Tales of the Chesapeake Part 24

"Nanking," asked the houseless Alrichs, "is not Elsje pretty yet?"

"Not as pretty," answered Nanking, "as my little baby sister. I will carry n.o.body's doll but hers."

"Humph!" said Peter Alrichs, "you are not the big idiot I took you for!"

A BAYSIDE IDYL.

Basking on the Choptank pleasant Cambridge lies In the humid atmosphere under fluttered skies, And the oaks and willows their protection fling Round the court-house cl.u.s.ter and the public spring.

There the streets are cleanly and they meet oblique, Forced upon each other by the village creek Winding round the ancient lawns, till the site appears Like a moated fortress crumbling down with years.

Round the town the oysters grow within the coves, And the fertile cornfields bearing yellow loaves; And the wild duck flying o'er the parish spire Fall into the graveyard when the fowlers fire?

There the old armorial stones dwellers seldom read; There the ivy clambers like the rankest weed; There the Cambridge lawyers sometimes scale the wall To the grave of Helen, loveliest of all.

Even here the fairest of the little band Strangers call the fairest girls in Maryland, Like the peach her color ere its dyes are fast, And her form as slender as the virgin mast.

Like a vessel gliding with a net in tow, Up the street of evenings Helen seemed to flow, Leaving light behind her and a nameless spell Murmured in the young men, like an ocean sh.e.l.l.

Made too early conscious of her power to charm, Still unconscious ever love of men could harm, Voices whispered to her: "Beauty rare as thine Princes in the city never drank in wine!

"Hide it not in Cambridge! Cross the bay and see How a world delighted hastes to honor thee.

Seek the fortune-teller and thy future hear; There is empire yonder; there is thy career!"

Oh, the sad ambition and the speedy dart!

He, the fortune-reader, read poor Helen's heart; And a face created for the hearthstone's light-- Fishers tell its ruin as they scud by night.

Whisper, whisper, whisper! leaf and wave and gra.s.s; Look not sidewise, maiden, as the place you pa.s.s.

If you hear a restless spirit when you pray, 'Tis the voice that tempted Helen o'er the bay.

SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON'S NIGHT.

An extraordinary story, some say the recital of a dream, or scenes in somnambulism, is that of Andrew Waples, of Horntown, Va. He visited Saratoga twenty years ago, well-to-do, the owner of slaves, sloops, lands, and fisheries, and visits it now upon an income of $2000 a year, derived from boiling down fish into phosphates for the midland markets. He preserves, however, the habit and appearance of old days: that is to say, his chin is folded away under his lip like a reef in a mainsail; his cheek-bones hide his ears, so tusky and prominent are the former, and tipped with a varnish of red, like corns on old folks'

feet; he has a nose which is so long and bony that it seems to have been constructed in sections, like a tubular bridge, and to communicate with itself by relays of sensation. A straight, mournful, twinkling, yet aristocratic man was Andrew Waples, "befo' de waw, sah!

befo' de waw!"

He had no sooner arrived at Saratoga than he met some ancient boon companions, who took him off to the lake, exploded champagne, filled his lungs with cigar-smoke, and sent him to bed, the first night, with a decided thirst and no occasion to say his prayers. For it was Andrew's intention, being a mournful man of the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, to pray on every unusual occurrence. Piety is relative as well as real, but Andrew Waples on this occasion jumped into bed, said hic and amen, and "times befo' de waw," and went to sleep in the somnorific air of the Springs.

He awoke with a dry throat, a disposition to faint and surrender his stomach, and an irresistible propensity to walk abroad and drink of the waters. He looked at his watch: it was two o'clock, and Sat.u.r.day night. "Alas!" said Andrew Waples aloud, "the bars are closed. Even Morrissey has gone to bed, and the club-house is in darkness, but perhaps I can climb over the gate of some spring company, or find a fountain uninclosed. Yes, there is the High Rock Spring!"

He drew on his clothes partly, slipped his feet in slippers, and wrote on a piece of paper, which he conspicuously posted on the gas bracket:

"Andrew Waples, Gentleman (befo' de waw), departed from the United States Hotel, at two o'clock A. M., precisely. If any accident happens to him, seek at the High Rock Spring, or thereabouts."

It was a sad, green, ghostly moonlight streaming through the elms as Andrew Waples walked up Broadway. The moon appeared to be dredging for oysters amongst the clouds, circling around there by bars, islets, and shoals. Bits of spotted and mackerel-back sky swam like hosts of menhaden through the pearly sheen of the more open aerial main. The leaves of the tall domes and kissing branches of the elms, that peeped on either side into open windows of people asleep and told across the street to each other the secrets there, were now themselves heavy as if with surfeit of gossip and they drooped and hardly rustled. Not a tipsy waiter lurked in the shadows, not a skylarking couple of darkey lovers whispered on doorsteps. No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded the torpid night. The shuffling feet of Andrew Waples barely made watch-dogs growl in their dreams, and started his own heart with the concussions they produced on the arborescent and deeply-shadowed aisles of the after midnight. He saw the town-hall clock pallidly illuminated above its tower. The low frame villa of Chancellor Walworth, cowering amongst the pine-trees, expressed the burden of parricidal blood that had of late oppressed its memories. There were no murmurs from the court-room where Judge Barnard had been tried, but its deep silence seemed from the clock to tick: "Removed!

disqualified!" and "Disqualified! removed!"

Turning from Broadway to lesser streets of cheap hotels and plain boarding cottages, where weary women and girls had drudged all day long, and washerwomen moaned and fluting and ruffling were the amus.e.m.e.nts of the poor, Andrew Waples became haunted with the idea that Saratoga was poisoned, that every soul in the village was dead, and that he was to be the last man of the century to drink of the Springs. Nature and night were in the swoon of love or death. Parting their drowsy curtains went Waples through the m.u.f.fled echoes, impelled by nothing greater than a human thirst.

He saw his shadow, at length, fall down the steep stairs of the valley of High Rock Spring, as he stood at the top of the steps uncovered to the moon. It was a shadow nearly a hundred feet long, a high-cheeked head without a chin and all nose, like the profile of a mountain. But what was extraordinary was the total absence of an abdominal part to Mr. Waples' exaggerated shadow, for he distinctly saw a young maple-tree, in perfect moonlight, grow through the cavity where his stomach ought to have been.

"I must be hollow," said Andrew, as he looked,--"the frame of a stomach removed; for surely my whole figure is in blackness, except my bread-basket." But his fears were dissipated by the sound of voices, of gla.s.ses clinking and water running, and the evident semblance of life at the High Rock Spring in the ravine beneath, to which the steep stairs descended. At the same moment he descried another shadow propelled alongside his own, as if from some far distance in the rear a human object was slowly advancing to stand beside him.

There were very old wooden houses around this precipice or promontory of Saratoga, some of them a hundred years old, and decrepit and in ruins; for here, at the High Rock, was the original fountain of the village. As if from the cover of one of these old and decaying tenements came a person of venerable aspect, with a tray of gla.s.ses fastened to the top of a staff, like a great caster of bottles on a broomstick. As this person stood by the side of Andrew Waples, and planted his staff on the top step of the stairs, his prolonged shadow, falling in the valley, gave him the appearance of a gigantic Neptune, with a trident in his hand.

"Hallo!" exclaimed Mr. Waples, "are you a town scavenger, to be up at this time of the clock?"

The man replied, after a very curious and explosive sound of his lips, like the extraction of a cork from a bottle, "No, sir; I'm only the Great Dipper."

"Very good," resumed Mr. Waples. "Then, perhaps, you'll explain to me a very great optical delusion, or tell me that I'm drunk. Do you see our two shadows as they fall yonder on the ground, and amongst the tree-tops? Now, if I have any eyes in my head, there is a stomach in your shadow and no stomach whatever in mine."

"Quite right," answered the Great Dipper. "You are the mere rim of a former stomach. Abdominally, you are defunct."

Andrew Waples put his hand instinctively where his stomach was presumed to be, and he saw the hand of his shadow distinctly imitate the motion, and repeat it through his empty centre.

"This is Sir William Johnson's night," remarked the Great Dipper. "We have a large company of guests on this anniversary, and no gentleman is admitted with a stomach, nor any lady with a character. My whole force of dippers is on to-night, and I must be spry."

As the venerable man spoke, and ceased to speak, exploding before and after each utterance, it occurred to Mr. Waples that his voice had a sort of mineral-water gurgle, which was very refres.h.i.+ng to a thirsty man's ears. He followed, therefore, down the flight of rickety stairs and stood in the midst of a promenading party of many hundred people, variously dressed and in the costumes of several generations.

The canopy or pavilion of the spring, which, like a fairy temple, seemed to have been exhaled from in bubbles, was yet capped, as in the broad light of day, by a gilded eagle, from whose beak was suspended a bottle of the water, and no other light was shed upon the scene than the silver and golden radiance emitted together from this bottle, as if ten thousand infinitely small goldfish floated there in liquid quicksilver. The spring itself, flowing over its ancient mound of lime, iron and clay, like the venerable beard over the Arabian prophet's yellow breast, shed another light as if through a veil fluttered the molten fire of some pulsating crater. The whole scene of the narrow valley, the group of springs, the sandy walks, dark foliage, and in closing ridges took a pale yellow hue from the effervescing water and the irradiant bottle in the eagle's beak. The people walking to and fro and drinking and returning, all carried their hands upon their stomachs or sides, and sighed amidst their flirtations. Mr. Waples saw, despite their garments, which represented a hundred years and more of all kinds, from Continental uniforms and hunting s.h.i.+rts to brocades, plush velvets, and court suits, that not a being of all the mult.i.tude contained an abdomen. He stopped one large and portly man, who was carried on a litter, and said:

"Have you a window through you, too, old chap?"

"'s.h.!.+" exclaimed one of the supporters of the litter, who wore the feathers and attire of an Indian. "'Tis Sir William Johnson--he who receives to-night."

"Young man," exclaimed that great and first of Indian agents, "this is the spot where all people come to find their stomachs. Mine was lost one hundred and ten years ago. The Mohawks, my wards, then brought me through the forest to this spot. Faith! I was full of gout and humors, and took a drink from a gourd. One night in the year I walk from purgatory and quench my thirst at this font. The rest of the year I limp in the agonies of dyspepsia."

A large and short-set woman was walking in one of the paths, wearing almost royal robes, and her train was held up by a company of young gallants, some of whom whistled and trolled stanzas of foreign music.

"Can you tell me her name!" asked Waples, speaking to a bystander.

"It is Madame Rush, the daughter of the banker who rivalled Girard.

She was a patroness of arts and letters in her day, full of sentiment."

"But disguised in a stomacher!" interrupted our friend. The lady pa.s.sed him as he spoke, and, looking regretfully in his face, murmured:

"Avoid hot joints for supper! Terrapin must crawl again. Drink nothing but claret. Adieu!"

"Really," thought Andrew Waples, "this is a sort of ma.s.s meeting of human picture-frames. But here is one I know by his portrait--the G.o.d-like head, the oxen eyes, the majestic stalk of Daniel Webster."

He was about to address this ma.s.sive figure, when it turned and looked upon him with rolling orbs like diamonds in dark caves.