6. VI.
Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the
sheltered river of boyhood—had encountered the
storms of a first entrance into life—had trimmed my
boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to windward,
was lying fairly on my course. Among others
from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John,
who had shaken hands with me at the university gate,
leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in
doubt as to his real character and history as the first
day we met. I had never heard him speak of either
father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, received
a letter from the day of his matriculation. He
passed his vacations at the university; he had studied
well, yet refused one of the highest college honors
offered him with his degree; he had shown many
good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and,
all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I
knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of
superiority; and my knowledge went no farther. The
coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off;
and, after four years' constant association, I had not
an idea where he was going, or to what he was destined.
The driver blew his horn.
“God bless you, Slingsby!”
“God bless you, St. John ”
And so we parted.
It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the
bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten
there was such a being in the world. Late in the
month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward,
giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked,
on a clear and delicious day, in the small
steamer which plies up and down the Caynga lake,
looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring
little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we
got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern
for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight
of a group of Indians standing motionless by the
wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic
visit to Washington.
I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened
soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding
through. The first severe frost had come, and the
miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which
is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple,
with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian
lip, stood here and there in the forest like the
Sultan's standard in a host—the solitary and far-seen
aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like
and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer,
turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining
of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fanlike
catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun,
spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the
kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its
majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a
stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about
him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with
its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward
in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with
its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring
green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash
flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed
sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation,
stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating
light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an
Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the
still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing
with the noble things whose summer they had
shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in
her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life
she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this
universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir
and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads
darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the
death-struck glory of their companions.
The dull colors of English autumnal foliage give
you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon.
The change here is gradual; in America it is the
work of a night—of a single frost!
Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the
still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the
morning to a spectacle like this!
It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through
the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold,
purple, and crimson—had been fused in the alembic
of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light
and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf
in those countless trees had been painted to outflush
the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of
the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals
and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let
forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the
roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden
time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the perishing
leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.
I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to
what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled,
when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the
moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.
“St. John? Impossible!”
“Bodily!” answered my quondam classmate.
I looked at him with astonishment. The soigné
man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a
kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to
his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap
of rich otter skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly
carelessness over his feet; and, altogether, there
was that in his air which told me at a glance that he
had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his
leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched
between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if
he was brooding over the more idle days in which we
had been acquainted.
“And where are you bound?” I asked, having answered
the same question for myself.
“Westward with the chiefs!”
“For how long?”
“The remainder of my life.”
I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise.
“You would wonder less,” said he, with an impatient
gesture, “if you knew more of me. And, by-the-way,”
he added with a smile, “I think I never
told you the first half of the story—my life up to the
time I met you.”
“It was not for want of a catechist,” I answered,
settling myself in an attitude of attention.
“No; and I was often tempted to gratify your curiosity:
but from the little intercourse I had had with
the world, I had adopted some precocious principles;
and one was, that a man's influence over others was
vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his
history.”
I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the
calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on leisurely
with a story which is scarce remarkable enough
for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son
of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed
his early youth on the borders of civilization, between
whites and Indians, and that he had been more particularly
indebted for protection to the father of Nunu.
Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward
while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond
life in the different cities had taught him the caution
and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A
fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with
the means of education, and, with singular application
in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied
himself to study under a private master, fitted himself
for the university in half the usual time, and cultivated,
in addition, the literary taste which I have remarked
upon.
“This,” he said, smiling at my look of astonishment,
“brings me up to the time when we met. I
came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few
hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience
of the rough side of the world, great confidence
in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind
of instinct of good manners, which made me ambitious
of shining in society. You were a witness to
my déb¢ut. Miss Temple was the first highly-educated
woman I had ever known, and you saw her
effect on me.”
“And since we parted?”
“Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar
enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bottom,
and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods.
I do not say it from common disappointment, for I
may say I succeeded in everything I undertook—”
“Except Miss Temple,” I said, interrupting, at the
hazard of wounding him.
“No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I
had my turn. You see me in my new character now.
But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, playing
my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for
a woman worth ten thousand of her—and here she
is.”
As Nunu came up the companion-way from the
cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature
so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair
of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in
the usual manner, but with the most absolute simplicity.
She had changed in those five years from
the child to the woman, and, with a round and well-developed
figure, additional height, and manners at
once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked
the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand,
and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.
“That I could ever have put a creature like this,”
he said, “into comparison with the dolls of civilization!”
We parted at Buffalo; St. John with his wife and
the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake
Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara.
