University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
CATCHING AND GETTING CAUGHT.

DID you never notice how many reasons, never
thought of before, against having an aching
tooth drawn, occur to you when once you stand
on the dentist's door-stone ready to ring the bell?
Albert Charlton was full of doubts of what Miss
Isabel Marlay's opinion of his sister might be, and of what Miss
Isabel Marlay might think of him after his intemperate denunciation
of ministers and all other men of the learned professions.
It was quite a difficult thing for him to speak to
her on the subject of his sister's love-affair, and so, whenever
an opportunity presented itself, he found reason to apprehend
interruption. On one plea or another lie deferred the matter
until afternoon, and when afternoon came, Isa had gone
out. So that what had seemed to him in the watchfulness of
the night an affair for prompt action, was now deferred till evening:

But in his indecision and impatience Charlton found it impossible
to remain quiet. He must do something, and so he
betook himself to his old recreation of catching insects. He
would have scorned to amuse himself with so cruel a sport
as fishing; he would not eat a fish when it was caught. But
though he did not think it right for man to be a beast of
prey, slaughtering other animals to gratify his appetites, he

did not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of creeping things to
satisly the intellectual needs of humanity. Even this he did
with characteristic tenderness, never leaving a grasshopper to
writhe on a pin for two days, but kindly giving him a drop
of chloroform to pass him into the Buddhist's heaven of eternal
repose. In the course of an hour or two he had adorned
his hat with a variety of orthoptera, coleoptera, and all the
other opteras known to the insect-catching profession. A
large Cecropia spread its bright wings across the crown of his
hat, and several green Katydids appeared to be climbing up
the sides for an introduction to the brilliant moth; three
dragon-flies sat on the brim, and two or three ugly beetles
kept watch between them. As for grasshoppers, they hung
by threads from the hat-brim, and made unique pendants,
which flew and flopped about his face as he ran hither and
thither with his net, sweeping the air for new victims. Hurrying
with long strides after a large locust which he suspected
of belonging to a new species, and which flew high and far,
his eyes were so uplifted to his game that he did not see
anything else, and he ran down a hill and fairly against a
lady, and then drew back in startled surprise and apologized.
But before his hasty apology was half-uttered he lifted his
eyes to the face of the lady and saw that it was Miss Minorkey,
walking with her father. Albert was still more confused
when he recognized her, and his confusion was not relieved
by her laughter. For the picturesque figure of Charlton and his
portable museum was too much for her gravity, and as the
French ladies of two centuries ago used to say, she “lost her
serious.” Guessing the cause of her merriment, Charlton lifted
his hat off his head, held it up, and laughed with her.

“Well, Miss Minorkey, no wonder you laugh. This is a
queer hat-buggery and dangling grasshoppery.”

“That's a beautiful Cecropia,” said Helen Minorkey, recovering
a little, and winning on Albert at once by showing a
little knowledge of his pet science, if it was only the name
of a single specimen. “I wouldn't mind being an entomologist
myself if there were many such as this and that green
beetle to be had. I am gathering botanical specimens,” and
she opened her portfolio.

“But how did you come to be in Metropolisville?”

“Why,” interrupted Mr. Minorkey, “I couldn't stand the
climate at Perritaut. The malaria of the Big Gun River
affected my health seriously. I had a fever night before last,
and I thought I'd get away at once, and I made up my mind
there was more oxygen in this air than in that at Perritaut.
So I came up here this morning. But I'm nearly dead,” and
here Mr. Minorkey coughed and sighed, and put his hand on
his breast in a self-pitying fashion.

As Mr. Minorkey wanted to inspect an eighty across the
slough, on which he had been asked to lend four hundred
dollars at three per cent a month, and five after maturity,
with a waiver in the mortgage, he suggested that Helen
should walk back, leaving him to go on slowly, as the rheumatism
in his left knee would permit. It was quite necessary
that Miss Minorkey should go back; her boots were not thick
enough for the passage of the slough. Mr. Charlton kindly
offered to accompany her.

Albert Charlton thought that Helen Minorkey looked finer
than ever, for sun and wind had put more color into her
checks, and he, warm with running, pushed back his long light

hair, and looked sidewise at the white forehead and the delicate
but fresh cheeks below.

“So you like Ceropias and bright-green beetles, do you?”
he said, and he gallantly unpinned the wide-winged moth
from his hat-crown and stuck it on the cover of Miss Minorkey's
portfolio, and then added the green beetle. Helen
thanked him in her quiet way, but with pleased eyes.

“Excuse me, Miss Minorkey,” said Albert, blushing, as
they approached the hotel, “I should like very much to accompany
you to the parlor of the hotel, but people generally
see nothing but the ludicrous side of scientific pursuits, and I
should only make you ridiculous.”

“I should be very glad to have you come,” said Helen.
“I don't mind being laughed at in good company, and it is
such a relief to meet a gentleman who can talk about something
besides corner lots and five per cent a month, and,” with
a wicked look at the figure of her father in the distance, “and
mortgages with waivers in them!”

Our cynic philosopher found his cynicism melting away
like an iceberg in the Gulf-stream. An hour before he would
have told you that a woman's flattery could have no effect on
an intellectual man; now he felt a tremor of pleasure, an indescribable
something, as he shortened his steps to keep time
with the little boots with which Miss Minorkey trod down
the prairie grass, and he who had laughed at awkward boys
for seeking the aid of dancing-masters to improve their gait,
wished himself less awkward, and actually blushed with
pleasure when this self-possessed young lady praised his conversation.
He walked with her to the hotel, though he
took the precaution to take his hat off his head and hang it

on his finger, and twirl it round, as if laughing at it himself—
back-firing against the ridicule of others. He who thought
himself sublimely indifferent to the laughter of ignoramuses,
now fencing against it!

The parlor of the huge pine hotel (a huge unfinished pine
hotel is the starting point of speculative cities), the parlor
of the Metropolisville City Hotel was a large room, the floor
of which was covered with a very cheap but bright-colored
ingrain carpet; the furniture consisted of six wooden-bottomed
chairs, very bright and new, with a very yellow
rose painted on the upper slat of the back of each, a badly
tattered hair-cloth sofa, of a very antiquated pattern, and a
small old piano, whose tinny tones were only matched by its
entire lack of tune. The last two valuable articles had been
bought at auction, and some of the keys of the piano had been
permanently silenced by its ride in an ox-cart from Red Owl
to Metropolisville.

But intellect and culture are always superior to external
circumstances, and Mr. Charlton was soon sublimely oblivious
to the tattered hair-cloth of the sofa on which he sat, and he
utterly failed to notice the stiff wooden chair on which Miss
Minorkey reposed. Both were too much interested in science
to observe furniture. She admired the wonders of his dragon-flies,
always in her quiet and intelligent fashion; he returned
the compliment by praising her flowers in his eager, hearty,
enthusiastic way. Her coolness made her seem to him very superior;
his enthusiasm made him very piquant and delightful
to her. And when he got upon his hobby and told her how
grand a vocation the teacher's profession was, and recited
stories of the self-denial of Pestalozzi and Froebel, and the

great schemes of Basedow, and told how he meant here in
this new country to build a great Institute on rational principles,
Helen Minorkey found him more interesting than ever.
Like you and me, she loved philanthropy at other people's
expense. She admired great reformers, though she herself
never dreamed of putting a little finger to anybody's burden.

It took so long to explain fully this great project that
Albert staid until nearly supper-time, forgetting the burden of
his sister's unhappy future in the interest of science and
philanthropy. And even when he rose to go, Charlton turned
back to look again at a “prairie sun-flower” which Helen
Minorkey had dissected while he spoke, and, finding something
curious, perhaps in the fiber, he proposed to bring his microscope
over in the evening and examine it—a proposition very
grateful to Helen, who had nothing but ennui to expect in
Metropolisville, and who was therefore delighted. Delighted
is a strong word for one so cool: perhaps it would be better
to say that she was relieved and pleased at the prospect of
passing an evening with so curious and interesting a companion.
For Charlton was both curious and interesting to her.
She sympathized with his intellectual activity, and she was
full of wonder at his intense moral earnestness.

As for Albert, botany suddenly took on a new interest in
his eyes. He had hitherto regarded it as a science for girls.
But now he was so profoundly desirous of discovering the true
character of the tissue in the plant which Miss Minorkey had
dissected, that it seemed to him of the utmost importance to
settle it that very evening. His mother for the first time complained
of his going out, and seemed not very well satisfied
about something. He found that he was likely to have a good

opportunity, after supper, to speak to Isabel Marlay in regard
to his sister and her lover, but somehow the matter did not
seem so exigent as it had. The night before, he had determined
that it was needful to check the intimacy before it went farther,
that every day of delay increased the peril; but things often
look differently under different circumstances, and now the most
important duty in life for Albert Charlton was the immediate
settlement of a question in structural botany by means of microscopic
investigation. Albert was at this moment a curious illustration
of the influence of scientific enthusiasm, for he hurriedly
relieved his hat of its little museum, ate his supper, got out
his microscope, and returned to the hotel. He placed the instrument
on the old piano, adjusted the object, and pedagogically
expounded to Miss Minorkey the true method of observing.
Microscopy proved very entertaining to both. Albert did
not feel sure that it might not become a life-work with him.
It would be a delightful thing to study microscopic botany
forever, if he could have Helen Minorkey to listen to his enthusiastic
expositions. From her science the transition to his
was easy, and they studied under every combination of glasses
the beautiful lace of a dragon-fly's wing, and the irregular spots
on a drab grasshopper which ran by chance half-across one of
his eyes. The thrifty landlord had twice looked in at the door
in hope of finding the parlor empty, intending in which case
to put out the lamp. But I can not tell how long this enthusiastic
pursuit of scientific knowledge might have lasted had
not Mr. Minorkey been seized with one of his dying spells.
When the message was brought by a Norwegian servant-girl,
whose white hair fairly stood up with fright, Mr. Charlton
was very much shocked, but Miss Minorkey did not for a
moment lose her self-possession. Besides having the advantage of
quiet nerves, she had become inured to the presence of Death in
all his protean forms—it was impossible that her father should be
threatened in a way with which she was not already familiar.

Emotions may be suspended by being superseded for a time
by stronger ones. In such case, they are likely to return with
great foree, when revived by some association. Charlton stepped
out on the piazza with his microscope in his hand and
stopped a moment to take in the scene—the rawness and newness
and flimsiness of the mushroom village, with its hundred
unpainted bass-wood houses, the sweetness, peacefulness, and
freshness of the unfurrowed prairie beyond, the calmness and
immutability of the clear, star-lit sky above—when he heard a
voice round the corner of the building that put out his eyes
and opened his ears, if I may so speak. Somebody was reproaching
somebody else with being “spooney on the little girl.”

“He! he!”—the reply began with that hateful giggle—“I
know my business, gentlemen. Not such a fool as you think.”
Here there was a shuffling of feet, and Charlton's imagination
easily supplied the image of Smith Westcott cutting a “pigeon-wing.”

“Don't I know the ways of this wicked world? Haven't
I had all the silly sentiment took out of me? He! he! I've
seen the world,” and then he danced again and sang:

“Now, boys,” he began, again rattling his coins and keys,
“I learnt too much about New York. I had to leave. They
didn't want a man there that knew all the ropes so well, and

[ILLUSTRATION]

"BY GEORGE! HE! HE! HE!"

[Description: 557EAF. Illustration page. Page 069. Engraving of a mustached man in a bowler hat holding a cigarette in a long holder.]

so I called a meeting of the mayor and told him good-by. He!
he! By George! 'S a fack! I drank too much and I lived
two-forty on the plank-road, till the devil sent me word he
didn't want to lose his best friend, and he wished I'd just put
out from New York. 'Twas leave New York or die. That's
what brought me here. If I'd lived in New York I wouldn't
never 've married. Not much, Mary Ann or Sukey Jane. He!
he!” And then he sang again:
but I'd be hanged if I'd marry a wife to save her from the
Tower of London, you know. As long as I could live at the
Elysian Club, didn't want a wife. But this country! Psha!
this is a-going to be a land of Sunday-schools and sewing-societies.
A fellow can't live here without a wife:
Yah! Can't sing! Out of practice! Got a cold! Instrument
needs tuning! Excuse me! He! he!”

There was some other talk, in a voice too low for Albert
to hear, though he listened with both ears, waiving all sense
of delicacy about eavesdropping in his anger and his desire
to rescue Katy. Then Westcott, who had evidently been drinking
and was vinously frank, burst out with:

“Think I'd marry an old girl! Think I'd marry a smart
one! I want a sweet little thing that would love me and
worship me and believe everything I said. I know! By
George! He! he! That Miss Minorkey at the table! She'd

see through a fellow! Now, looky here, boys, I'm goin' to be
serious for once. I want a girl that'll exert a moral influence
over me, you know! But I'll be confounded if I want too
much moral influence, by George, he! he! A little spree now
and then all smoothed over! I need moral influence, but in
small doses. Weak constitution, you know! Can't stand too
much moral influence. Head's level. A little girl! Educate her
yourself, you know! He! he! By George! And do as you
please.
Yah! yah! He! he! he!”

It is not strange that Charlton did not sleep that night,
that he was a prey to conflicting emotions, blessing the cool,
intellectual, self-possessed face of Miss Minorkey, who knew
botany, and inwardly cursing the fate that had handed little
Katy over to be the prey of such a man as Smith Westcott.