University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
THE “TIMSES.”

About three weeks after the conversation detailed in the preceding
chapter, the beautiful wife of the young clergyman found herself
presiding over “a household of her own.” The residence which
Edward had chosen was in one of the handsome streets that run
northward from Beacon, and it was one of the most elegant in the
street. The house was purchased for him by his father, and presented
to him; while Gertrude, with a portion of her own splendid
fortune, insisted upon furnishing it.

Her taste and wealth were exquisitely apparent in the minutest
detail, as well as in the grander features of the sumptuous apartments.
A refined elegance and a just taste prevailed throughout.
In addition to costly mirrors, priceless pictures, velvet lounges,
alabaster vases, statuary, and a thousand ornamental, yet useful
articles, that enriched her drawing-rooms and parlors, there was a
handsome library, most luxuriously arranged, for Edward, and a
charming conservatory, filled with the most rare and fragrant flowering
plants. The conservatory was a long, glass-enclosed gallery,
overlooking the garden; and, besides the ranges of beautiful vases
for plants, it contained in the centre a vast marble fountain, in
which swam dazzling schools of gold and silver fish; and around
the conservatory, hanging among the foliage of the taller trees,
were suspended small gilt cages, containing singing birds. Not far
from the fountain was a little artificial bower, of the most tasteful
construction, in which were seats for two, Edward and herself, and
a small marble table in the midst for her work-basket, a book, or
even for the salver to stand upon, whenever she invited her husband
from his library, which opened into the conservatory, to take tea
with her; which was a treat, she said playfully, she should extend
to him but once a week, lest, if granted more frequently, he should
lightly esteem it, and not look upon it as a privilege.

Wealth, in the hands of the refined and pure-hearted, comes to
its right uses. It can make earth a paradise; and such will earth
be, when riches are at every one's command, and all are good, and
in charity each with his neighbor. When innocence, love to God,
and charity towards our neighbor, prevail in the hearts of the
whole human race, then will riches be the greatest earthly blessing,
instead, as too often now, the greatest curse, vouchsafed to our
race. It will make an Eden of the globe, and earth correspond to
Heaven in excellence and beauty.

How perfectly happy were Edward and Gertrude in their new
abode, their first home! If happiness could be found on earth, it

dwelt with them. They were virtuous; they feared God; they
had the goods of this life, and the calm hope of the life to come, (a
source of ineffable happiness in itself;) they were intellectual; they
were rationally intelligent; they had minds to comprehend and
hearts to feel the beauties and glories of creation; they had refined
and accurately cultivated tastes, elevated and purified by religion,
the spiritual alembic of the human soul; they loved one another
with that pure and virtuous love which adores without idolatry.
Linked heart and heart by sympathy of mind, and tastes, and
hopes, they were one rather than two. The most perfect mutual
confidence and trust dwelt in their bosoms; and so closely were
they united in spirit, that it would seem that, if Edward should
feel a grief, though absent from her, she would know, and share,
and feel it instinctively, miles though they were divided. Such
was their love—such their happiness. But, alas! human happiness
is never enduring. It is either terminated by our own restlessness
and follies, or by the means of the envy and malice of our enemies.
Like the happiness of our first parents in Eden, their bliss had an
envious and hateful spectator. There was one who planned the
destruction of their peace, and who brought to this end all the
strong energies of his mind, and the deep evil of his heart.

We have already alluded to the degradation of Simmins Satchell
from the bar, which he had talents to have adorned, if his moral
obliquity of character had not diverted him from the path of honor.
We will now proceed to explain the causes which led to it, before
we go on to show the results which are to follow it.

Simmins Satchell was a native of one of the country towns of a
State adjoining the commonwealth. His father was a man in low
life; the highest occupation to which he ever was known to attain
was to help keep bar in the village inn on the grand occasions of
general muster and fourth of July. At such times, he was paid in
as much as he could drink, and a quart of rum to carry home. But
there was many a four-pence-half-penny, too, that should have
gone into the money-draw, that mysteriously found its way into his
sleeve. On other days, Tim Satchell, as he was called, used to get
a living by doing “chores,” sawing half a cord of wood when
driven to extremities, and sometimes carrying “the squire's” marketing
home for him; but his favorite mode of raising the wind
was in holding travelers' horses, at which genteel profession he
used to make sometimes two shillings a day. This pursuit was
just idle enough to suit Tim, as he could sit about all day on the
benches in the gallery of the inn; and so, if any one charged him
with being an idle vagabond, he could reply that he was “vaitin'
for 'osses.” And in waiting for “'osses” Tim passed the most of
his time. Tim ostensibly had a home, but it was only a lodging-place.
It was a wretched, one-story cabin, on the skirts of the
town, remarkable for the rags in the windows, which rags, by computation,
if sold, would have paid for glazing them. The house
was a wretched, tumble-down affair altogether, that a southern
slave would turn up his nose at, and in which no southern master

would put a slave to live. It was a bleak, desolate abode, with
broken door pannels, and, in winter, no wood-pile. No wonder
that Tim loved the tavern, with its pleasant, sunny gallery, and
loafer's bench, its warm bar-room fire in winter, its constantly
changing company, life, talk, and tippling! There was always
something going on at the tavern in sympathy with Tim's feelings;
when he was a sociable, dram-loving poor devil. There were the
stages to come in and start out four times in the course of the day,
when it was quite a busy time for Tim, who always, if not too
tipsy, was found at the leaders' bits; and, if he happened to be too
far gone for this, he would watch from the bench, with great cugers,
the letting down of the steps, the getting in of the passengers,
the shutting up of the steps, and fastening of the door. He
would dreamily inspect the process of the driver's mounting his
box, gathering up his reins, taking his whip and giving it the preliminary
flourish in the air. Crack! away bound the leaders! the
wheelers dance, and prance, and follow! The stage whirls away
after them, when Tim, inspired by the excitement, catching off his
old hat, swings it, and gives two tipsy cheers and a half, sinks
away into a toper's snooze, with his hurrahing hat feebly sinking to
his side, his unshaven chin fallen upon his breast, his red, foolish-looking
eyes closing with a ludicrous series of winks, and his whole
form as supple as an India rubber man.

Then there was the constant arrival and departure of travelers;
there were groups talking politics before the door to listen to; there
was a trade in horses to watch; or a menagerie come to put up and
perform, and bills to be posted, when Tim was in his element. No
wonder Tim liked to be at the tavern! It was a sort of paradise to
him. It was, moreover, his place of business—his exchange. His
house presented quite opposite images. There was Tim's wife—
naturally a good-hearted woman and kind, but who, with the cares
of a large family and Tim's idleness and intemperance, had lost
her patience with her beauty, and was now become a perfect virago,
at least to Tim. He never came home at night that she did n't
give him the gall that had laid in her heart for him all day; he
never left in the morning without an inverted blessing, and the
charitable wish that he might get his neck broke in a gutter before
she laid eyes upon him again.

Tim used to say that it was his wife's tongue made him drink,
and drove him to the tavern. But this was a slander, and, unfortunately,
a very common one, from Tim Satchell's. Tim knew,
and so do most other Tims know the same, that “her tongue” was
the effect, not the cause. Tim began to drink when she loved him,
and her tongue was kindly in its cadence. By and by, as he neglected
her, his family, and his own character, she became soured.
She saw that her visions of happiness were wrecked; for all young
women who marry look for happiness. When young women marry
young men, the young men are not drunkards; they are upright;
their cheeks are fresh with health; their eyes sparkle with hope
and beam with love, whether the young man be a farmer or mechanic.

It is a marriage of love, and youth, and hopes of happiness.
All marry, the lowest and humblest marry, with such hopes.
So had the wife of Tim wedded him. She was nineteen, and rosy
and healthy, and loved him heartily; for he was then hale, strong,
and kind-hearted and, she thought, handsome. But a few years
passed on, and Tim took to tippling, by degrees at first; but
by and by he became a confirmed inebriate. His poor wife, shivering
over the few embers upon her hearth, remembers their wedding-day,
and the first few months of their married life, and weeps.

But tears will not always flow. By and by, after months of wo
and privation, their fountain is dried up. The spirit becomes hardened,
and the spirit yields angry fire instead of tears. The voice
becomes harsh in addressing the wronger, and the eye welcomes
him, in his beastly intoxication, with scorn and hatred instead of
love. No, there is no more love! Stern endurance has taken the
place of all the gentler emotions. Alas, for the wife of the inebriate!
Who will condemn the cross wife, because she is cross?
Has she not enough to sour her spirit and embitter her words?
Who that hears the wretched mother, in the midst of her ragged
and father-deserted brood, lifting her voice, and dealing her blows
to the right and left, will condemn? Be assured, that the voice of
anger, and the language of the virago, is oftener the expression of a
broken heart and crushed hopes, seared into sternness, than the
manifestation of a hard heart and cruel temper. Speak to her kindly.
Hear her tale of crushed hopes, of privation, of insult, of neglect,
of poverty, of cares that seemed too hard to be borne. Who would
be even as sweet-tempered as she? Judge not. Beneath all that
seems harsh and evil, lies a crushed heart! When we look at the
stars, we place to our eyes a telescope. When we look upon the
poor, let us use the lens of charity, which magnifies and brings in
the foreground the good, but diminishes and removes at a distance
the evil.

Tim Satchell was not driven from his home to the tavern by his
wife's tongue, as he told every body,—villain that he was, thus to
speak evil of her whom he had sworn to love and cherish, not to
dishonor! Her bitterness of words was the consequence of his
degradation, and neglect of her. How could she receive kindly the
man who had made himself a by-word? Was she not, as his wife,
degraded? were not his children degraded? She was “drunken
Tim's wife;” they were “drunken Tim's children.” Thus were
they designated, she and the babes of her bosom, through him who
should have been a sun to his household, to dispense light and glory
therein. What wonder that she should look upon her ragged babes,
as they cried around her for food, as they grew up in poverty and
vice, and pilfered, and cursed, and got evil names in the town,—
what wonder that she should look from them to him, and curse him
in her heart?

The wretched interior of his cabin, no furniture, no food to eat,
no fire-wood, crying, tattered children, a sour-featured wife,—no

wonder that Tim loved the tavern, and hated his home! But he
had himself made his home the hell he called it, and felt it to be.

In this home, if such it be called, Simmins Satchell first saw the
light. He had the advantage, from being the oldest, to have passed
the first five or six years in comparative happiness, compared with
the infancy of his numerous brothers and sisters, especially the
later ones; for each succession entered upon a harder lot than the
preceding. The father was more brutal and idiotic, the mother
crosser, the poverty deeper, and starvation more certain; for food
was less, and mouths more. These children, nine in all, grew up
like cats and dogs. They ate nothing that all did not fight for;
they squabbled and fought like dogs for bones; they hated each
other, as hungry children will, because each saw in his brother or
sister a devourer of food which he wanted. The children of Tim,
indeed, could be likened to a litter of young wolves, without
stretching for a comparison. As soon as they could run about, they
stole apples and fruit, and whatever they could get. Three or four
of them had even been known to sally out after a large dog carrying
a bone in his mouth, attack him with sticks till he dropped it,
and then attack each other for its possession.

Young Simmins, as he grew up to stout boyhood, had got to be a
thorough-paced rogue; for his early advantages, during his father's
industrious years, had only made him more skillful and intelligent.
At sixteen, he would lead his whole horde of brothers and sisters,
not even excepting the one three years old, next to the infant, to
rob orchards, hen-roosts, yards, and barns, till they became so
formidable, from their number, adroitness, and daring, that the
town took the matter in hand. Simmins, and three of his brothers,
were one night waylaid and caught in the act of climbing a garden
fence, with arms filled with vegetables, chickens, clothes from the
line, and other articles that they had fallen in with in their foraging.
These being handed over to citizens in waiting, the constables
entered the garden, and found two of the “Tim-girls,” stripping a
plum-tree; these, by great fleetness of foot, escaped. The house
was then approached, and, through a broken pane of glass in the
sink-room window, they saw the heels and little legs and back of a
young “Tim” coming out. They received him in their arms,
much to his surprise, and found his little fists—for he was not five
years old—filled with silver spoons!

The next morning, they were all had up before a magistrate, and
all but Simmins were sent to the poor-house for a month, to pick
oakum, greatly to the relief of their mother, who had no more
control over them than over so many rattle-snakes. Simmins met
with a different fortune, and one which led the way to his future
career as a lawyer.