1. I
ON the second day of June, 186—, a
young Norseman, Halfdan Bjerk by
name, landed on the pier at Castle
Garden. He passed through the straight
and narrow gate where he was asked his name,
birthplace, and how much money he had,—at
which he grew very much frightened.
“And your destination?”—demanded the
gruff-looking functionary at the desk.
“America,” said the youth, and touched his
hat politely.
“Do you think I have time for joking?”
roared the official, with an oath.
The Norseman ran his hand through his hair,
smiled his timidly conciliatory smile, and tried
his best to look brave; but his hand trembled
and his heart thumped away at an alarmingly
quickened
tempo.
“Put him down for Nebraska!” cried a stout
red-cheeked individual inwrapped in the mingled
fumes of tobacco and whisky whose function
it was to open and shut the gate.
“There aint many as go to Nebraska.”
“All right, Nebraska.”
The gate swung open and the pressure from
behind urged the timid traveler on, while an
extra push from the gate-keeper sent him flying
in the direction of a board fence, where he sat
down and tried to realize that he was now in
the land of liberty.
Halfdan Bjerk was a tall, slender-limbed youth
of very delicate frame; he had a pair of
wonderfully candid, unreflecting blue eyes, a smooth,
clear, beardless face, and soft, wavy light hair,
which was pushed back from his forehead without
parting. His mouth and chin were well
cut, but their lines were, perhaps, rather weak
for a man. When in repose, the ensemble of
his features was exceedingly pleasing and somehow
reminded one of Correggio's St. John. He
had left his native land because he was an
ardent republican and was abstractly convinced
that man, generically and individually, lives
more happily in a republic than in a monarchy.
He had anticipated with keen pleasure the large,
freely breathing life he was to lead in a land
where every man was his neighbor's brother,
where no senseless traditions kept a jealous
watch over obsolete systems and shrines, and
no chilling prejudice blighted the spontaneous
blossoming of the soul.
Halfdan was an only child. His father, a
poor government official, had died during his
infancy, and his mother had given music lessons,
and kept boarders, in order to gain the means
to give her son what is called a learned education.
In the Latin school Halfdan had enjoyed
the reputation of being a bright youth, and at
the age of eighteen, he had entered the
university under the most promising auspices. He
could make very fair verses, and play all
imaginable instruments with equal ease, which
made him a favorite in society. Moreover, he
possessed that very old-fashioned accomplishment
of cutting silhouettes; and what was more,
he could draw the most charmingly fantastic
arabesques for embroidery patterns, and he even
dabbled in portrait and landscape painting.
Whatever he turned his hand to, he did well,
in fact, astonishingly well for a
dilettante, and
yet not well enough to claim the title of an
artist. Nor did it ever occur to him to make
such a claim. As one of his fellow-students
remarked in a fit of jealousy, “Once when Nature
had made three geniuses, a poet, a musician,
and a painter, she took all the remaining odds
and ends and shook them together at random
and the result was Halfdan Bjerk.” This agreeable
mélange of accomplishments, however,
proved very attractive to the ladies, who invited
the possessor to innumerable afternoon
tea-parties, where they drew heavy drafts on
his unflagging patience, and kept him steadily
engaged with patterns and designs for embroidery,
leather flowers, and other dainty knickknacks.
And in return for all his exertions
they called him “sweet” and “beautiful,” and
applied to him many other enthusiastic adjectives
seldom heard in connection with masculine
names. In the university, talents of this order
gained but slight recognition, and when Halfdan
had for three years been preparing himself
in vain for the
examen philosophicum, he found
himself slowly and imperceptibly drifting into
the ranks of the so-called
studiosi perpetui, who
preserve a solemn silence at the examination
tables, fraternize with every new generation of
freshmen, and at last become part of the fixed
furniture of their
Alma Mater. In the larger
American colleges, such men are mercilessly
dropped or sent to a Divinity School; but the
European universities, whose tempers the centuries
have mellowed, harbor in their spacious
Gothic bosoms a tenderer heart for their
unfortunate sons. There the professors greet them
at the green tables with a good-humored smile
of recognition; they are treated with gentle
forbearance, and are allowed to linger on, until
they die or become tutors in the families of
remote clergymen, where they invariably fall
in love with the handsomest daughter, and thus
lounge into a modest prosperity.
If this had been the fate of our friend Bjerk,
we should have dismissed him here with a confident
“vale” on his life's pilgrimage. But,
unfortunately, Bjerk was inclined to hold the
government in some way responsible for his own
poor success as a student, and this, in connection
with an æsthetic enthusiasm for ancient Greece,
gradually convinced him that the republic was
the only form of government under which men
of his tastes and temperament were apt to flourish.
It was, like everything that pertained to
him, a cheerful, genial conviction, without the
slightest tinge of bitterness. The old institutions
were obsolete, rotten to the core, he said,
and needed a radical renovation. He could sit
for hours of an evening in the Students' Union,
and discourse over a glass of mild toddy, on the
benefits of universal suffrage and trial by jury,
while the picturesqueness of his language, his
genial sarcasms, or occasional witty allusions
would call forth uproarious applause from
throngs of admiring freshmen. These were the
sunny days in Halfdan's career, days long to be
remembered. They came to an abrupt end
when old Mrs. Bjerk died, leaving nothing
behind her but her furniture and some trifling
debts. The son, who was not an eminently
practical man, underwent long hours of misery
in trying to settle up her affairs, and finally in
a moment of extreme dejection sold his entire
inheritance in a lump to a pawnbroker reserving
for himself a few rings and trinkets for the
modest sum of 250 dollars specie. He then
took formal leave of the Students' Union in a
brilliant speech, in which he traced the parallelisms
between the lives of Pericles and Washington,—
in his opinion the two greatest men
the world had ever seen,—expounded his theory
of democratic government, and explained the
causes of the rapid rise of the American Republic.
The next morning he exchanged half of
his worldly possessions for a ticket to New
York, and within a few days set sail for the
land of promise, in the far West.
