Twice-told tales
some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to wet my
whistle.—Thank you, sir!—My dear hearers, when the world shall have
been regenerated by my instrumentality, you will collect your useless
vats and liquor-casks into one great pile and make a bonfire in honor
of the town-pump. And when I shall have decayed like my predecessors,
then, if you revere my memory, let a marble fountain richly sculptured
take my place upon this spot. Such monuments should be erected
everywhere and inscribed with the names of the distinguished champions
of my cause. Now, listen, for something very important is to come next.
There are two or three honest friends of mine—and true friends I know
they are—who nevertheless by their fiery pugnacity in my behalf do put
me in fearful hazard of a broken nose, or even a total overthrow upon
the pavement and the loss of the treasure which I guard.—I pray you,
gentlemen, let this fault be amended. Is it decent, think you, to get
tipsy with zeal for temperance and take up the honorable cause of the
town-pump in the style of a toper fighting for his brandy-bottle? Or
can the excellent qualities of cold water be no otherwise exemplified
than by plunging slapdash into hot water and woefully scalding
yourselves and other people? Trust me, they may. In the moral warfare
which you are to wage—and, indeed, in the whole conduct of your
lives—you cannot choose a better example than myself, who have never
permitted the dust and sultry atmosphere, the turbulence and manifold
disquietudes, of the world around me to reach that deep, calm well of
purity which may be called my soul. And whenever I pour out that soul,
it is to cool earth’s fever or cleanse its stains.
One o’clock! Nay, then, if the dinner-bell begins to speak, I may as
well hold my peace. Here comes a pretty young girl of my acquaintance
with a large stone pitcher for me to fill. May she draw a husband while
drawing her water, as Rachel did of old!—Hold out your vessel, my dear!
There it is, full to the brim; so now run home, peeping at your sweet
image in the pitcher as you go, and forget not in a glass of my own
liquor to drink “SUCCESS TO THE TOWN-PUMP.”
THE GREAT CARBUNCLE[4]
A MYSTERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
At nightfall once in the olden time, on the rugged side of one of the
Crystal Hills, a party of adventurers were refreshing themselves after
a toilsome and fruitless quest for the Great Carbuncle. They had come
thither, not as friends nor partners in the enterprise, but each, save
one youthful pair, impelled by his own selfish and solitary longing for
this wondrous gem. Their feeling of brotherhood, however, was strong
enough to induce them to contribute a mutual aid in building a rude hut
of branches and kindling a great fire of shattered pines that had
drifted down the headlong current of the Amonoosuck, on the lower bank
of which they were to pass the night. There was but one of their
number, perhaps, who had become so estranged from natural sympathies by
the absorbing spell of the pursuit as to acknowledge no satisfaction at
the sight of human faces in the remote and solitary region whither they
had ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay between them and the
nearest settlement, while scant a mile above their heads was that bleak
verge where the hills throw off their shaggy mantle of forest-trees and
either robe themselves in clouds or tower naked into the sky. The roar
of the Amonoosuck would have been too awful for endurance if only a
solitary man had listened while the mountain-stream talked with the
wind.
The adventurers, therefore, exchanged hospitable greetings and welcomed
one another to the hut where each man was the host and all were the
guests of the whole company. They spread their individual supplies of
food on the flat surface of a rock and partook of a general repast; at
the close of which a sentiment of good-fellowship was perceptible among
the party, though repressed by the idea that the renewed search for the
Great Carbuncle must make them strangers again in the morning. Seven
men and one young woman, they warmed themselves together at the fire,
which extended its bright wall along the whole front of their wigwam.
As they observed the various and contrasted figures that made up the
assemblage, each man looking like a caricature of himself in the
unsteady light that flickered over him, they came mutually to the
conclusion that an odder society had never met in city or wilderness,
on mountain or plain.
The eldest of the group—a tall, lean, weatherbeaten man some sixty
years of age—was clad in the skins of wild animals whose fashion of
dress he did well to imitate, since the deer, the wolf and the bear had
long been his most intimate companions. He was one of those ill-fated
mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom in their early youth the
Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness and became the passionate
dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew him as “the
Seeker,” and by no other name. As none could remember when he first
took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the Saco that
for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle he had been condemned
to wander among the mountains till the end of time, still with the same
feverish hopes at sunrise, the same despair at eve. Near this miserable
Seeker sat a little elderly personage wearing a high-crowned hat shaped
somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond the sea—a Doctor
Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by
continually stooping over charcoal-furnaces and inhaling unwholesome
fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It was told of
him—whether truly or not—that at the commencement of his studies he had
drained his body of all its richest blood and wasted it, with other
inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment, and had never
been a well man since. Another of the adventurers was Master Ichabod
Pigsnort, a weighty merchant and selectman of Boston, and an elder of
the famous Mr. Norton’s church. His enemies had a ridiculous story that
Master Pigsnort was accustomed to spend a whole hour after prayer-time
every morning and evening in wallowing naked among an immense quantity
of pine-tree shillings, which were the earliest silver coinage of
Massachusetts. The fourth whom we shall notice had no name that his
companions knew of, and was chiefly distinguished by a sneer that
always contorted his thin visage, and by a prodigious pair of
spectacles which were supposed to deform and discolor the whole face of
nature to this gentleman’s perception. The fifth adventurer likewise
lacked a name, which was the greater pity, as he appeared to be a poet.
He was a bright-eyed man, but woefully pined away, which was no more
than natural if, as some people affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog,
morning mist and a slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced
with moonshine whenever he could get it. Certain it is that the poetry
which flowed from him had a smack of all these dainties. The sixth of
the party was a young man of haughty mien and sat somewhat apart from
the rest, wearing his plumed hat loftily among his elders, while the
fire glittered on the rich embroidery of his dress and gleamed
intensely on the jewelled pommel of his sword. This was the lord De
Vere, who when at home was said to spend much of his time in the
burial-vault of his dead progenitors rummaging their mouldy coffins in
search of all the earthly pride and vainglory that was hidden among
bones and dust; so that, besides his own share, he had the collected
haughtiness of his whole line of ancestry. Lastly, there was a handsome
youth in rustic garb, and by his side a blooming little person in whom
a delicate shade of maiden reserve was just melting into the rich glow
of a young wife’s affection. Her name was Hannah, and her husband’s
Matthew—two homely names, yet well enough adapted to the simple pair
who seemed strangely out of place among the whimsical fraternity whose
wits had been set agog by the Great Carbuncle.
Beneath the shelter of one hut, in the bright blaze of the same fire,
sat this varied group of adventurers, all so intent upon a single
object that of whatever else they began to speak their closing words
were sure to be illuminated with the Great Carbuncle. Several related
the circumstances that brought them thither. One had listened to a
traveller’s tale of this marvellous stone in his own distant country,
and had immediately been seized with such a thirst for beholding it as
could only be quenched in its intensest lustre. Another, so long ago as
when the famous Captain Smith visited these coasts, had seen it blazing
far at sea, and had felt no rest in all the intervening years till now
that he took up the search. A third, being encamped on a
hunting-expedition full forty miles south of the White Mountains, awoke
at midnight and beheld the Great Carbuncle gleaming like a meteor, so
that the shadows of the trees fell backward from it. They spoke of the
innumerable attempts which had been made to reach the spot, and of the
singular fatality which had hitherto withheld success from all
adventurers, though it might seem so easy to follow to its source a
light that overpowered the moon and almost matched the sun. It was
observable that each smiled scornfully at the madness of every other in
anticipating better fortune than the past, yet nourished a
scarcely-hidden conviction that he would himself be the favored one. As
if to allay their too sanguine hopes, they recurred to the Indian
traditions that a spirit kept watch about the gem and bewildered those
who sought it either by removing it from peak to peak of the higher
hills or by calling up a mist from the enchanted lake over which it
hung. But these tales were deemed unworthy of credit, all professing to
believe that the search had been baffled by want of sagacity or
perseverance in the adventurers, or such other causes as might
naturally obstruct the passage to any given point among the intricacies
of forest, valley and mountain.
In a pause of the conversation the wearer of the prodigious spectacles
looked round upon the party, making each individual in turn the object
of the sneer which invariably dwelt upon his countenance.
“So, fellow-pilgrims,” said he, “here we are, seven wise men and one
fair damsel, who doubtless is as wise as any graybeard of the company.
Here we are, I say, all bound on the same goodly enterprise. Methinks,
now, it were not amiss that each of us declare what he proposes to do
with the Great Carbuncle, provided he have the good hap to clutch
it.—What says our friend in the bearskin? How mean you, good sir, to
enjoy the prize which you have been seeking the Lord knows how long
among the Crystal Hills?”
“How enjoy it!” exclaimed the aged Seeker, bitterly. “I hope for no
enjoyment from it--that folly has past, long ago! I keep up the search
for this accursed stone, because the vain ambition of my youth has
become a fate upon me, in old age. The pursuit alone is my
strength--the energy of my soul--the warmth of my blood, and the pith
and marrow of my bones! Were I to turn my back upon it, I should fall
down dead, on the hither side of the Notch, which is the gate-way of
this mountain region. Yet, not to have my wasted life time back again,
would I give up my hopes of the Great Carbuncle! Having found it, I
shall bear it to a certain cavern that I wot of, and there, grasping it
in my arms, lie down and die, and keep it buried with me for ever.”
“Oh, wretch, regardless of the interests of science!” cried Doctor
Cacaphodel, with philosophic indignation. “Thou art not worthy to
behold, even from afar off, the lustre of this most precious gem that