University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER FOURTH.
THE FORTUNES OF THE FAMILY CONSIDERED.

When Oliver and old Sylvester entered the house
they found all of the family gathered within, save
the children, who loitered about the doors and windows,
looking in, anxious-eyed, on the preparations
for tea going forward under the direction of the
widow Margaret, and Mopsey. The other women of
the household were busy with a discussion of the
merits of Mrs. Carrack, of Boston, the fashionable
lady of the family.

“I should like to see Mrs. Carrack above all
things,” said the Captain's pretty little wife, “she
must be a fine woman from all I have heard of her.”

“Thee will have small chance, I fear, child,”
said Mrs. Jane Peabody, sitting buxomly in an easy
arm chair, which she had quietly assumed, “she is
too fine for the company of us plain folks in every
point of view.”

“It's five years since she was here,” the widow

suggested as she adjusted the chairs around the table,
“she said she never would come inside the house
again, because the best bed-chamber was not given
to her—I am sorry to say it.”

“She's a heathen and wicked woman,” Mopsey
said, shuffling at the door, and turning back on her
way to the kitchen—“your poor boy was lying low
of a fever and how could she expect it.”

“In one point of view she may come; her husband
was living then,” continued Mrs. Jane Peabody,
“she has become a rich woman since, and may honor
us with a visit—to show us how great a person she has
got to be—let her come—it need'nt trouble thee, nor
me, I'm sure.” Mrs. Jane Peabody smoothed her
Quaker vandyke, and sat stiffly in her easy chair.

Old Sylvester entering at that moment, laid aside
his staff and broad-brimmed hat, which little Sam
Peabody ran in to take charge of, and took his seat
at the head of the table; the Captain, who was busy
at the back-door scouring an old rusty fowling-piece
for some enterprise he had in view in the morning,
was called in by his little wife; the others were seated
in their places about the board.

“Where's William?” old Sylvester asked.

He was at a window in the front room, where he
had sat for several hours, with spectacles on his brow,
poring over an old faded parchment deed, which
related to some neighboring land he thought belonged
to the Peabodys, (although in possession of others,)
and which he had always made a close study of on
his visits to the homestead. There was a dark passage,
under which he made their title, which had
been submitted to various men learned in the law;
it was too dark and doubtful, in their opinion, to
build a contest on, and yet William Peabody gave it
every year a new examination, with the hope, perhaps,
that the wisdom of advancing age might
enable him to fathom and expound it, although it
had been drawn up by the greatest lawyer of his
day in all that country. His wife Hannah, grieving
in spirit that her husband should be toiling forever in
the quest of gain, sat near him, pale, calm and disheartened,
but speaking not a word. He could not
look at her with that fearful green shade on her face,
but kept his eyes always fixed on the old parchment.
When his aged father had taken his seat, and began
his thanks to God for the bounties before them, as
though the old Patriarch had brought a better spirit

from the calm day without, he thrust the paper into
his bosom and glided to his place at the table. It
would have done you good to hear that old man's
prayer. He neither solicited forgiveness for his
enemies nor favors for his friends; for schools,
churches, presidents or governments; neither for
health, wealth, worldly welfare, nor for any single
other thing; all he said, bowing his white old head,
was this:

“May we all be Christian people the day we die—
God bless us.”

That was all; and his kinsfolk lost no appetite in
listening to it—for it was no sooner uttered than they
all fell to—and not a word more was spoken for five
minutes at least, nor then perhaps, had not little Sam
Peabody cried out, with breathless animation, and
delight of feature,

“The pigeons, grandfather!” at the same time
pointing from the door to the evening sky, along
which they were winging their calm and silent flight
in a countless train—streaming on westward as
though there was no end to them; which put old
Sylvester upon recalling the cheerful sports of his
younger days.

“I have taken a couple of hundred in a net on the
Hill before breakfast, many a time,” he said. “You
used to help me, William.”

“Yes, I and old Ethan Barbary,” said the merchant,
“used to spring the net; you gave the word.”

“Old Ethan has been dead many a day. Ethan,”
continued old Sylvester, in explanation, “was the
father of our Mr. Barbary. He was a preacher too,
and carried a gun in the revolution. I remember he
was accounted a peculiar man. I never knew why.
To be sure he used to spend the time he did not employ
in prayers, preaching and tending the sick, in
working on the farms about, for he had no wages for
preaching. When there was none of that to be had,
he took his basket, and sallying through the fields,
gathered berries, which he bestowed on the needy
families of the neighborhood. In winter he collected
branches in the woods about, as fire-wood for the
poor.”

“That was a capital idea,” said Oliver the politician.
“It must have made him very popular.”

“Wasn't he always thought to be a little out of
his head?” asked the merchant. “He might have
sold the wood for a good price in the severe winters.”

“I remember as if it were yesterday,” old Sylvester
went on in his own way, not heeding in the slightest
the suggestions of his sons, “he and black Burling,
who is buried in the woods by the Great Walnut
tree, near the pond, both fought in the American
ranks, and had but one gun between them, which
they used turn about.”

“You saw rough times in those days, grandfather,”
said the Captain.

“I did, Charley,” old Sylvester answered, looking
kindly on the Captain, who had always been something
of a favorite of his from the day he had married
into the family; “and there are but few left to talk
with me of them now. I am one of the living survivors
of an almost extinguished race. The grave
will soon be our only habitation. I am one of the
few stalks that still remain in the field where the tempest
passed. I have fought against the foreign foe
for your sake; they have disappeared from the land,
and you are free; the strength of my arm delays,
and my feet fail me in the way; the hand which
fought for your liberties is now open to bless you.
In my youth I bled in battle that you might be independent—let
not my heart, in my old age, bleed because

you abandon the path I would have you follow.”

The old patriarch leaned his head upon his hand,
and the company was silent as though they had
listened to a voice from the grave. He presently
looked up and smiled—“Old Ethan, I call to mind
now,” he renewed, “had a quality which our poor
Barbary inherited, and for which,” he added, looking
toward his son William, “and for which I greatly
honor his memory. He counted the money of this
world but as dross. From his manhood to the very
moment of his entering on the ministry, he never
would touch silver nor gold, partly, I think, because
it was the true Scripture course, and partly because a
dreadful murder had once happened in the Barbary
family, growing out of a quarrel for the possession of
a paltry sum of money.”

The bread she was raising to her lips fell from the
widow's hand, for she could not help but think of the
history of her absent son; and the voice of Miriam,
who did not present herself at the table, was heard
from a distant chamber, not distinctly, but in that
tone of chanting lament which had become habitual
to her whether in house, garden, or field. It was an

inexpressibly mournful cadence, and for the time stilled
all other sounds. They were only drawn away
from it by descrying Mopsey, the black servant, at a
turn of the road, hurrying with great animation towards
the homestead, but with a singularity in her
progress which could not fail to be observed. She
rushed along at great speed, for several paces, and
suddenly came to a halt, during which her head disappeared,
and then renewed her pace, repeating the
peculiar manœuvre once at least in every ten yards.
In a word, she was shuffling on in her loose shoes,
(which were on or off, one or the other of them every
other minute,) at as rapid a rate as that peculiar species
of locomotion allowed. Bursting with impatience
and the importance of her communication, her cap
flaunting from her head, she stood in the doorway
and announced, “We've beat Brundage—we've beat
Brundage!”

“What's this, Mopsey?” old Sylvester inquired.

“I've tried it and I've spanned it. I can't span
ours!”

On further questioning it appeared that Mopsey
had been on a pilgrimage to the next neighbor's, the
Brundages, to inspect their thanksgiving pumpkin,

and institute a comparison with the Peabody growth
of that kind, with a highly satisfactory and complacent
result as regarded the home production. Nobody
was otherwise than pleased at Mopsey's innocent
rejoicing, and when she had been duly complimented
on her success, she went away with a broad
black guffaw to set a trap in the garden for the
brown mouse, the sole surviving enemy of the great
Peabody thanksgiving pumpkin which must be plucked
next day for use.

With the dispatch of the evening meal, old Sylvester
withdrew to the other room, with a little hand
lamp, to read a chapter by himself. The others
remaining seated about the apartment; the Captain
and Oliver presently fell into a violent discussion on
the true sources of national wealth, the Captain giving
it as his opinion that it solely depended on having
a great number of ships at sea, as carriers between
different countries. Oliver was equally clear and
resolute that the real wealth of a nation lay in its
wheat crops. When wheat was at ten shillings the
bushel, all went well; let it fall a quarter, and you
had general bankruptey staring you in the face. Mr.
William Peabody was'nt at the pains to deliver his

opinion, but he was satisfied, in his secret soul, that
it lay in the increase of new houses, or the proper
supply of calicoes—he had'nt made up his mind
which. Presently Oliver was troubled again in reference
to the supply of gold in the world—whether
there was enough to do business with; he also had
some things to say (which he had out of a great
speech in Congress) about bullion and rates of exchange,
but nobody understood him.

“By the way,” he added, “Mrs. Carrack's son
Tiffany is gone to the Gold Region. From what he
writes to me I think he'll cut a very great figure in
that country.”

“An exceedingly fine, talented young man,” said
the merchant, who had, then, sundry sums on loan
from his mother.

“In any point of view, in which you regard it,”
continued Oliver, “the gold country is an important
acquisition.”

“You hav'nt the letter Tiffany wrote, with you?”
interrupted the Captain.

“I think I have,” was the answer. “I brought
it, supposing you might like to look at it. Shall I
read it?”

There was no objection—the letter was read—in
which Mr. Tiffany Carrack professed his weariness of
civilized life—spoke keenly of misspent hours—a
determination to rally and do something important,
intimating that that was a great country for enterprising
young men, and, in a familiar phrase, closed
with a settled resolution to do or die.

“I have a letter to the same effect,” said the Captain.

“And so have I,” said William Peabody, “word
for word.”

“He means to do something very grand,” said the
Captain. Something very grand — the women all
agreed—for Mr. Tiffany Carrack was a nice young
man, and had a prospect of inheriting a hundred
thousand dollars, to say nothing of the large sums he
was to bring from the Gold Regions. It was evident
to all that he was going into the business with a
rush. They, of course, would'nt see Mr. Tiffany
Carrack at this Thanksgiving gathering—he had better
business on hand—Mr. Tiffany Carrack was clearly
the promising young man of the family, and was
carrying the fortunes of the Peabodys into the remotest
quarters of the land.

“In a word,” said Mr. Oliver Peabody, developing
the Declaration of Independence on his pocket-handkerchief.
“He is going to do wonders in every point
of view. He'll carry the principles of Free Government
everywhere!”

The consideration of the extraordinary talents and
enterprise of the son imparted a new interest to the
question of the coming of Mrs. Carrack; which was rediscussed
in all its bearings; and it was almost unanimously
concluded—that, one day now only intervening
to Thanksgiving—it was too late to look for her.
There had been a general disposition, secretly opposed
only by Mrs. Jane Peabody, to yield to that fashionable
person the best bed-chamber, which was always accounted
a great prize and distinguished honor among
the family. But now there was scarcely any need of
reserving it longer—and who was to have it? Alas!
that is a question often raised in rural households,
often shakes them to the very base, and spreads
through whole families a bitterness and strength and
length of strife, which frequently ends only with
life itself.

To bring the matter to an issue, various whispered
conversations were held in the small room, lying next

to the sitting-room, at first between Mrs. Margaret
Peabody and Mopsey, to which one by one were summoned,
Mrs. Jane Peabody, the Captain's wife, and
Mrs. Hannah Peabody. The more it was discussed
the farther off seemed any reasonable conclusion.
When one arrangement was proposed, various faces
of the group grew dark and sour; when another,
other faces blackened and elongated; tongues, too,
wagged faster every minute, and at length grew to
such a hubbub as to call old Sylvester away from his
Bible and bring him to the door to learn what turmoil
it was that at this quiet hour disturbed the peace
of the Peabodys. He was not long in discovering
the ground of battle, and even as in old pictures
Adam is shown walking calmly in Eden among the
raging beasts of all degrees and kinds, the old patriarch
came forward among the women of the Peabody
family—“My children,” he said, “should dwell in
peace for the short stay allotted them on earth. Why
make a difference about so small a matter as a lodging-place—they
are all good and healthful rooms. I
have seen the day when camping on the wet grounds
and morasses I would have held any one of them to
be a palace-chamber. The back chamber, my child,”
he continued, addressing the Captain's wife, “looks
out on the orchard, where you always love to walk;
the white room, Hannah, towards your father's
house; and Jane, you cannot object to the front chamber
which is large, well-furnished, and has the best
of the sunrise. The Son of Man, my children, had
not where to lay his head, and shall we who are but
snails and worms, compared with his glory and goodness,
presume to exalt ourselves, where he was
abased.”

The old patriarch wished them a good night,
and with the departure of his white locks gleaming
as he walked away, as though it had been the
gentle radiance of the moon stilling the tumult of
the waters, they each quietly retired, and without a
further murmur, to the chambers assigned them.