University of Virginia Library

1. CLARENCE;
OR,
A TALE OF OUR OWN TIMES.

1. CHAPTER I.

It was one of the brightest and most beautiful
days of February. Winter had graciously yielded
to the melting influence of the soft breezes
from the Indian's paradise—the sweet southwest.
The atmosphere was a pure transparency, a perfect
ether; and Broadway, the thronged thoroughfare
through which the full tide of human existence
pours, the pride of the metropolis of our western
world, presented its gayest and most brilliant aspect.

Nature does not often embellish a city; but here,
she has her ensigns, her glorious waving pennons
in the trees that decorate the park, and the entrance
to the hospital, and mantle with filial reverence
around St. Paul's and Trinity churches. A sudden

change from intense cold to rain, and then
again to frost, changes and successions not uncommon
in our inconstant climate, had encircled the
trees, their branches, and even the slightest twigs that
bent and crackled under the little snowbird, with a
brilliant incrustation of ice, and hung them with
countless crystals—nature's jewels—how poor in
the comparison a monarch's regalia!

The chaste drapery of summer is most beautiful;
but there was something in all this gorgeousness,
this ostentatious brilliancy, that harmonized well
with the art and glare of a city. It seemed that
nature, for once, touched with the frailty of her
sex, and determined to outshine them all, had donned
her jewelled robe, and come forth in all her
queenly decorations in the very temple of art and
fashion; for this is the temple of these divinities, and
on certain hours of every auspicious day is abandoned
to the rites of their worshippers.

But the day has its successive scenes, as life its
seven ages. The morning opens with servants
sweeping the pavements—the pale seamstress hastening
to her daily toil—the tormented dyspeptic
sallying forth to his joyless morning ride—the cry
of the brisk milkman—the jolly baker and the
sonorous sweep—the shop-boy fantastically arranging
the tempting show, that is to present to the
second sight of many a belle her own sweet person,
arrayed in Flandin's garnitures, Marquand's jewels,
Goguet's flowers, and (oh tempora! oh mores!) Manuel's
`ornamental hair work of every description.'

Then comes the business hour—the merchant,
full of projects, hopes, and fears, hastening to his

counting house—the clerk to his desk—the lawyer
to the courts—the children to their schools, and
country ladies to their shopping.

Then come forth the gay and idle, and Broadway
presents a scene as bustling, as varied, and
as brilliant, as an oriental fair. There, are
graceful belles, arrayed in the light costume of
Paris, playing off their coquetries on their attendant
beaux—accurately apparelled Quakers—
a knot of dandies, walking pattern-cards, faithful
living personifications of their prototypes in
the tailor's window—dignified, self-complacent matrons—idle
starers at beauties, and beauties willing
to be stared at—blanketed Indian chiefs from the
Winnebagoes, Choctaws, and Cherokees, walking
straight forward, as if they were following an enemy's
trail in their own forests—girls and boys
escaped from school thraldom—young students
with their backs turned on college and professors—merry
children clustering round a toy-shop
—servants loaded with luxuries for the evening
party, jostling milliners' girls with bandboxes—a
bare headed Greek boy with a troop of shouting
urchins at his heels—a party of jocund sailors
from the `farthest Ind'—a family groupe of Alsace
peasants—and, not the least jolly or enviable
of all this multifarious multitude, the company
of Irish orangemen stationed before St. Paul's,
their attention divided between the passers-by, their
possible customers, and the national jibes and jokes
of their associates.

It was on such a day as we have described, and
through such a throng, that one lonely being was

threading his way, who felt the desolateness of
that deepest of all solitudes—the solitude of a
crowd—the loneliness of the tomb amidst abounding
life. He was a stranger. No one of all that
multitude, high or humble, saluted him; no familiar
eye rested on him. He was not old, but the frosts
of age were on his head, and his cheek was indented
with furrows of `long thought and dried up tears.'
There was not one of all the gay and reckless, confident
in happiness, and secure in prosperity, that
could sympathize with the sullen, disappointed, and
wretched aspect of the stranger; but the beggar as
he passed him forgot his studied attitude and mock
misery, and the mourner in her elaborate weeds
threw a compassionate glance at him. The stranger
neither asked nor looked for compassion.
Though his dress indicated poverty, there was that
in his demeanour that would have repressed inquiry,
and seemed to disdain charity. Something
like a scornful smile played on his features, a smile
of derision, of hostility with a species that could be
thus occupied and amused; such a smile as a show
of monkeys might extort.

A knot of ladies stopped his way for a moment.
“Was you at Mrs. Layton's last night?” asked one
of the fair ones. “Indeed was I—something quite
out of the common way, I assure you. Nothing
but Italian sung—nothing but waltzes danced.”
“Do you know poor Mrs. Bruce is just gone?”
“Poor thing! is she?—Where did you get your
Marabouts?”—“Is not that hat ravishing?”—“Do
you know Roscoe's furniture is to be sold to-morrow?”—“Julia,
look, what a sweet trimming!”—

“My! let that old man pass.”—For an instant the
gaze of the pretty chatterers was fixed on the ashen
countenance of the stranger, and there was something
in the expression of his large sunken eye, as
its sarcastic glance met theirs, that arrested their
attention and steps. But they passed on, and their
thoughts reverted to trimmings, parties, and Marabouts.

The stranger pursued his way slowly and pensively
as far as Trinity-church, and then crossing
Broadway turned into Wall-street, where he eyed
the bustling multitude of merchants, merchants'
clerks, brokers, and all the servants, ministers, and
followers of fortune, with even a more bitter mental
satire than the butterfly world of Broadway. As
he reached the corner of William-street, his attention
was attracted by a beautiful boy who stood at a
fruit-stall stationed there, trafficking with an illfavored
old woman for a couple of oranges. The
love of childhood is a tie to our species that even
misanthropy cannot dissolve. Perhaps it was this
bond of nature that strained over the stranger's
heart; or there might have been something in the
aspect of the boy that touched a spring of memory;
a faint colour tinged his livid cheek, and the veins
in his bony forehead swelled. The boy, unconscious
of this observation, completed his bargain, and
bounded away, and the stranger perceiving that he
in turn had become the object of notice to some
loiterers about the stall, purchased an apple and
passed on. In taking a penny from his pocket,
he dropped his handkerchief. The old woman
saw it, and unobserved, contrived by a skilful sweep

of her cloak to sequester it, and at a convement
opportunity transferred it to her pocket, saying
to herself as she did so, “It is as fine as a spider's
web, a pretty article for the like of him
truly; it's reasonable that my right to it is as good as
his,” and with this comment entered on the records
of conscience, she very quietly appropriated it.

In the mean time the stranger pursued his way
down William-street, and the little boy, who, for
some reason had retraced his steps, was running in
the same direction, tossing up his oranges, and
amusing himself with the effort to keep both in the
air at the same moment.

Intent on his sport, he heedlessly ran against the
stranger, dropped his oranges, knocked the man's
cane from his hand, and nearly occasioned his
falling. Something very like a curse rose to his lips.
The boy picked up the cane and gently replaced it,
saying at the same time, with such unaffected earnestness,
“I am very sorry, sir,” that softened by his
manner, and perceiving it was the same child who
had before attracted his attention, he replied,
“Never mind, boy; pick up your oranges.” He
did so, and looking again at the stranger, who to
his unpractised eye seemed old and poor, he said
modestly, “Will you take one, sir?”

“No, no, boy.”

“Do take one.”

“No, thank ye, child.”

“I had much rather you would than not; I don't
really want but one myself.”

“No, no; God bless ye.”

By this time they had reached an old Dutch
domicil, with a gable end to the street, one of the
few monuments that remain of the original settlers
of our good city.

The steps or (to use the vernacular word) the
stoop had just been nicely scoured: the boy perceiving
the stranger breathed painfully, and moved
with difficulty, sprang forward to open the door.
The sound of the lifted latch brought out an old
woman who appeared by the shrill tones of authority
and wrath that issued from her lips, at the sight
of the boy's muddy footsteps on the clean boards,
to be the “executive” of the establishment.

She stood with a scrubbing brush in her uplifted
hand, and the boy started back, as if he expected
farther and more painful demonstrations of her anger.
“Stay, stay, my child,” said the stranger,
“and sit down on that bench,” and then turning to
the old woman, “hold your foul tongue,” he said,
“and let the lad alone.”

“Leave him be! It's my own house and my
own tongue, and neither you nor any other man
can master it.”

“God knows that's true,” replied the stranger, and
without wasting any farther efforts on the confessedly
impossible, he very unceremoniously extended his
cane, and poked the woman's garments within the
door, so as to enable him to shut it in her face,
which he effected without delay. Perhaps the boy
laughed from instinctive sympathy with the power
of the superior sex; he certainly laughed most
heartily at its timely demonstration, and shouted
again and again, “Cracky! cracky!” an exclamation

that the young urchins of our city often send
up, equivalent to “a palpable hit, my Lord!”

The saturnine features of the stranger relaxed,
and from that moment there was a tacit compact
between him and his young friend, who seemed the
only link that connected him with his kind. He
received even his pity with complacency, for he felt
that the pity of a child was tolerable, because `without
any mixture of blame or counsel.'

The boy's father, Mr. Carroll, was clerk in an
insurance office opposite the stranger's lodgings.
Frank came daily to his father's office, and as he
passed and repassed the stranger's door, he stopped
with some good humored greeting, or to share with
him his fruit, cakes, or candy. His bonbons were
received with manifest pleasure, but never eaten, at
least in Frank's presence, and when he inquired the
reason of this extraordinary abstemiousness, his
friend would answer, “I keep them to console me,
Frank, when you are away.”

Mr. Carroll's desk was stationed at his office-window,
and his eye often involuntarily glanced from
his books to his boy, whose benevolent friendship
for the forlorn stranger, he secretly watched, and
promoted, by permitting him to loiter in his society,
and by daily largesses of pennies.

What draught is so delicious to a parent as a
child's virtue? What spectacle so beautiful to man
as the aspect of childhood? childhood flushed with
health and happiness; its bouyant step, its loud
laugh, and joyous shout; its little bark still riding
in its secure and guarded haven; its interminable
perspective of an ever brightening future? And infancy—who

has not looked with prophetic eye on
the fair face of infancy, the dawn of never ending
existence, and seen in vision the temptations, the
struggles, the griefs, the joys, that awaited the unconscious
little being? Who has not contemplated
the placid minute frame, enveloping such capacities
for suffering, and not longed to withhold it from its
fearful voyage? Peaceful infancy! must those
senses that now convey to thee but the intimations
of thy new existence, become the avenues of all good
and evil? Must these pulses which now beat so
softly, harmoniously, throb with passion? Must this
clear eye be dimmed with tears? this soft cheek,
this smooth brow be furrowed with care and sorrow?
Even so; for the destiny of humanity is thine, with
its joys and its triumphs. Enfolded in this minute
frame are the capacities of an angel. Go forth
then, labor, struggle, and knowledge shall fill thy
mind with light of thine own—endure, and resist,
and from the fires of temptation shall rise and soar
to heaven, the only phœnix—virtue.