University of Virginia Library

37. CHAPTER XXXVII.

Early this autumn, Aunt Kitty having after considerable
unfixings got us fixed, returned to Glenville, whither
we all at the same time paid a flying visit. At our arrival,
we found true the report that John was defeated in his
views on the clerkship by a majority against him of eleven;
and that our ex-legislator had now leisure to collect the
debts due Glenville & Co.—debts increased by two political
campaigns into “a puttee powerful smart little heap.”

This business would have been altogether easy and
pleasant, but for two small obstacles; most of our debtors
who were very willing indeed to pay, had no visible pro

perty; and the rest were even invisible themselves! For,
pleased with the credit system in the Purchase, they had
gone to try it elsewhere, and had become suddenly so unmindful
of “the powerfullest smartest man and darndest
cleverest feller in the county,” as to go away without one
tender adieu! The fact is, our dear old friends had absquatulated,
and gone away off somewhere to give other
candidates a sort of a lift.

But important changes almost destructive of Glenville Settlement,
were now on the eve of accomplishment. Mr.
Hilsbury had, his health being ruined, resigned his bishopric
with all its emoluments, and was about returning to the far
east; and Uncle Tommy from an irrepressible spirit of
wandering, was just starting to go and build a cabin on Lake
Michigan.[8] And so, we had come in time to bid farewell!

How melancholy the houses already, seemed so soon to
be tenantless, and then so soon to moulder and fall into
ruins;—a deserted cabin quickly changes, like a body left
by the vital spark! Ah! how dreary the forest would be
without friends! I had no spirits to hunt; although I
wandered away and sat down on the bank of the creek opposite
the little islet where the deer lay down to die—but
without my rifle—it was to weep! Reader! if you have
a soul you will not laugh at me;—and if you have none,
then laugh away, poor creature, why should you not enjoy
yourself your own way?—but dear reader with a soul, I
after that went and sat down in the old bark-mill. And
there I recalled the morning we stumbled down the opposite
cliff into Uncle John's open arms—I saw the very spot
where the mother had clasped the daughter to her bosom,
and “lifted up her voice and wept”—and the sad spot too
where that mother now rested in the lonely grave! I remembered
the fresh revival of early dreams and visions

realized in the novelty of a wild forest life!—ay! I recalled
the oddity of my labours—and even that poor mute, but
not wholly irrational companion!—and when I felt in my
soul that changes had come and were yet coming, and that
I never, no, never, could be in these woods as I had been—
I even wept there, too, reader!—not loud indeed, but bitterly!

In a few days we took a mournful farewell of the two
families going from Glenville; and with no expectation of
ever meeting again in this life. True, some of these persons,
wanderers like ourselves, we did meet for a brief
space in other parts of the United States again; but others
we have never seen since the morning of our separation.
And at this hour we know not where Uncle Tommy lives
—or if dead, where his grave is! In this work, however,
there will be no further mention of these two families.

During the past summer Uncle John had been appointed
a lay delegate from the Welden Diocese to attend an ecclesiastical
convention about to meet early this fall at Vincennes;
and he now, before our return to Woodville, obtained
my promise to accompany him. Accordingly, a few
days after our return, he, and with him Bishop Shrub, called
on me, and we three set out for the Convention, or as
all such gatherings are there called—the Big Meeting.

The weather was luxurious, and the ride across the
small prairies was to me, who now for the first time saw
these natural meadows, indescribably bewitching; indeed,
this first glimpse of the prairie world was like beholding an
enchanted country! The enchanted land in that most
transcendently enchanting book, the Pilgrim's Progress,
came so naturally to one's mind, that surely Bunyan must
have imagined a world like this meadowy land of wild and

fragrant scents wafted by balmy airs from countless myriads
of blossoms and flowers! Nothing is like the mellow
light, as the sun sinks down far away behind the cloudless
line of blended earth and sky—as if there one could, at a
step, pass from the plane of this lower world through the
hazy concave into the world of the ransomed! The
bosoms of these grassy lakes undulate at the slightest
breeze, and are sprinkled with picturesque islets of timber,
on which the trees are fancifully and regularly disposed,
suggesting an arrangement by the taste of an unrecorded
people of bygone centuries for pleasure and religion. The
whole brought back delusive dreams—we felt the strange
and half-celestial thrill of a fairy scene!

But pass we to a more earthly one. Eight miles from
Vincennes we stopped at a friend's house to shave and
preach; for among western folks a bishop is supposed to
be made for preaching and we use him accordingly—and
not infrequently we use him entirely up. The preaching was
in due season easily performed, but the shaving, ah! there's
the—scrape! Bishop Shrub was fortunately shaved close
enough to last to Vincennes; not so Uncle John and myself.
And when the old gentleman examined his saddle-bags,
alas! alas! by an unaccountable negligence our razors
and concomitants had been left at Woodville! But this
forgetfulness was promptly supplied, I may add, and punished
also by our host; for he offered his own razor—a
curious cutting tool in a wooden handle nearly as large and
quite as rough as a corn-cob! The bone handle, or make-believe-turtle
one, had, in the course of ages, been worn
away by the handling of grandsires and grandsons; and so
had the edge itself by the ferocious stubble on the chins
of woodsmen! Or perhaps it had been tritered away on a
grindstone—the thing so much resembled a farmer's knife
done up for hog-killing!

Now Uncle John's countenance (?) was tender asa

lamb's. Hence his razors were always in prime order;
and when he and I shaved with his articles in company, he
always insisted on the—first shave. But to-day, the excellent
old gentleman most condescendingly gave me the
precedence, internally resolving to watch my performance
and success, and then to shave or not accordingly. Well,
duly appreciating this unusual condescension, and thinking
it a pity Uncle John should enter Vincennes with such a
crop as his chin now held, we also secretly purposed—viz.
to go through the whole affair without one audible or visible
sign of torture! For certain was it, that if Mr. Carlton
whose face was just as lamb-like as Mr. Seymour's, shaved
without wincing, certain was it, Uncle John, long before
my complete abrasion, would be so in the suds that, for
consistency's sake, he must go through the whole scrape
before he would get out it.

Hence I strapped the oyster-knife, first on the instep of
my boot, making there, however, an ominous scratch or
two; then on the cover of a leaven-bit Testament done up
in freckled leather; and finally, although very lightly, on
the palm of my hand secundum artem: after which I made a
feint at a hair, and then laid down the tormentor with so
complacent compression of my lips as to say, that notwithstanding
looks, the razor after all was “jeest” the very
thing! Next, with a small bundle of swine's bristles tied
in the middle with a waxed thread, I applied, out of a
broken blue tea-cup, as much brown soap lather to my face
as would stick; and then with a genuine far-east barber's
flourish, touched the vile old briar-hook to my cheek,
boldly and—lightly as possible.

Reader! I did not swear in those days, but I could not
avoid saying mentally—“O-o-oh! go-o-od! gramine!!”—
and thinking of Job and the barrel of ale. Some profane
wretches would have cursed right out as horribly as Pope
Pius or Innocent, the vice-god damning and blackguarding

a Calvinistic heretic; and for which malignancy the said
Pope deserves to be scraped over his whole divine carcass
twice a-day with the above razor, and without the alleviation
of the brown soap. Happily for the success of my
benevolent statagem I kept in; for at the moment I caught a
glimpse of uncle John's face peeping over my shoulder into
the tiny bit of looking-glass, and with his spectacles on!
But if he did detect the involuntary tear in my eye, and take
the alarm, he became instantly calm again by seeing the
smile on my lip! Blood he discerned not; the tool was
guiltless of all cutting, and brought away no beard save
what it pulled out by the roots. Hence uncle John was
most essentially bamboozled; and long before my beard
was all plucked up, he had laid aside his coat and cravat,
and according to custom and to soften his beard, he was
lathering away with the hog bristles and brown soap.

Had the old gentleman taken a peep now, he must have
smelled the rat; for, spite of pain and tears, my laugh was
too broad for mere delectability from a good shave—there
was mischief and, I fear, some hypocrisy in the scarcely
suppressed chuckle. However, being done, or scraped, I
put down the eradicator with the air of one willing to shave
all day with such a razor; upon which Uncle John advanced
and took up the thing, manifesting, indeed, a little
suspicion on glancing at its edge, and yet with very commendable
confidence too; and then after the usual strappings
and flourishings, he seized his nose with the left
hand, and with the right laid the scraper sideways on a
cheek, and essayed a rapid and oblique sweep towards his
ear.

Ah! me!—if I live a thousand more years, I shall ever
be haunted by the dear old gentleman's look! Such a compound
of surprise, and vexation, and pain, and fun, and
humour! Such a “Carlton—you—rascal—you!—if I don't
—never mind!” expression as met my view while I peeped

over his shoulder into the fragment of glass against the
wall! And then as he espied me therein grinning, when
he turned, and with eyes swimming in tears, uttered in a
whisper, and between a cry and a laugh, his favourite expression
of benevolence and amazement—“Oh!—cry!—
out!”

Yes! yes! if one could have cried out, or even laughed
out! But there was our host and all his family; and the
father kept on at very judicious intervals with praise of
that razor, thus:—“Powerful razor that, Mr. Carlton!
Grandaddy used to say he'd shaved with it when he was
young, Mr. Seymour! and his face was near on about as
saft as yourn I allow. However its getting oldish now,
and don't cut near as sharpish as it once did—allow it
wants grinding: still I wouldn't give it for are another two
I ever seen.”

Could one dare venture to complain about such a razor?
against which no dog had even wagged a tongue or a tail
for a hundred years! So we cried in and laughed in then
—but when we got out of sight and hearing in the prairie!
Nobody, I fear, would have conjectured we were going to
the big meeting. Poor dear, old Uncle John! I am laughing
even now at thy beloved face in that most furious lather
of brown soap! and with that grand swathe cut through towards
thy ear by that venerable briar-hook!—ay! and at
that concentration of kindness, surprise, and joke-taking
embodied in—“Oh! cry out!”

“But, la! me! Mr. Carlton, where's the moral of this
story?”

My dear madam, some stories have no moral; but the
design is to warn you never to travel in new settlements if
your face is tender without your own shaving apparatus.

“For shame!—ladies never shave.”

Oh! my!—the sentence is carelessly constructed; but
none can say where beards may not grow next. Certainly

they are now found, if not on girls' chins, yet on very girlish
faces. And agriculture of all kinds is now better understood,
and the most unpromising soils produce the most
astonishing crops: and besides, we are evidently in the
Hairy Age, and tobacco is puffed and spurted from hairy
lips like black mud from a quagmire —

“Sir! this is offensive!”

Very; therefore let us quit it.