University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.

Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending
Medical Lectures at the school connected with
one of our principal colleges, remained after the
Lecture one day and wished to speak with the
Professor. He was a student of mark, — first
favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby
colts. There are in every class half a dozen
bright faces to which the teacher naturally directs
his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose
attention he seems to hold that of the mass of
listeners. Among these some one is pretty sure
to take the lead, by virtue of a personal magnetism,
or some peculiarity of expression, which
places the face in quick sympathetic relations
with the lecturer. This was a young man with
such a face; and I found, — for you have guessed
that I was the “Professor” above-mentioned, —
that, when there was anything difficult to be explained,
or when I was bringing out some favorite
illustration of a nice point, (as, for instance,
when I compared the cell-growth, by which Nature
builds up a plant or an animal, to the glass-blower's

similar mode of beginning, — always
with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is
going to make,) I naturally looked in his face
and gauged my success by its expression.

It was a handsome face, — a little too pale,
perhaps, and would have borne something more
of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the
organization to which it belongs in Section B of
Class 1 of my Anglo-American Anthropology
(unpublished). The jaw in this section is but
slightly narrowed, — just enough to make the
width of the forehead tell more decidedly. The
moustache often grows vigorously, but the whiskers
are thin. The skin is like that of Jacob,
rather than like Esau's. One string of the animal
nature has been taken away, but this gives
only a greater predominance to the intellectual
chords. To see just how the vital energy has
been toned down, you must contrast one of this
section with a specimen of Section A of the
same class, — say, for instance, one of the old-fashioned,
full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring, big
Commodores of the last generation, whom you
remember, at least by their portraits, in ruffled
shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as plucky
as bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up
from their foreheads, which were not commonly
very high or broad. The special form of physical
life I have been describing gives you a right to
expect more delicate perceptions and a more
reflective nature than you commonly find in

shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.

The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking
all the time as if he wanted to say something
in private, and waiting for two or three others,
who were still hanging about, to be gone.

Something is wrong! — I said to myself, when
I noticed his expression. — Well, Mr. Langdon,
— I said to him, when we were alone, — can I do
anything for you to-day?

You can, Sir, — he said. — I am going to leave
the class, for the present, and keep school.

Why, that's a pity, and you so near graduating!
You'd better stay and finish this course,
and take your degree in the spring, rather than
break up your whole plan of study.

I can't help myself, Sir, — the young man answered.
— There's trouble at home, and they cannot
keep me here as they have done. So I must
look out for myself for a while. It 's what I 've
done before, and am ready to do again. I came
to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach
a common school, or a high school, if you think
I am up to that. Are you willing to give it to
me?

Willing? Yes, to be sure, — but I don't want
you to go. Stay; we 'll make it easy for you.
There 's a fund will do something for you, perhaps.
Then you can take both the annual prizes,
if you like, — and claim them in money, if you
want that more than medals.

I have thought it all over, — he answered, —
and have pretty much made up my mind to go.

A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous
address and mild utterance, but means at
least as much as he says. There are some people
whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual understatement.
I often tell Mrs. Professor that one of
her “I think it 's sos” is worth the Bible-oath of all
the rest of the household that they “know it 's
so.” When you find a person a little better than
his word, a little more liberal than his promise, a
little more than borne out in his statement by his
facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you
recognize a kind of eloquence in that person's
utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.

This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive,
with family-recollections that made him unwilling
to accept the kind of aid which many students
would have thankfully welcomed. I knew
him too well to urge him, after the few words
which implied that he was determined to go.
Besides, I have great confidence in young men
who believe in themselves, and are accustomed to
rely on their own resources from an early period.
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the
great bully, the World, and takes him boldly by
the beard, he is often surprised to find it come off
in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare
away timid adventurers. I have seen young men
more than once, who came to a great city without
a single friend, support themselves and pay for

their education, lay up money in a few years,
grow rich enough to travel, and establish themselves
in life, without ever asking a dollar of any
person which they had not earned. But these are
exceptional cases. There are horse-tamers, born
so, as we all know; there are woman-tamers who
bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the
children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers,
who can make any community, even a Yankee
one, get down and let them jump on its back as
easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.

Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I
could not say positively; but he had spirit, and,
as I have said, a family-pride which would not
let him be dependent. The New England Brahmin
caste often gets blended with connections of
political influence or commercial distinction. It
is a charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune
carries him in this way into some of the
“old families” who have fine old houses, and city-lots
that have risen in the market, and names
written in all the stock-books of all the dividend-paying
companies. His narrow study expands
into a stately library, his books are counted by
thousands instead of hundreds, and his favorites
are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian
sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and
paper.

The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather
of our young gentleman, had made an advantageous
alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea

Wentworth had read one of his sermons which
had been printed “by request,” and became
deeply interested in the young author, whom
she had never seen. Out of this circumstance
grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration,
a matrimonial alliance, and a family
of half a dozen children. Wentworth Langdon,
Esquire, was the oldest of these, and
lived in the old family-mansion. Unfortunately,
that principle of the diminution of estates by
division, to which I have referred, rendered
it somewhat difficult to maintain the establishment
upon the fractional income which the
proprietor received from his share of the property.
Wentworth Langdon, Esq., represented
a certain intermediate condition of life not at
all infrequent in our old families. He was the
connecting link between the generation which
lived in ease, and even a kind of state, upon its
own resources, and the new brood, which must
live mainly by its wits or industry, and make itself
rich, or shabbily subside into that lower stratum
known to social geologists by a deposit of
Kidderminster carpets and the peculiar aspect
of the fossils constituting the family furniture
and wardrobe. This slack-water period of a
race, which comes before the rapid ebb of its
prosperity, is familiar to all who live in cities.
There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than
these children of rich families, just above the necessity
of active employment, yet not in a condition
to place their own children advantageously,
if they happen to have families. Many of them
are content to live unmarried. Some mend their
broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some
leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity
from which their ancestors emerged; so that
you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls
names which, a few generations back, were upon
parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with
armorial bearings.

In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar
to us in the streets. They are very courteous in
their salutations; they have time enough to bow
and take their hats off, — which, of course, no
business-man can afford to do. Their beavers are
smoothly brushed, and their boots well polished;
all their appointments are tidy; they look the respectable
walking gentleman to perfection. They
are prone to habits — to frequent reading-rooms,
insurance-offices, — to walk the same streets at
the same hours — so that one becomes familiar
with their faces and persons, as a part of the
street-furniture.

There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people
must have noticed, which is often illustrated
in our experience of the slack-water gentry.
We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly,
for years, but never have learned his
name. About this person we shall have accumulated
no little circumstantial knowledge; — thus,
his face, figure, gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting,

perhaps even of speaking, may be familiar
to us; yet who he is we know not. In another
department of our consciousness, there is a very
familiar name, which we have never found the person
to match. We have heard it so often, that it
has idealized itself, and become one of that multitude
of permanent shapes which walk the chambers
of the brain in velvet slippers in the company
of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington
and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person dies,
but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and
then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent
existence of the name and its shadowy
image in the brain, on the one part, and the person
and all its real attributes, as we see them
daily, on the other, that some accident reveals
their relation, and we find the name we have carried
so long in our memory belongs to the person
we have known so long as a fellow-citizen. Now
the slack-water gentry are among the persons
most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce
of title and reality, — for the reason, that,
playing no important part in the community, there
is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong
in any way to the public, while yet their names
have a certain historical currency, and we cannot
help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going
to and from them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon,
Esq. He had been “dead-headed” into the world

some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands
in his pockets staring at the show ever since. I
shall not tell you, for reasons before hinted, the
whole name of the place in which he lived. I
will only point you in the right direction, by saying
that there are three towns lying in a line with
each other, as you go “down East,” each of them
with a Port in its name, and each of them having
a peculiar interest which gives it individuality, in
addition to the Oriental character they have in
common. I need not tell you that these towns
are Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The
Oriental character they have in common consists
in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen
better days. They are in perfect harmony with
the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them is a “paradise of demifortunes.”
Each of them is of that intermediate
size between a village and a city which
any place has outgrown when the presence of a
well-dressed stranger walking up and down the
main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity
and private speculation, as frequently happens,
during the busier months of the year, in
considerable commercial centres like Salem.
They both have grand old recollections to fall
back upon, — times when they looked forward
to commercial greatness, and when the portly
gentlemen in cocked hats, who built their now
decaying wharves and sent out their ships all over
the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port
was to be the Tyre or the Carthage of the rich
British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport,
remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed
in these places of old. Other mansions — like
the Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at
the white horse's tail before you mount the broad
staircase) show that there was not only wealth,
but style and state, in these quiet old towns during
the last century. It is not with any thought
of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as
in a certain sense decayed towns; they did not
fulfil their early promise of expansion, but they
remain incomparably the most interesting places
of their size in any of the three northernmost
New England States. They have even now prosperity
enough to keep them in good condition, and
offer the most attractive residences for quiet families,
which, if they had been English, would have
lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other
Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland,
it is getting too prosperous to be as attractive
as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for a fine
old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within
its walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked
alleys and mottled with venerable mould, it
seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a
vulgar material prosperity. Still it remains invested
with many of its old charms, as yet, and

will forfeit its place among this admirable trio
only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal
marks of having been built and organized in
the present century.

— It was one of the old square palaces of
the North, in which Bernard Langdon, the son
of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the
luck to be an only child, he might have lived
as his father had done, letting his meagre competence
smoulder on almost without consuming,
like the fuel in an air-tight stove. But after
Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea Elizabeth
Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William
Pepperell Langdon, and others, equally well
named, — a string of them, looking, when they
stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would
fit a set of Pandean pipes, of from three feet
upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight
stove has to be opened, under such circumstances,
you may well suppose! So it happened
that our young man had been obliged, from an
early period, to do something to support himself,
and found himself stopped short in his studies
by the inability of the good people at home to
furnish him the present means of support as a
student.

You will understand now why the young man
wanted me to give him a certificate of his fitness
to teach, and why I did not choose to urge
him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy
from a family without ante-Revolutionary

recollections would have thankfully received. Go
he must, — that was plain enough. He would
not be content otherwise. He was not, however,
to give up his studies; and as it is customary
to allow half-time to students engaged
in school-keeping, — that is, to count a year, so
employed, if the student also keep on with his
professional studies, as equal to six months of
the three years he is expected to be under an
instructor before applying for his degree, — he
would not necessarily lose more than a few
months of time. He had a small library of professional
books, which he could take with him.

So he left my teaching and that of my estimable
colleagues, carrying with him my certificate,
that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young gentleman
of excellent moral character, of high intelligence
and good education, and that his services
would be of great value in any school,
academy, or other institution, where young persons
of either sex were to be instructed.

I confess, that expression, “either sex,” ran a
little thick, as I may say, from my pen. For,
although the young man bore a very fair character,
and there was no special cause for doubting
his discretion, I considered him altogether
too good-looking, in the first place, to be let loose
in a room-full of young girls. I didn't want him
to fall in love just then, — and if half a dozen
girls fell in love with him, as they most assuredly
would, if brought into too near relations with

him, why, there was no telling what gratitude
and natural sensibility might bring about.

Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs;
the giver never knows what is hatched out
of them. But once in a thousand times they act
as curses are said to,—come home to roost. Give
them often enough, until it gets to be a mechanical
business, and, some day or other, you will get
caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in
any climate, or somebody's razors to be safe in
the hands of the youngest children.

I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate.
It might be all right enough; but if it
happened to end badly, I should always reproach
myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it
would lead him or others into danger or wretchedness.
Any one who looked at this young man
could not fail to see that he was capable of
fascinating and being fascinated. Those large,
dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul
of a young girl as the black cloth sunk into the
snow in Franklin's famous experiment. Or, on
the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature
should ever be concentrated on them, they would
be absorbed into the very depths of his nature,
and then his blood would turn to flame and burn
his life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white
as the ashes that cover a burning coal.

I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate.
An academy for young gentlemen, now; that
sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school;

that would be a very good place for him; — some
of them are pretty rough, but there is nerve
enough in that old Wentworth strain of blood;
he can give any country fellow, of the common
stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out of time in
ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow
as that out a girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a
free pass into all the dove-cotes! I was a fool,
— that's all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come
out of these two words until it seemed to me
that they were charged with destiny. I could
hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might
have been laying, which might take a spark any
day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or
prospects. What I dreaded most was one of
those miserable matrimonial misalliances where
a young fellow who does not know himself as
yet flings his magnificent future into the checked
apron-lap of some fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl,
no more fit to be mated with him than her
father's horse to go in double harness with Flora
Temple. To think of the eagle's wings being
clipped so that he shall never lift himself over the
farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always
must, — because, as one of us said awhile
ago, a man always loves a woman, and a woman
a man, unless some good reason exists to the
contrary. You think yourself a very fastidious
young man, my friend; but there are probably at
least five thousand young women in these United

States, any one of whom you would certainly
marry, if you were thrown much into her company,
and nobody more attractive were near, and
she had no objection. And you, my dear young
lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy;
but if I should say that there are twenty
thousand young men, any one of whom, if he
offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances,
you would
I should be much more imprudent than I mean
to be, and you would, no doubt, throw down a
story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young
fellow had a career marked out for him. He
should begin in the natural way, by taking care
of poor patients in one of the public charities,
and work his way up to a better kind of practice,
— better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense.
The great and good Boerhaave used to say, as
I remember very well, that the poor were his best
patients; for God was their paymaster. But
everybody is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as
deserving; so that the rich, though not, perhaps,
the best patients, are good enough for common
practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with
them when he could not get poor ones, as he left
his daughter two millions of florins when he died.

Now if this young man once got into the wide
streets, he would sweep them clear of his rivals of

the same standing; and as I was getting indifferent
to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing
careless, and had once or twice prescribed
morphine when he meant quinine, there would
soon be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,
— the streets with only one side to them. Then I
would have him strike a bold stroke, — set up a
nice little coach, and be driven round like a first-class
London doctor, instead of coasting about
in a shabby one-horse concern and casting anchor
opposite his patients' doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack.
By the time he was thirty, he would
have knocked the social pawns out of his way,
and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of
great pieces in the background. I would not have
a man marry above his level, so as to become the
appendage of a powerful family-connection; but
I would not have him marry until he knew his
level, — that is, again, looking at the matter in a
purely worldly point of view, and not taking the
sentiments at all into consideration. But remember,
that a young man, using large endowments
wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a
level with the highest in the land in ten brilliant
years of spirited, unflagging labor. And to stand
at the very top of your calling in a great city is
something in itself, — that is, if you like money
and influence, and a seat on the platform at public
lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of
places where you don't want to go, and, what is
a good deal better than any of these things, a
sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute
in its range, so that all the Cæsars and Napoleons
would have to stand aside, if they came between
you and the exercise of your special vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might
have come to; and now I have let him go off into
the country with my certificate, that he is fit to
teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he
will run like a moth into a candle, right into one
of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up in some
sentimental folly or other, and there will be the
end of him. Oh, yes! country doctor, — half a
dollar a visit, — ride, ride, ride all day, — get up
at night and harness your own horse, — ride again
ten miles in a snow-storm, — shake powders out
of two phials, (pulv. glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac.
āā partes equales,) — ride back again, if you
don't happen to get stuck in a drift, — no home,
no peace, no continuous meals, no unbroken
sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse,
but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky,
until you feel like the mummy of an Indian who
had been buried in the sitting posture, and was
dug up a hundred years afterwards! Why didn't
I warn him about love and all that nonsense?
Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do with
it, yet awhile? Why didn't I hold up to him
those awful examples I could have cited, where
poor young fellows who could just keep themselves
afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone
round their necks, taking it for a life-preserver?

All this of two words in a certificate!