Tales of the Chesapeake Part 25

"Brandy," said the great man, "'tis the drink of a gentleman, and the stimulus of oratory. But public life requires a thousand stomachs. Who could have saved the Const.i.tution on only one?"

"Poor ghost!" thought Andrew Waples. "Yet here is a milder man, also of mighty girth, like the frame of a mastodon, transparent. Your name, my friend?"

"John Meredith Clayton, of Delaware! I filled my paunch of midnights with chicken soup. I arose from bed to riot in gravy. Ye who have livers and intestines, think of my fame and fate!"

The old man sobbed as he receded, and Waples had only time to get a glimpse of the next trio before they were upon him.

"I agree with Commodore Vanderbilt," said the other, the wearer of a rubicund face, and great blue eyes. "My _forte_ was oysters and economy. I grew wondrous fat and conservative, and one day awoke with a stomach that exclaimed, 'I have become round, so that you can trundle me for the exercise you deprived me of.' Henceforward, not even the unequalled advantages of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad gave me pleasure. I live like a skeleton world, without an inner globe, without a paunch. Beware?"

"Well," cried Mr. Waples, "it is a singular thing that the conservative as well as the volatile lose their full habits. How is it with Colonel Tom Scott, I wonder?"

"No rest," exclaimed a full-necked man, "I eat at figures, and think in my sleeping car. Go slow, go fast, young man, 'But it is even, heads I win, stomach you lose!'"

The s.h.a.ggy iron-gray whiskers and hair of Charles Sumner were well known to Mr. Waples, as that great Senator strutted down the maple paths. "You here, also!" shouted Mr. Waples.

"Ay!" answered the champion. "Freedom is not worth enjoying without the gastric juice. The taste of Chateau Yquem pursues me through eternity. There are times when Plymouth Rock is a pennyweight in value compared to High Rock at Saratoga, and all the acts of Congress foolish beside a pint of Congress water!"

A tall and elegant man came by and said: "I was the reviver of the running turf. My stomach was tough as my four-in-hand. 'Twas Angostura nipped my bud. It was, by Saint Jerome!"

Another pa.s.ser, with a dark skin and a merry twinkle, said: "Uncle John's under the weather to-night. But he can lay out another generation yet. While there's sleep there's hope. Cecil's the word!

Give me me an order."

A tremendous fellow, with a foot a little gouty, gulped down a gallon of the water, and said: "Rufe Andrews never gives up while on that high rock he builds his church!"

"The way to eat a sheep's head," exclaimed a florid man, "is with plain sauce. Clams are not kind after nightfall. Champagne destroyed the coats of W. Wickham, Mayor of the _bon vivants_. _Sic transit_ overtook my rapid transit. Heigh-ho!"

"Hear me lisp a couplet," said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had no paunch, he went blind."

"Halt! 'Sdeath! is't I, that once could put the whole Brazilian court to bed, who prowls these grounds for midnight water now? I am the Chevalier Webb. Who says it is dyspepsia? I will spit him upon my walking-staff."

"Ees! 'tis good drinkin' at the fount when one can naught sleep.

Johnson, of Congress Spring, the resident cherub; that's my name. I tipped the rosy, and it tripped on me. What measure I used to take around the bread-basket!"

"The top of the foine midnight to you!" said Richard O'Gorman. "I'm here, my lords and gentle folk, to find a portion of my appet.i.te. It was not so when I could lead a revolution in a cabbage garden."

So went past Uncle Dan Sanford and Father Farrell, and arm-in-arm, on mutual errands of thirst, Judge Hilton and Joseph Seligman.

"Shudge," said Seligman, "when you refushed me a room, it was only becaush you had no stummicks? Heigh, Shudge?"

"Ay, Joseph, me broth of a darlint," answered Hilton, "when a spalpeen has no stummick, he speaks without circ.u.m--spection. Ye can impty yer stummick wherever ye loike over the furniture, if ye'll fill this aching void."

So went the procession. All walking with hands laid heavily on their paunches, or where they used to be. Lovers had lost the light of interest from their eyes, wedded people the light of retrospection, statesmen the pride of intellect, princes and legates the pride of power. Wealth flashed in a thousand diamonds to contrast with the heavy eyes that had no vanity in them, and religion wore the asceticism of everlasting gloom instead of the hope of immortal life.

As Mr. Andrew Waples beheld these things, and felt his thirst impel him toward the fountain of the High Rock, he became sensible of a wonderful change in the proportions of that object. It had always been a mound or cone of sand, clay, magnesia, and lime, well oxidized, and made rusty-red by the particles of iron in the composition deposited with the other materials, through ages of overflow. It had never been above three feet in height, and of little more diameter than a man's stature. The water, flowing through its middle, sparkled and discharged diamond showers of bubbles, and ran down the ochre-besmeared sides, to disappear in the ground, the cavity through which it came not more than ten inches wide. Such had been the dimensions of the High Rock Spring.

But it was now a mountain, rising high in the air, and flowing crystal and gold, like a volcano in an eruption of jewels. The pyrites of sulphur and motes of iron, that formerly gleamed in the rills that trickled down its slopes, were now big as cascades, filled with carbuncles and rocks of amethyst. A mist of soft splendor, like the light of stars crushed to dust and diffused around the mountain's head, revealed an immense mult.i.tudes of people scaling the slopes, and drinking; and some were raising their hands to Heaven in praise, and some were drawing the water from the mountain's base by flumes and troughs. This extensive prospect fell to a foreground of people, such as Mr. Waples had been mingling with, and these were clamoring and supplicating for water faster than a hundred dippers there could pa.s.s it up. The dippers were of all garbs and periods, from Indians and rustics to boys in cadet uniform. The vessels with which they dipped were of all shapes and metals, from conch sh.e.l.ls and calabashes to cups of transparent china, and goblets of gold and silver. Amongst the dippers, conspicuous by his benevolent face and clothing of a b.u.t.ternut color, was the Great Dipper himself, directing operations.

"Drink freely!" he exclaimed, "for the night is going by. Sir William Johnson has ordered his litter, and the company is breaking up. Drink while you may, for the sun is soon to arise, and ye who have no stomachs will be exposed and disgraced."

"Hark ye! old friend," whispered Andrew Waples to the Great Dipper, "are there here people alive, as well as dead people, and why do they fear exposure?"

The Great Dipper replied: "n.o.body can be said to live who has lost his stomach. We make no other distinction here. There are thousands who have lost them, however, and who deceive mankind. Even these, you perceive, who drink at the High Rock Spring, flirt while they feel unutterable gloom, and so are dead women above the ground tied to living men, and men without a human hope of health mated to joyous beauty and animation."

It seemed at this point that Mr. Waples shrank away down to the ground, and the Great Dipper loomed up high as the mountain of High Rock. His drinking gla.s.ses were as large as Mr. Waples' body; he was a mighty giant, clad in colors like those of the overflowing mountain.

"Old chap," cried Mr. Waples, "methinks your clothing up there is of much age and tarnish. Tell me its material?"

A voice came down the long ravines of the mountain like rolling thunder. "It's calcareous tufa I'm a-wearing, wove on me by exudation and accretion in the past two thousand years."

At this point the head of the Great Dipper was quite invisible in the clouds, but the tray of gla.s.ses he carried, which were now big as barrels or full-sized casks, was set down on Mr. Waples' toe. As he sought to get out of the way a torrent of water washed him up and away, and he was spilled into one of the gla.s.ses; and then, as it appeared, he was raised an inconceivable distance in the air and plunged down like a bursted balloon from the sky to the sea, and he found himself immersed in mineral water and rapidly descending, against the current, toward the centre of the earth!

Before Mr. Waples could get his breath he was landed in a bar or shoal of mineral salt, which came nearly to the surface of the torrent in which he found himself, and the current of this torrent was ascending toward the surface, as full of mineral substances as a freshet is full of saw-logs. Explosions of gas, loud and rapid as the guns in a naval battle, took place on every side. The walls of the inclosure made a large and almost regular cave or tunnel of blue marl, and in the contrary way from the course of the stream. Mr. Waples sank along the sides of the cave in the swash or backflow, until he arrived at a grand archway of limestone, riven from a ma.s.s of slate. A voice from the roof of the archway, whispering like a sigh of pain, articulated shrilly,

"Who goes back?"

Waples discerned, in the joint or junction of the arch a huge deformed object, whose hands were caught between the ma.s.ses of stone, and he still desperately pulled to divide them, so that the torrent could escape through. The eyes of this object rolled in pain, but he gave no sign of relinquis.h.i.+ng his hold, and again the painful whisper skipped through the abyss, "Who goes back from the alluvial?" Mr. Waples got a breathful of air from an explosion of bubbles, and boldly replied, "The Great Dipper's a.s.sistant."

"Tell him," whispered the hunchback in the roof, "that Priam, the Fault Finder, is holding the strata back, but wants the relief to come on three centuries hence, that I may spit upon my hands."

Mr. Waples had no time to reply, for a large bubble of carbonic acid gas burst at that moment, and blew him through the gap or "fault" of the rock, into the coldest and clammiest cavern he had ever trodden.

From every part of the walls, ceilings, and floor exuded moisture, which flowed off in rills and large ca.n.a.ls, until they formed the torrent that disappeared at the Fault Finder's Archway.

"Magnesia, faugh!" exclaimed Mr. Waples, unconscious that he was in the presence of somebody.

"You don't like Magnesia, then?" rejoined a large, spongy object on the floor, whose forehead perspired while he looked up through the chalky-white sockets of sightless eyes. "Why, he's a sixth part of all that's drunk at the springs. Here, I'll call him up. Come Magnesia!

come Potas.h.!.+ come Lime, Soda, Lithia, and Baryta! Come ye all to the presence of Prince Saturation."

There glided to the Sponge's feet a number of leather-looking beings, of broad, circular faces, and to every face a tail was appended on the other side.

"The gentleman don't like our laboratory," exclaimed the Sponge, purring the while like a cat. "Apply your suckers to him, ye percolating angels, and draw him to the forests of Fernandes!"

Mr. Waples felt a hundred little wafers of suction take hold of his body, and a sense of great compression, as if he was being pulled through a mortar bed. He opened his eyes on the summit of a stalagmite in a vast thicket or swamp of overthrown and decaying trees. Birds of buried ages, whose long, bittern-like cries flopped wofully through the silence, made ever and anon a call to each other, like the Nemesis of century calling to century. One of these birds, having authority and standing on one leg, observed to Mr. Waples, in a very philosophical manner:

"Stranger, are you of the Fungi family?"

"No, Fernandes," answered our bold adventurer; "I live nearer the phosphates when at home, and it's a good article."

A mournful chorus of croons from the loons went round the solitude.

"Phosphates! phew! Phosphates! phew!"

"This apartment," exclaimed the one-legged bird, "is exclusively for fungi of the old families. Here we rot piecemeal and furnish gas to the nine-thousandth generation after us. By our decay the springs are fed with bubbles. Here is the world as it fell in the floral period, and our boughs are budding anew in the Eldorado of the waters above us."

"Phosphates! phew!" shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as Mr. Waples' stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental clock, the griffin-bird finally let go. Mr. Waples was propelled at least six miles out of gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake.

Nothing affected its loveliness but an oppressive shadow that came from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely buoyant waves. No sh.o.r.es were visible, but distant mountains on one side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that ran as if on errands for the spirit above. Broad, submissive, unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint. Mr. Waples knew the power it obeyed to be that prostrate, cloud-like, overbrooding presence, far above, with outlines like a mountain range. The silent sea was the water-trough of Apalachia, the western d.y.k.e of the deluge of Noah. The oppressive spirit, stretching overhead, was Bellydown, or the thing that brooded over the waters of chaos, known to schoolmasters as Atmospheric Pressure.

Mr. Waples saw it all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break in the strata at the arch of the Fault Finder.

But who had ever pa.s.sed back against the current of the earth's barometry, from the spa to the reservoir, like Andrew Waples, of Horntown, Eastern Sh.o.r.e of Virginia?