Twice-told tales
pursue the road to Stamford together, it being sometimes the policy of
these people to form a sort of league and confederacy.
“And the young lady too,” observed the gallant bibliopolist, bowing to
her profoundly, “and this foreign gentleman, as I understand, are on a
jaunt of pleasure to the same spot. It would add incalculably to my own
enjoyment, and I presume to that of my colleague and his friend, if
they could be prevailed upon to join our party.”
This arrangement met with approbation on all hands, nor were any of
those concerned more sensible of its advantages than myself, who had no
title to be included in it.
Having already satisfied myself as to the several modes in which the
four others attained felicity, I next set my mind at work to discover
what enjoyments were peculiar to the old “straggler,” as the people of
the country would have termed the wandering mendicant and prophet. As
he pretended to familiarity with the devil, so I fancied that he was
fitted to pursue and take delight in his way of life by possessing some
of the mental and moral characteristics—the lighter and more comic
ones—of the devil in popular stories. Among them might be reckoned a
love of deception for its own sake, a shrewd eye and keen relish for
human weakness and ridiculous infirmity, and the talent of petty fraud.
Thus to this old man there would be pleasure even in the
consciousness—so insupportable to some minds—that his whole life was a
cheat upon the world, and that, so far as he was concerned with the
public, his little cunning had the upper hand of its united wisdom.
Every day would furnish him with a succession of minute and pungent
triumphs—as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out of
the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a part
of my slender purse to his plump leather bag, or when some ostentatious
gentleman should throw a coin to the ragged beggar who was richer than
himself, or when—though he would not always be so decidedly
diabolical—his pretended wants should make him a sharer in the scanty
living of real indigence. And then what an inexhaustible field of
enjoyment, both as enabling him to discern so much folly and achieve
such quantities of minor mischief, was opened to his sneering spirit by
his pretensions to prophetic knowledge.
All this was a sort of happiness which I could conceive of, though I
had little sympathy with it. Perhaps, had I been then inclined to admit
it, I might have found that the roving life was more proper to him than
to either of his companions; for Satan, to whom I had compared the poor
man, has delighted, ever since the time of Job, in “wandering up and
down upon the earth,” and, indeed, a crafty disposition which operates
not in deep-laid plans, but in disconnected tricks, could not have an
adequate scope, unless naturally impelled to a continual change of
scene and society.
My reflections were here interrupted.
“Another visitor!” exclaimed the old showman.
The door of the wagon had been closed against the tempest, which was
roaring and blustering with prodigious fury and commotion and beating
violently against our shelter, as if it claimed all those homeless
people for its lawful prey, while we, caring little for the displeasure
of the elements, sat comfortably talking. There was now an attempt to
open the door, succeeded by a voice uttering some strange,
unintelligible gibberish which my companions mistook for Greek and I
suspected to be thieves’ Latin. However, the showman stepped forward
and gave admittance to a figure which made me imagine either that our
wagon had rolled back two hundred years into past ages or that the
forest and its old inhabitants had sprung up around us by enchantment.
It was a red Indian armed with his bow and arrow. His dress was a sort
of cap adorned with a single feather of some wild bird, and a frock of
blue cotton girded tight about him; on his breast, like orders of
knighthood, hung a crescent and a circle and other ornaments of silver,
while a small crucifix betokened that our father the pope had
interposed between the Indian and the Great Spirit whom he had
worshipped in his simplicity. This son of the wilderness and pilgrim of
the storm took his place silently in the midst of us. When the first
surprise was over, I rightly conjectured him to be one of the Penobscot
tribe, parties of which I had often seen in their summer excursions
down our Eastern rivers. There they paddle their birch canoes among the
coasting-schooners, and build their wigwam beside some roaring
mill-dam, and drive a little trade in basket-work where their fathers
hunted deer. Our new visitor was probably wandering through the country
toward Boston, subsisting on the careless charity of the people while
he turned his archery to profitable account by shooting at cents which
were to be the prize of his successful aim.
The Indian had not long been seated ere our merry damsel sought to draw
him into conversation. She, indeed, seemed all made up of sunshine in
the month of May, for there was nothing so dark and dismal that her
pleasant mind could not cast a glow over it; and the wild man, like a
fir tree in his native forest, soon began to brighten into a sort of
sombre cheerfulness. At length she inquired whether his journey had any
particular end or purpose.
“I go shoot at the camp-meeting at Stamford,” replied the Indian.
“And here are five more,” said the girl, “all aiming at the
camp-meeting too. You shall be one of us, for we travel with light
hearts; and, as for me, I sing merry songs and tell merry tales and am
full of merry thoughts, and I dance merrily along the road, so that
there is never any sadness among them that keep me company. But oh, you
would find it very dull indeed to go all the way to Stamford alone.”
My ideas of the aboriginal character led me to fear that the Indian
would prefer his own solitary musings to the gay society thus offered
him; on the contrary, the girl’s proposal met with immediate acceptance
and seemed to animate him with a misty expectation of enjoyment.
I now gave myself up to a course of thought which, whether it flowed
naturally from this combination of events or was drawn forth by a
wayward fancy, caused my mind to thrill as if I were listening to deep
music. I saw mankind in this weary old age of the world either enduring
a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if they
breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope but to
wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among
the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened
the sunshine of today. But there were some full of the primeval
instinct who preserved the freshness of youth to their latest years by
the continual excitement of new objects, new pursuits and new
associates, and cared little, though their birthplace might have been
here in New England, if the grave should close over them in Central
Asia. Fate was summoning a parliament of these free spirits;
unconscious of the impulse which directed them to a common centre, they
had come hither from far and near, and last of all appeared the
representatives of those mighty vagrants who had chased the deer during
thousands of years, and were chasing it now in the spirit-land.
Wandering down through the waste of ages, the woods had vanished around
his path; his arm had lost somewhat of its strength, his foot of its
fleetness, his mien of its wild regality, his heart and mind of their
savage virtue and uncultured force, but here, untamable to the routine
of artificial life, roving now along the dusty road as of old over the
forest-leaves,—here was the Indian still.
“Well,” said the old showman, in the midst of my meditations, “here is
an honest company of us—one, two, three, four, five, six—all going to
the camp-meeting at Stamford. Now, hoping no offence, I should like to
know where this young gentleman may be going?”
I started. How came I among these wanderers? The free mind that
preferred its own folly to another’s wisdom, the open spirit that found
companions everywhere—above all, the restless impulse that had so often
made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments,—these were my claims to be
of their society.
“My friends,” cried I, stepping into the centre of the wagon, “I am
going with you to the camp-meeting at Stamford.”
“But in what capacity?” asked the old showman, after a moment’s
silence. “All of us here can get our bread in some creditable way.
Every honest man should have his livelihood. You, sir, as I take it,
are a mere strolling gentleman.”
I proceeded to inform the company that when Nature gave me a propensity
to their way of life she had not left me altogether destitute of
qualifications for it, though I could not deny that my talent was less
respectable, and might be less profitable, than the meanest of theirs.
My design, in short, was to imitate the story-tellers of whom Oriental
travellers have told us, and become an itinerant novelist, reciting my
own extemporaneous fictions to such audiences as I could collect.
“Either this,” said I, “is my vocation, or I have been born in vain.”
The fortune-teller, with a sly wink to the company, proposed to take me
as an apprentice to one or other of his professions, either of which
undoubtedly would have given full scope to whatever inventive talent I
might possess. The bibliopolist spoke a few words in opposition to my
plan—influenced partly, I suspect, by the jealousy of authorship, and
partly by an apprehension that the _vivâ-voce_ practice would become
general among novelists, to the infinite detriment of the book trade.
Dreading a rejection, I solicited the interest of the merry damsel.
“‘Mirth,’” cried I, most aptly appropriating the words of L’Allegro,
“‘to thee I sue! Mirth, admit me of thy crew!rsquo;”
“Let us indulge the poor youth,” said Mirth, with a kindness which made
me love her dearly, though I was no such coxcomb as to misinterpret her
motives. “I have espied much promise in him. True, a shadow sometimes
flits across his brow, but the sunshine is sure to follow in a moment.
He is never guilty of a sad thought but a merry one is twin-born with
it. We will take him with us, and you shall see that he will set us all
a-laughing before we reach the camp-meeting at Stamford.” Her voice
silenced the scruples of the rest and gained me admittance into the
league; according to the terms of which, without a community of goods
or profits, we were to lend each other all the aid and avert all the
harm that might be in our power.
This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe
of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The
old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of
the pigmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book;
tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen and ladies all seemed to share in the
spirit of the occasion, and the Merry Andrew played his part more
facetiously than ever, nodding and winking particularly at me. The
young foreigner flourished his fiddle-bow with a master’s hand, and
gave an inspiring echo to the showman’s melody. The bookish man and the
merry damsel started up simultaneously to dance, the former enacting
the double shuffle in a style which everybody must have witnessed ere
election week was blotted out of time, while the girl, setting her arms
akimbo with both hands at her slim waist, displayed such light rapidity
of foot and harmony of varying attitude and motion that I could not
conceive how she ever was to stop, imagining at the moment that Nature
had made her, as the old showman had made his puppets, for no earthly
purpose but to dance jigs. The Indian bellowed forth a succession of