5. CHAPTER V.
WINCHESTER.
Having followed the Indian boy from Apple Orchard to his
lodge in the wilderness, and shown how he passed many of his
hours in the hills, it is proper now that we should mount—in a
figurative and metaphorical sense—behind Mr. Rushton, and see
whither that gentleman also bends his steps. We shall thus
arrive at the real theatre of our brief history—we mean at the
old town of Winchester.
Every body knows, or ought to know, all about Winchester.
It is not a borough of yesterday, where the hum of commerce
and the echo of the pioneer's axe mingle together, as in many of
our great western cities of the Arabian Nights:—Winchester has
recollections about it, and holds to the past—to its Indian combats,
and strange experiences of clashing arms, and border revelries,
and various scenes of wild frontier life, which live for us
now only in the chronicles;—to its memories of Colonel Washington,
the noble young soldier, who afterwards became, as we
all have heard, so distinguished upon a larger field;—to Thomas
Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, who came there often when
the deer and the wolves of his vast possessions would permit him
—and to Daniel Morgan, who emptied many fair cups on Loudoun-street,
and one day passed, with trumpets sounding, going
to Quebec; again on his way to debate questions of importance
with Tarleton, at the Cowpens—lastly, to crush the tory rising
on Lost River, about the time when “it pleased heaven so to
order things, that the large army of Cornwallis should be entrapped
and captured at Yorktown, in Virginia,” as the chronicles
inform us. All these men of the past has Winchester looked
upon, and many more—on strange, wild pictures, and on many
histories. For you walk on history there and drink the chronicle:—Washington's
old fort is crumbling, but still visible;—Morgan,
the strong soldier, sleeps there, after all his storms;—and
grim, eccentric Fairfax lies where he fell, on hearing of the Yorktown
ending.
When we enter the town with Mr. Rushton, these men are
elsewhere, it is true; but none the less present. They are there
forever.
The lawyer's office was on Loudoun-street, and cantering
briskly along the rough highway past the fort, he soon reached
the rack before his door, and dismounted. The rack was
crooked and quailed—the house was old and dingy—the very
knocker on the door frowned grimly at the wayfarer who
paused before it. One would have said that Mr. Rushton's manners,
house, and general surrounding, would have repelled the
community, and made him a thousand enemies, so grim were
they. Not at all. No lawyer in the town was nearly so popular—none
had as much business of importance entrusted to them.
It had happened in his case as in a thousand others, which every
one's experience must have furnished. His neighbors had discovered
that his rude and surly manners concealed a powerful
intellect and an excellent heart—and even this rudeness had
grown interesting from the cynical dry humor not unfrequently
mingled with it.
A huge table, littered with old dingy volumes, and with dusty
rolls of papers tied with red tape—a tall desk, with a faded and
ink-bespattered covering of brown cloth—a lofty set of “pigeon
holes,” nearly filled with documents of every description—and a
set of chairs and stools in every state of dilapidation:—there was
the ante-room of Joseph Rushton, Esq., Attorney-at-Law and
Solicitor in Chancery.
No window panes ever had been seen so dirty as those which
graced the windows—no rag-carpet so nearly resolved into its
component elements, had ever decorated human dwelling—and
perhaps no legal den, from the commencement of the world to
that time, had ever diffused so unmistakeable an odor of parchment,
law-calf, and ancient dust!
The apartment within the first was much smaller, and here
Mr. Rushton held his more confidential interviews. Few persons
entered it, however; and even Roundjacket would tap at the door
before entering, and generally content himself with thrusting his
head through the opening, and then retiring. Such was the
lawyer's office.
