University of Virginia Library

4. IV.
A FEW SPECIMENS OF HUMANITY.

In one of those thousand and one vein-like streets
which cross and recross the mercantile heart of
Gotham, is situated a red brick edifice, which, like
the beggar who solicits your charity in the Park,
has seen better days.

In the time of our Knickerbocker sires, it was
an aristocratic dwelling fronting on a fashionable
street, and “Jeems,” in green livery, opened the
hall door. The street was a quiet, orderly street in
those days—a certain air of conscious respectability
hung about it. Sometimes a private cabriolet
rolled augustly along; and of summer evenings the

city beaux, with extraordinary shoe-buckles, might
have been seen promenading the grass-fringed side-walks.
To-day it is a miasmatic, miserable, muddy
thoroughfare. Your ears are startled by the “Extray
'rival of the 'Rabia,” and the omnibuses dash
through the little confined street with a perfect madness.
Instead of the white-kided, be-ruffled gallants
of Eld, you meet a hurrying throng of pale, anxious
faces, with tare, tret and speculation in their eyes.

It is a business street, for Mammon has banished
Fashion to the golden precincts of Fifth Avenue.
The green of Jeems' livery is, like himself, invisible.
He has departed this life—gone, like Hiawatha,
to the Land of the Hereafter—to the land of spirits,
where we can conceive him to be in his element;
but he has a “town residence” in an obscure
graveyard, with his name and “recommendation”
on a stone door-plate. His mundane superiors are
reclining beneath the shadow of St. Paul's steeple,
where they are regaled with some delectable music
if you would only think so) from the balcony of
(the Museum opposite, and have the combined benefit
of Barnum's scenic-artist and the Drummond
light.

The massive door-plate, and highly polished, distroted
knocker, no longer grace the oaken panels of
number 85; but a republican sign over the family-looking

door-way tells you that “the front room,
second floor,” is occupied by Messrs. Flint & Snarle.
After passing up a flight of broad, uncarpeted stairs,
you again see the name of that respectable firm
painted on a light of ground glass set in the office
door. Once on the other side of that threshold,
you breathe mercantile air. There have been so
many brain-trying interest calculations worked out
on those high desks, that the very atmosphere, figuratively
speaking, is mathematical.

The sign should not read Flint & Snarle, for
Snarle has been dead six months, and it is not
pleasant to contemplate a name without an owner—
it is not to every one, but Mr. Flint likes to read
the sign, and think that Snarle is dead. He was
the reverse of Flint, and that his name should
have been Snarle at all is odd, for in life he was the
quintessence of quietness, and the oil of good nature.
But Flint is well named; he is chalcedony
at heart. Nobody says this, but everybody knows
it. Nell, the pretty match-girl, who sells her wares
in Wall-street, never approaches him, nor the newsboys;
and blind men, with sagacious, half-fed dogs,
steer clear of him by instinct. He doesn't tolerate
paupers, and Italian hand-organs with monkey
accompaniments—not he.

The man who has not as much money as the

surviving senior of Flint & Snarle, is a dog—in
Flint's distinguished estimation. His God is not
that divine Presence, whose thought
Flint's God is Gold.—

Flint is about fifty-three years of age; but if
you could forget his gray hair, and look only at
those small, piercing black eyes, you would hardly
think him forty. His black dress-coat is buttoned
around his somewhat attenuated form, and he wears
a stiff white cravat because it looks religious. In
this respect, and perhaps in others, you will find
Flint's prototype on every corner—people who look
religious, if religion can be associated with the
aspect of an undertaker.

It is Monday morning.

Mr. Flint sits in his private office reading the
letters. There is a window cut in the wall, and
he glances through it now and then, eyeing the
book-keeper as if the poor careworn fellow were
making false entries. On a high consumptive-looking
stool sits the office boy, filing away answered
letters and sundry bills paid. The stool seems so
high and the boy so small, that he at once suggests
some one occupying a dangerous position—at
a mast-head or on the golden ball of a church-steeple.
For thus risking his life, he receives “thirty
dollars per year, and clothing.” We like to have
forgotten that. The said clothing consists of one
white cravat full of hinges, and a dilapidated coat,
twelve sizes too large for him, his widowed mother
supplying the deficiency.

Save the monotonous ticking of a thick-set, croupy
clock, and the nervous scratching of pens, not a
sound is heard.

Mr. Flint in deep thought, with his thumbs lost
in the arm-holes of a white vest, paces up and
down his limited sanctum, just as a thoughtful-eyed,
velvet-mouthed leopard walks its confined
cage, only waiting for a chance to put its paws
on somebody. The stool on which the boy is sitting
is a rickety concern, and its creakings annoy Mr.
Flint, who comes out, and looks over the orphan's

shoulder. If his lynx eyes discover a document
incorrectly filed, he pinches the delinquent's ears,
till he (the orphan) is as red in the face as an
August sunset. Mr. Flint chuckles when he gets
back to his desk, and seems to enjoy it immensely,
for he drums out an exhilarating dead march with his
long, wiry fingers on the cover of the letter-book.
The pale book-keeper—his hair and eyes are darker
than when we first saw him sitting with little Bell
at “the round window” in the Old House—continues
to write assiduously; and the orphan thinks
that he hears fire-bells, his ears ring so.

He's an unfortunate atom of humanity, that office-boy.
He was never young. He never passed through
the degrading cycles of infancy—never had any
marbles or hoops: his limbs were never ignominiously
confined by those “triangular arrangements”
incidental to babyhood. At five, when other children
are bumping their heads over steep stairs, he
smoked cinnamon segars, and was a precocious,
astute little villain at seven. For thirty-six months
he folded books for Harper & Brothers, and at
the advanced age of ten years three months, was
bound over to the tender mercies of Flint & Snarle
for “thirty dollars per year and clothing, (so the
indentures read;) but as he is charged with all
the inkstands demolished during the term, and one

gross of imaginary lead pencils, he generally has
about twenty-five dollars to his credit on the 1st of
January, which Flint generously offers to keep for
him at four per cent. interest, and which offer the
ungrateful orphan “firmly but respectfully” declines.

“Mortimer!” cries Mr. Flint, in a quick, snarly
voice from the inner office.

The book-keeper lays down the pen which he
has just dipped in the ink, and disappears in the
little room. Mr. Flint is turning over the leaves
of the invoice book.

“In thirteen pages there are no less than two
blots and five erasures. You have grown careless
in your penmanship lately;” and Mr. Flint closes
the book with a report like that of a pocket-pistol,
and opens it again. One would suppose the office-boy
to be shot directly through the heart; but he
survives, and is attacked with a wonderful fit of
industry.

“Do you write in your sleep?” inquires Mr. Flint,
with a quiet insolence.

Mortimer thinks how often he has toiled over
those same pages at hours when he should have
been sleeping—hours taken from his life. But he
makes no reply. He only bites his lips, and lets his
eyes flash. Suddenly a thought strikes him, and,
bending over Mr. Flint's shoulder, as if to examine

more closely his careless chirography, he takes a
small key from an open drawer in the escritoire behind
him, and drops it into his vest-pocket. After
receiving a petulant reprimand, Mortimer returns
to his desk; and again that weary, weary pen
scratches over the paper.

After the bank deposit is made up, and Mr. Flint
looks over the bill-book, and startles the orphan
from a state of semi-somnolency, he goes on 'Change.
He is no sooner out, than Mortimer throws Tim a
bit of silver coin.

“Get some apples for yourself, Tim.”

Tim (he's small of his age) slides down from the
high stool with agility, while his two eyes look like
interrogation points. He is wondering at this sudden
outbreak of munificence, for though “Mr. Mortimer”
always had a kind word for Tim, and tried
to extricate him from the web of mistakes which
Tim was forever spinning around himself, yet Tim
never knew him to come down with the “block tin”
before, as he eloquently expressed it; and he looks
at Mortimer all the time he is getting his cap, and
pauses a moment at the door to see if he doesn't
repent.

When Tim's feet cease sounding on the stairs,
Mortimer goes into the back office, and with the
key which he had taken from the drawer, unlocks

a small iron hand-safe. His trembling fingers turn
over package after package; at last he finds one
which seems to be the object of his search. This
he hastily conceals in the bosom of his coat. After
carefully re-locking the safe, he approaches the
escritoire to return the purloined key, but to his dismay
he finds the drawer locked. The one above
it, however, is unfastened. Drawing this out, he
places the key in its right compartment.

Mortimer, in searching for the paper which he
has hidden in his bosom, had removed several others
from the safe; but in his nervousness he had
neglected to replace a small morocco case. He
discovers his negligence, and hears foot-falls on the
stairs at the same moment. There is no time to
re-open the chest: he wraps the case in his handkerchief,
and resumes his place at the desk.

Tim returns munching the remains of a gigantic
apple, and bearing about him a convicting smell of
peanuts. Suddenly Mr. Flint enters, and Tim is
necessitated to swallow the core of his russet without
that usual preparatory mastication which nature's
kindly law suggests. Mr. Flint has made a
capital bargain on 'Change, and his face is lighted
up with a smile, if fancy can coax such an expression
into one. It looks like a gas-light in an undertaker's
window.

It is five o'clock. Mr. Flint goes home to doze
over a diminutive glass of sherry. He holds it up
between his eyes and the light, smiling to see the
liquid jewels, and wishes that they were real rubies.
Flint! they are red tears, and not jewels which
glisten in your glass, for you crushed the poor, and
took advantage of the unfortunate to buy this
pleasant blood which pulses in your brittle chalice!

That night he thought of a pair of blue, innocent
eyes which once looked pleadingly in his—of two
tiny arms that were once wound fondly around his
neck. Those eyes haunted him into the misty realm
of dreams, where myriads of little arms were
stretched out to him; and he turned restlessly on
his pillow. Ah, Flint, there is an invisible and
powerful spirit in the heart of every man that will
speak. It whispers to the criminal in his cell; and
the downy pillows and sumptuous drapery around
the couch of Wealth cannot keep it away at midnight.

There is not a house but has its skeleton. There
is a ghastly one in Flint's.

The silvery lips in Trinity steeple chime the hour
of eleven; St. Paul's catch it up, and hosts of belfrys
toss the hour to and fro like a shuttle-cork.
Then the goblin bells hush themselves to sleep again
in their dizzy nests, murmuring, murmuring!—and

the pen of the pale book-keeper keeps time with
the ticking of the office time-piece.

It is nearly twelve o'clock when he reaches the
door of a common two-story house in Marion-street.
The door is opened before he can turn the bolt
with his night-key, and the whitest possible little
hand presses his. He draws it within his own, and
places his arm around the daintiest little waist that
ever submitted to the operation. Then the two
enter the front parlor, where the dim light falls on
Mortimer and a beautiful girl on the verge of
womanhood. She looks into his face, and his lips
touch a tress of chestnut hair which has fallen over
his shoulder.

“You are very pale. Have you been unwell to-day?”

“No, Daisy,” and he bends down and kisses her.

“Why do you persist in sitting up for me? I
shall scold if you spoil your cheeks. Kiss me,
Daisy.”

The girl pouts, and declares she won't, as she
coquettishly twines her arms around his neck, and
Mortimer has such a kiss as all Flint's bank stock
could not buy him—a pure, earnest kiss. He was
rich, poor in the world's eye, richer than Flint, with
his corpulent money bags, God pity him!

They sit a long while without speaking. Mortimer
breaks the silence.

“We are very poor, Daisy.”

“Yes, but happy.”

“Sometimes. To-night I am not; I am weary of
this daily toiling. The world is not a workshop
to wear out souls in. Man has perverted its use.
Life, and thought, and brain, are but crucibles to
smelt gold in. Nobleness is made the slave of
avarice, just as a pure stream is taught to turn a
mill-wheel and become foul and muddied. The rich
are scornful, and the poor sorrowful. O, Daisy, such
things should not be! My heart beats when I think
how poorly you and your mother are living.”

“O, how much we owe you, Mortimer! you are
selling your life for us. From morning till night,
day after day, you have been our slave. Poor,
dear Mortimer, how can we thank you? We can
only give you love and prayers. You will not let
me help you. Last night, when you found me
embroidering a collar, a bit of work which Mrs.
Potiphar had kindly given me, you pleasantly cut it
in pieces with your pen-knife, and then pawned your
gold pencil to pay for ruining Mrs. Potiphar's muslin—too
proud to have me work!”

“Why will you pain me, darling? I was complaining
for others, not myself. I do not toil as

thousands do. I am impulsive and irascible, and do
not mean all I say. I am ungrateful; my heart
should be full of gratitude to-night, for the cloud
which has hung over me the last six months has
shown its silver lining.”

“What do you mean?” cries Daisy.

“Do you know that you are an heiress?” asks
Mortimer, gaily.

Daisy laughs at the idea, and mockingly says,
“Yes.”

“An heiress to a good name, Daisy! which is
better than purple, and linen, and fine gold.”

Daisy looks mystified, but forbears to question
him, for he complains of sleep. The lovers part at
the head of the stairs. Mortimer, on reaching his
room, draws a paper from his bosom; he weeps
over it, reads it again and again; then he holds it
in the flame of a candle. When the ashes have
fallen at his feet, he exclaims:

“I have kept my promise, Harvey Snarle! Peace
to your memory!”

From a writing-desk in a corner of the room he
takes a pile of manuscript, and weary as he is, adds
several pages to it. The dream of his boyhood
has grown with him—that delightful dream of authorship!
How this will-o'-the-wisp of the brain
entices one into mental fogs! How it coaxes and

pets one, cheats and ruins one! And so that appalling
pile of closely-written manuscript is Mortimer's
romance? Wasted hours and wasted thought
—who would buy or read it?

A down-town clock strikes the hour of two so
gently, that it sounds like the tinkling of sheep-bells
coming through the misty twilight air from
the green meadows. With which felicitous simile
we will give our hero a little sleep, after having
kept him up two hours after midnight.

Slumber touches his eyelids gently; but Daisy
lies awake for hours; at last, falling into a trouble
sleep, she dreams that she is an heiress.

Oh, Daisy Sarle!