University of Virginia Library

8. EIGHTH INSTALLMENT.

About this time—I think it was about this time (my
memory is not failing me, but I am much occupied of late,
and besides, the chronological order of my benefactions
or non-benefactions is not so important after all)—I was
approached by a large delegation composed of some of

the leading men of Richmond and, indeed, of the whole
State. I could see by the way they took off their hats
that they wanted money.

“Gentlemen,” said I, testily, without waiting for the
spokesman to open his mouth, “Gentlemen, you cannot
be ignorant of the fact that Mr. Binford is the proper person
to apply to. My time is val—”

“Strike, but hear us,” pompously interrupted Mr. Felix
Pigskin, principal citizen of the period.

“Say on,” was my submissive answer, as I settled myself
back in my arm-chair and adjusted my trumpet.

“You desire to do good to Virginia?” inquired Mr. P.
I nodded assent.

“And have been uniformly thankful for suggestions
looking to that end. Your patience and humility—”

“Come to the point without compliment, Mr. P.”

“Well, then, sir, being for the time being the honored
voice of Virginia, I am requested, and in fact instructed,
to say, that in no manner whatever can you so well
serve the State whose soil your birth has hon—”

“Oh, pish!”

“—ored, as by aiding and abetting with your ample
means the cause of immigration.”

“And that is the object of your visit?”

“It is.”

“Then, gentlemen, let me say, in all kindness and
frankness, that your mission is a vain one. If Mr. Binford
has a few thousands to spare, you are most heartily
welcome to them, but the matter rests absolutely with him,
not with me. Anxious as I have proved myself to be to
serve the State—indeed, I have little else to live for—I
am still constrained to think that money will be wasted in
the attempt to transplant full-grown trees or men to worn-out
soil.”

“But the deep plowing of stalwart Yankee-British arms
will bring up new soil.”

“True, quite true; but perfect candor compels me to
say that the real Virginian, being a product of slave society,
and of slave society only, cannot be reproduced under any
other conditions whatsoever, and it is not my desire, however
much it may be to the interest of land-owners, to see

the few remaining Virginians supplanted any quicker than
they would be and ought to be by the natural course of
events. That another and a very different race (perhaps
very much better race, but not better to me) will in time
reclaim our lapsed lands, and that the day will come when
the shores of our American Mediterranean, the Chesapeake
Bay, will teem with cities and population I make no doubt,
but the first indispensable step to that result is the removal
from the settler of an incubus that weighs down to the
earth every inhabitant, native or foreign-born, of Virginia.
I mean the State debt. Get that paid by the central government,
accept the fact of empire with all its unpleasant
consequences to us of this generation, and then, but not
till then, will it be worth your while to incite immigration
by solicitation—not the best way any way. If you have
so very good a thing in this climate, soil, latitude, proximity
to the sea, etc., the world, I should think, would
not be slow to find it out. In this day of telegraphs, light
cannot be hid under a bushel. But until the debt is assumed
by the true debtor, and the only one able to pay
it, money spent for immigration purposes will be money
thrown away. Good-morning, gentlemen.”

They withdrew, not in the best of humors.

Binford, if I can be certain of the fact, gave them a
trifle of ten or twenty thousand dollars, but no one has
yet told me that much good came of it.

“Conceited old ass, he thinks because he's got money
that he's got more sense than all the world put together.
By George! don't I remember the day, here in Richmond,
when, by universal acknowledgment, he was regarded as
the most active, intransitive fool in Virginia!”

So said one of the delegates as they left my office; and
his opinion, I had too much reason to know, was for a long
time the general opinion in the State. Men, feeling the
weight of my wealth, did not give open expression to their
opinions, but I could see it in their eyes; the newspapers
had got after me, too, and I suffered. Living, and desiring
only to live in order to give pleasure to my brother-Virginians,
I could not bear their ill will, even when I knew
that they were wrong and I was right.

But the delegate was not wrong in his assertion. I was

conceited, and my money had made me so in spite of
myself. General deference to my opinions and the power
of carrying out my views at times elevated my self-esteem
to an inordinate degree, I doubt not. Very often I could
not dispossess myself of the belief that I had made my fifty
millions with my own hands or by my own sagacity; at
any rate I felt that I deserved them, being such a good
man, and that uplifted me mightily in my own eyes. It
took visit after visit to the woods to cure and humble me.
The measureless and inexhaustible force of nature, its utter
indifference (in the midst of great love) to what we call
great or small, finally brought me back again all safe, simple,
and unconceited.

[I now think I ought to have given a couple of hundred
thousand towards immigration; funds were getting low,
considering what remained to be done, but I could have
better stood the loss of ten times that amount than the
averted look of one unfriendly eye. I care too much for
public opinion.]

As when the State declined to accept my proposition to
build a new capitol, so now, when I felt constrained to
decline giving money to promote immigration, I considered
that I had added just that much more to my principal,
and accordingly proceeded to spend it with a good
deal of glee, as a poor fellow often does when a windfall
of a few dollars comes to him. The scheme was not
wholly my own, but was suggested to me by one of my
most trusted and sensible agents. It was, in a few words,
to give in fee simple ten thousand dollars cash to each of
fifteen hundred girls (so many to each county, city, and
town) on the day they got married to some strong, healthy,
handsome, sensible, good-natured, sober, industrious
young man, who had proved himself to be a good son and
brother—the girls to be just as healthy, sweet, well formed,
pretty, modest, and dutiful as the boys. The proposition,
as soon as its sincerity became known beyond all cavil,
produced an excitement the like of which was never, as I
honestly believe, witnessed in any part of the civilized
world—no, not even in time of war. Words quite fail
me to describe it. “What is healthy?” “Who is
pretty?” “What does he call good-natured?” “Who

is to decide about being well formed?” etc., etc., etc.,
etc.

In vain I protested that I had nothing on earth to do
with defining or deciding anything. The State was in an
inconceivable ferment. I was bedeviled almost to death,
and finally had to run away to Canada to get rid of the
clamor; and even there I was beset. “Let the girls in
each county call a convention, and leave it to the county
judge, a board of physicians, the overseers of the poor,
the county surveyor, anybody, anybody, Lord, for the
sake of peace.”

No, they wouldn't hear to that—they wouldn't hear to
anything, until at length Governor Kemper,[1] being appealed
to, decided that there was but one way to settle it,
and that was by lottery in each county, etc. But then
the money was not to be paid till the day of marriage—
how about that? It was even so—that was in the bond.

Well, such a demand for young men, such attention to
even decently respectable young men, on the part of impecunious
parents, such beautiful eyes cast at young men,
such running away to distant States of young men who
didn't want to marry anybody, such indignation and
drawing back of young ladies who wanted neither money
nor husbands, but wanted to do just as they pleased and
marry just when it suited them, such fun, excitement,
bickerings, jealousies, fights, and family quarrels when
the marriages did take place, were never seen, heard, or
dreamed of. Virginia was a most unhappy State until
the thing played out and the money set apart was expended
to the very last dollar. It was a sad ending of
what I thought a good scheme. Old people sometimes
allude to it as the run-mad scheme, but it has been generally
forgotten.

I am glad, though, that I tried it. It satisfied me that
the plan I had been practicing, from the time I got my
fifty millions, of helping deserving young couples in the
quietest possible manner, was the best, indeed the only
practical plan. But some of the wilder young fellows did

have what they called a high old time, and certainly if
there is fun in excitement there was excitement enough in
Virginia for about two and a half years.

[The State hasn't yet recovered from the furious family
feuds occasioned by my well-meant, but ill-judged, action
in this matter, and never will in my day. The worst-hated
man in Virginia, by fully two-thirds of the people,
is myself.]

But to return to my building.

My wife, the most sensible woman I ever knew (my
acquaintance is limited), soon after my good fortune came
from heaven, said to me,—

“Moses, because we are rich that's no reason we should
be fools.”

“W-e-ll, I don't know about that.”

“Come, don't try to be sarcastic, or I'll say something
presently that'll make you wish you had never
married—”

“I often wish that.”

“a woman that isn't quite as big a ninny as you are.
But what I mean is this: that there is no sense in our
building a huge brick advertisement of the fact that we
have money. Every rich man does that. My idea is to
have two spare chambers for our friends—I suspect we'll
have a good many now—and that's all. Of course the
house will be as well furnished, tasteful, and comfortable
as possible. A small, perfectly equipped house, that's
what we want. The more house the more servants and
trouble about cleaning and keeping clean—don't you
think so?”

“Yes'm,” said I, meekly.

“You are such a goose! But I certainly—no, Virginia
says `certainly' all the time—I do really like you as much
—as much—as much as you liked me the day cousin Susan
Brown sent me fifty dollars.”

The upshot of it was that we bought the house that
Rev. Dr. Minnegerode lived in in 1874—on Clay Street,
I rather think (but the fact is, my memory for names,
dates, places, and things never was good), modernized
and mansarded it (Mrs. Johnson Jackson assured me that
no respectable person from the upper ends of Franklin

and Grace would ever visit me if I did not mansard it),
and made it snug in every way. It became a pleasant
place to visit about dinner-time. I insisted on buying
this particular house, because I had often picked it out in
my days of poverty as perhaps the only place in which a
man could find a home and at the same time repose from
the women and children. This I got by building a two-story
office at the lower end of the garden, where I could
be out of the reach of feminine and juvenile jargon and
intrusion, and where I could have at any time what Dr.
Howland (a scientific lecturer of the period) would call
“a general view of the valley”—the vale of Butchertown,
to wit.

We did have a good deal of company. People seemed,
for some reason or other, to be fond of us. Often, a little
too often I thought, my wife and myself were forced to
ascend to the mansard and swelter there, which made
me bless the mansard and wish I could have my family to
myself as in the days when, perhaps owing to my poverty,
people were not so fond of us. However, it was a great
delight to have those we really loved (my wife had a prodigious
width as well as depth of affection) with us, to
make them as comfortable as kings and queens, and to
give them dinners that were fit for something a great deal
better than gods. Jupiter never ate a good dinner in his
life, the truth being that J. was not born in Lynchburg.
The dinners were so delightful that I look back to them
as the happiest hours of my life. Happiest! no; I will
tell you ere long what hours were really the happiest of
all. To be sure, I could retreat to my office at night,
when the house was full, and enjoy the moonlit valley
aforenamed to the full. But this was not being at home.
Finally, my wife bought a couple of houses in the neighborhood
and placed them at the service of surplus and
not agreeable company. This was all very well; it relieved
the pressure without touching too deeply on my privy
purse (Binford, his female coadjutor, and my public
enterprises having cut me down to less than half a million
a year for individual and household expenses), but when,
day after day, I came home only to find my house a
livery-stable, as it were, or hack-stand, my wife having

ordered, in addition to our private vehicles, from six to
eight others daily, to be sent hither and thither for the
use of this or that sick friend, or for some friend who was
not sick, but would “enjoy a ride so”—. When I saw
this I got mad, as husbands will do, and determined to
make her sick of the carriage business. Accordingly, I
bolted off in hot haste, fully bent on buying every carriage,
hack, buggy, and thing of the kind in town; but as I
walked on I cooled down a little and contented myself
with the purchase of one hundred and seven hacks, carryalls,
rockaways, phætons, coupes, drags, buggies, gigs,
single-chairs, drays, tumbril carts, etc., etc., including
sixteen omnibuses, four furniture-wagons, a milk-cart,
and two wheelbarrows, with horses and mules to match,
goats also for the wheelbarrows, and ordered them all to
assemble simultaneously at my front door the next day at
twelve o'clock.

“Now, old lady,” thinks I, “if you don't get your
digestive apparatus full of wheeled vehicles for poor-folks,
then I'll agree to eat all the omnibuses, and half the
goats.”

The scene next day was a refreshing one. For several
squares the street was blocked up with carriages and
things, and an immense crowd of wondering people
gathered immediately to see what the matter was.

“It can't be a funeral,” said the people, “for there
is the milk-cart. Whoever heard of a milk-cart at a
funeral?”

As driver after driver came up, knocked, and announced
that his vehicle had been bought and paid for,
and ordered to come at twelve o'clock for Mrs. Adams's
commands (I poked my head out of a mansard room,
where I had hid myself, and watched the whoel affair),
the state of that good woman's mind may be imagined.
She sent for twenty policemen to disperse the vehicles
and the mob, but the policemen, finding that there had
been a bona fide purchase of the vehicles, and that the
drivers had actually received orders to assemble, could
do nothing. Mrs. A. was in despair. She sent for the
Mayor, but he too was powerless. Made desperate by
the frightful aspect of affairs, for the mob had now in

creased to many thousands, she said to the Mayor, “If
these drivers have been directed to obey my commands,
will you see that my commands are executed to the
letter?”

“Most assuredly, madam.”

“Then I command these drivers to drive their vehicles
to the nearest auction store, and there sell the vehicles,
horses, etc., immediately to the highest bidder, and you,
Mr. Keiley, are to receive the proceeds of the sale, and
turn them over in full to Dr. Peterkin's[2] fair, now being
held at No.—, Main street.”

It was done, and I never got mad with my wife any
more—at least not to that tune. I think she told me
that the church realized some eleven thousand dollars
from the sale.

Of all the vehicles, she reserved but one—a choice
dray, thirty feet long, and drawn by seven tomato-catsup-colored
mules; so convenient, she said, for moving at
one haul all the furniture of any poor friend who wanted
to move.

And a shave-tail mule, from that day to this, gives me
facial neuralgia, accompanied by symptoms of trichina
spiralis.

[Other men have confessed to me that they, too, have
often wished to pile bonnets, boas, redingotes, or other
special weaknesses of their wives, upon their heads until
they were suffocated, or nearly so. But being men of
feeble feelings and little money, they could not vent
such rage as mine with the pecuniary violence exhibited
above. They have the venom, but not the spondulics.
Perhaps it is well.]