unsuitableness pervading his whole figure. Wherever he
might chance to be, whether in palace or cottage, church or market, on
land or sea, or even at his own fireside, he must have worn the
characteristic expression of a man out of his right place.
“This,” inquired he, putting his question in the form of an
assertion,—“this is the Central Intelligence Office?”
“Even so,” answered the figure at the desk, turning another leaf of his
volume; he then looked the applicant in the face and said briefly,
“Your business?”
“I want,” said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, “a place!”
“A place! and of what nature?” asked the Intelligencer. “There are many
vacant, or soon to be so, some of which will probably suit, since they
range from that of a footman up to a seat at the council-board, or in
the cabinet, or a throne, or a presidential chair.”
The stranger stood pondering before the desk with an unquiet,
dissatisfied air,—a dull, vague pain of heart, expressed by a slight
contortion of the brow,—an earnestness of glance, that asked and
expected, yet continually wavered, as if distrusting. In short, he
evidently wanted, not in a physical or intellectual sense, but with an
urgent moral necessity that is the hardest of all things to satisfy,
since it knows not its own object.
“Ah, you mistake me!” said he at length, with a gesture of nervous
impatience. “Either of the places you mention, indeed, might answer my
purpose; or, more probably, none of them. I want my place! my own
place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do,
which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry,
and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime! Whether it be a
footman’s duty or a king’s is of little consequence, so it be naturally
mine. Can you help me here?”
“I will enter your application,” answered the Intelligencer, at the
same time writing a few lines in his volume. “But to undertake such a
business, I tell you frankly, is quite apart from the ground covered by
my official duties. Ask for something specific, and it may doubtless be
negotiated for you, on your compliance with the conditions. But were I
to go further, I should have the whole population of the city upon my
shoulders; since far the greater proportion of them are, more or less,
in your predicament.”
The applicant sank into a fit of despondency, and passed out of the
door without again lifting his eyes; and, if he died of the
disappointment, he was probably buried in the wrong tomb, inasmuch as
the fatality of such people never deserts them, and, whether alive or
dead, they are invariably out of place.
Almost immediately another foot was heard on the threshold. A youth
entered hastily, and threw a glance around the office to ascertain
whether the man of intelligence was alone. He then approached close to
the desk, blushed like a maiden, and seemed at a loss how to broach his
business.
“You come upon an affair of the heart,” said the official personage,
looking into him through his mysterious spectacles. “State it in as few
words as may be.”
“You are right,” replied the youth. “I have a heart to dispose of.”
“You seek an exchange?” said the Intelligencer. “Foolish youth, why not
be contented with your own?”
“Because,” exclaimed the young man, losing his embarrassment in a
passionate glow,—“because my heart burns me with an intolerable fire;
it tortures me all day long with yearnings for I know not what, and
feverish throbbings, and the pangs of a vague sorrow; and it awakens me
in the night-time with a quake, when there is nothing to be feared. I
cannot endure it any longer. It were wiser to throw away such a heart,
even if it brings me nothing in return.”
“O, very well,” said the man of office, making an entry in his volume.
“Your affair will be easily transacted. This species of brokerage makes
no inconsiderable part of my business; and there is always a large
assortment of the article to select from. Here, if I mistake not, comes
a pretty fair sample.”
Even as he spoke the door was gently and slowly thrust ajar, affording
a glimpse of the slender figure of a young girl, who, as she timidly
entered, seemed to bring the light and cheerfulness of the outer
atmosphere into the somewhat gloomy apartment. We know not her errand
there, nor can we reveal whether the young man gave up his heart into
her custody. If so, the arrangement was neither better nor worse than
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where the parallel sensibilities
of a similar age, importunate affections, and the easy satisfaction of
characters not deeply conscious of themselves, supply the place of any
profounder sympathy.
Not always, however, was the agency of the passions and affections an
office of so little trouble. It happened, rarely, indeed, in proportion
to the cases that came under an ordinary rule, but still it did happen,
that a heart was occasionally brought hither of such exquisite
material, so delicately attempered, and so curiously wrought, that no
other heart could be found to match it. It might almost be considered a
misfortune, in a worldly point of view, to be the possessor of such a
diamond of the purest water; since in any reasonable probability it
could only be exchanged for an ordinary pebble, or a bit of cunningly
manufactured glass, or, at least, for a jewel of native richness, but
ill-set, or with some fatal flaw, or an earthy vein running through its
central lustre. To choose another figure, it is sad that hearts which
have their wellspring in the infinite, and contain inexhaustible
sympathies, should ever be doomed to pour themselves into shallow
vessels, and thus lavish their rich affections on the ground. Strange
that the finer and deeper nature, whether in man or woman, while
possessed of every other delicate instinct, should so often lack that
most invaluable one of preserving itself front contamination with what
is of a baser kind! Sometimes, it is true, the spiritual fountain is
kept pure by a wisdom within itself, and sparkles into the light of
heaven without a stain from the earthy strata through which it had
gushed upward. And sometimes, even here on earth, the pure mingles with
the pure, and the inexhaustible is recompensed with the infinite. But
these miracles, though he should claim the credit of them, are far
beyond the scope of such a superficial agent in human affairs as the
figure in the mysterious spectacles.
Again the door was opened, admitting the bustle of the city with a
fresher reverberation into the Intelligence Office. Now entered a man
of woe-begone and downcast look; it was such an aspect as if he had
lost the very soul out of his body, and had traversed all the world
over, searching in the dust of the highways, and along the shady
footpaths, and beneath the leaves of the forest, and among the sands of
the sea-shore, in hopes to recover it again. He had bent an anxious
glance along the pavement of the street as he came hitherward; he
looked also in the angle of the doorstep, and upon the floor of the
room; and, finally, coming up to the Man of Intelligence, he gazed
through the inscrutable spectacles which the latter wore, as if the
lost treasure might be hidden within his eyes.
“I have lost—” he began; and then he paused.
“Yes,” said the Intelligencer, “I see that you have lost,—but what?”