University of Virginia Library

26. OLD UNCLE JOHN OLIVE.

Attending the Kemper Court one day, and engaged in a
cause then going on, and which the adverse counsel was
arguing to the jury (something in the nature of a suit for
trespass for suing out execution and levying it on some corn
reserved under the poor debtor's law), I saw this venerable
old father in Israel playing bo-peep over the railing behind
the bar, and giving me sundry winks and beckonings to come
to him.

Uncle John was a gentleman of the old school, if, indeed,
he was not before there was any school. He was some seventy
or seventy-five years old, perhaps a little older. His
physique was remarkable. He looked more like an antediluvian
boy than a man. He was some four feet and a
half or five feet high, rather large for that height, and tapering
off with a pair of legs marking Hogarth's line of beauty,
—an elegant curve, something on the style of apair of pothooks.
His beard and hair were grizzly gray, and the face
oval, with a high front in the region of benevolence; but which,
I believe, no one ever knew the sense of being placed there:

for all of Uncle John's benefactions together, would not have
amounted to a supper of bones for a hungry dog. Uncle
John's eyes were black or black-ish, with sanguine trimmings,
as if lined by red fereting. He had a voice with a double
wabble—and, especially when he tried it on the vowels, he
ran up some curious notes on the gamut, and eked out the
sound with a very useless expenditure of accent. Uncle
John Olive belonged to the Baptist Church,—hard-shell
division, but took it with the privilege: he had a thirst like
the prairies in the dog-days, and it took nearly as much of
the liquid to refresh it. But much as Uncle John loved the
ardent restoratives, he loved money quite as well; and there
was a continual warfare going on in Uncle John's breast between
these aspiring rivals: but this led to a compromise.
Uncle John treated both with equal impartiality: he drank
very freely, but drank very cheap liquors, making up for any
lack of quality, by no economy of quantity.

Uncle John's scheme of life was simple. It was but a
slight improvement on Indian modes. He lived out in
the woods, in a hut which an English nobleman would have
considered poor quarters for his dogs. The furniture was
in keeping, and his table was in keeping with the furniture.
His whole establishment would probably have brought fifteen
dollars. The entire civil list of the old gentleman
could not have cost seventy-five dollars to answer its
demands. He had no white person in his family except himself—and
about fifteen negroes, of all sorts and sizes. He
worked some six or seven hands, but being of a slow turn,

and very old-fogyish in his notions, he did not succeed very
well with them, either in governing them or making much
of a crop: about a bale to the hand was the extent to which
Uncle John ever went, even in the best seasons. But as he
spent nothing except for some articles of the last necessity,
he managed to lay up every year some few dollars, which he
kept in specie, hid in a hole under a plank of the floor,
in an old chest. This close economy and saving way of
life, kept up for about fifty-five years, had at length made
old Uncle John Olive worth some ten thousand dollars.
He had made it wholly by parsimony. He was habitually
and without exception the closest man I ever saw,—as close
as the bark is to a tree, or as green is to a leaf.

He was dressed in home-made linsey, and as he went gandering
it along, you would take him for the survivor of those
Dutchmen whom Irving tells of, rolling the ninepins down
the cave in the Kaatskill Mountains, when Rip Van Winkle
went to see them; except that Uncle John did not carry
the keg of spirits on his shoulder,—but generally in his
belly.

A circle of a mile drawn around Uncle John would have
embraced all he knew and more than he knew of this breathing
world, its ways and works, and plan and order; except
what he got item of at the market-town or at the court-house.
All beyond that circle was mystery. Uncle John
was a silent man,—he used his tongue for little except to
taste his liquor,—and his eyes and ears were open always,
though I suspect there must have been some stoppage in the

way to the brain: for the more Uncle John heard and observed,
the more he seemed not to know about matters seen
and heard. But a more faithful attention I never heard of.
Uncle John was in the habit of attending court, and gave
his special attention to the matters there carried on: the
way he would listen to an argument on a demurrer or an
abstract point of law, might be a lesson and example to the
most patient Dutch commentator. He would stare with a
gaze of rapt attention upon the Court and Counsel, occasionally
shifting one leg, and uttering a slight sigh as some
one of them closed the argument; and stretching his head
forward, and putting his hand behind his ear to catch the
sound as the Court suggested something, though he never
understood a single word of what was going on. Towards
the end of a long discussion, Uncle John would begin to
flag a little, wiping the perspiration from his brow, as if the
exercise of listening were very fatiguing—as, indeed, in not
a few instances, it might well have been.

On the occasion referred to in the opening, Uncle John
called me, and after the salutations, told me he wanted to see
me right then on business of importance. I should have
said before that I had had some business of Uncle John's in
hand, which I discharged entirely to his satisfaction; not
charging the venerable old gentleman any thing, but getting
my fee out of another person through whose agency the old
man had got into the difficulty. This being Uncle John's
first and only lawsuit, though the matter was very simple,
gave him a high opinion of my professional abilities.

Indeed, next to his man Remus Simpson, the “foreman of
the crap,” whom he was in the habit of consulting on “difficult
pints,” I stood higher with Uncle John than any one
else as “a raal judgmatical man.” I hope I state the fact
with a feeling of becoming modesty. In the way of law,
Uncle John evidently thought the law would be behaving itself
very badly, if it did not go the way I wished it; and
looked to my opinion not so much as to what the law was, as
what it was to be after I spoke the word.

I told Uncle John Olive that I was a good deal pressed
for time just at that moment, as a case was going on in which
I was concerned; but as it was he, Uncle John, I would
spare him a few moments. And so I left Duncan to harangue
the jury until I could confer with the old man, and took
him into the vacant jury-room on the same floor, and shut
the door. “Well,” said I, “Uncle John, I hope nothing serious
has happened—[which was a lie, for I was, in the then
(and I might lay the fact with a continuando) depressed
state of my fiscality,—I confess I was a little anxious for
something to happen in order to relieve the same, and was
just doing a little mental arithmetic; figuring up what I
should charge the old man, whether a fifty or a hundred;
but concluding to take the fifty, rather than hazard the
chance of bluffing the old man off.]

“But,” said the old man, “they is, I tell you.
B-a-a-a-w-ling—Bawling, Virgil C-a-a-a-n-non won't do to
tie to no way you can fix it—Bawling.”

“Why,” said I, “Uncle John, I must confess the conduct
of that young man has not altogether—(here the sheriff

called me at the door) but Uncle John, quick I'm called—”
“Well, Bawling, I reckon it don't make much odds about
your going back—you've told that juror what they must do
wonce, and I reckon they wont ha' a furgot it by this time,
Bawling.”

“Yes,—but they are obstinate sometimes, Uncle John,
and I must go—quick now—Uncle John—You say Cannon
did—what to you.”

“Why, Bawling—Virgil Cannon—he had been a whippin'
my nigger, Remus—Remus told me so hisself, and I kin
prove it by Remus and sore-legged Jim—jest 'cause Remus
sassed him—when he sassed Remus fust—when he, Virgil
Cannon, should have said, as Remus heerd, that Virgil Cannon
should ov said Remus stole his corn—I went to see
Virgil Cannon, and `Virgil Cannon,' says I,—jest in them
words I said it, Bawling; `you nasty, stinking villain, what
did you whip my nigger, Remus, fur?' And what you
think Bawling, Virgil Cannon should have said?” (here was a
long emphatic stony stare.) “Why I don't know, Uncle
John,” replied I. “Why, Bawling, Virgil Cannon should ov
said to me, says he, `Go to h—ll, you d—d old bow-legged
puppy, and kiss my foot'—Now, Bawling, what would you
advise me to do, Bawling?”

“Well,” said I, “old man, I would advise you not to do
it. Good-bye, I must go.” And I left the old fellow stiff
as a pillar staring at the place which I left.

I don't know how long he remained there—for I pitched
into the case, and the way I made the fire fly from parties,
witnesses and counsel, in the corn case, was curious.