University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.

Intending, with this chapter, to have taken a single
flying leap to the fair city of Florence, and there (with
the omission of a year in our story) to commence the history
of our hero's adventures in Europe, we found a difficulty—unable
to alight, that is to say within any very
close neighborhood of Mr. Paul Fane, at Florence, without
jostling a gentleman, who was, then and there, the sole
sharer of the secrets of his domestic life, and to whose
familiar acquaintance the reader would thus be too precipitately
introduced. With the imagination so kindly
intrusted to us while your eye rests upon this page, dear
reader, it is due, by the courtesy of narrative, that we
should prepare you for any so full-blown intimacy by some
little confidential “aside.”

To go back then, for a little personal information as to
the history of the gentleman to be introduced to you.

On entering college (five or six years previous to present
date) Paul had obediently taken the “room-mate”

assigned to him by “The Faculty,” and had thus found
himself in sudden and bivalve familiarity with an equally
astonished young gentleman from Indiana. As a means
of neutralizing the sectional prejudices with which the
students were apt to get clannish and hostile, Freshmen
from opposite parts of the country were thus coupled as
inmates.

Mr. Wabash Blivins was a “hoosier” of fifteen years of
age, whose father was an enterprising captain on the Western
waters, and who was patriotically named after the
river at the mouth of which the “Star-spangled Banner,”
his father's lumber-craft, was tied up (Mrs. Blivins being
on board) to have him born. He had not been long in
college before his overpowering first name was reduced by
his classmates to the affectionate diminutive of “Bosh;”
and by that (like the sweet iteration in “Will Shakspeare,”
and “Ben Jonson”) he is now on his way to posterity.

With “Bosh Blivins” for a room-mate, Paul was not,
at first, very particularly pleased. His manners, though
based on heroic principles, were, as yet, matters of very
general outline, the particulars to be filled in, according to
individual need and circumstances. He would “pitch
into” any Sophomore who tried a trick upon his slenderer
room-mate, for instance, but he could not be made to understand
the relative privacies of boots and hair-brushes.

Then he mortified Paul, in their daily promenades to the
Post-office, by his hoosier habit of resting—squatting flat
upon his heels, if his friend stopped to speak to a lady or
look in at a shop window, and with his arms hung collapsedly
over his knees, sitting motionless in this Western
attitude of repose, till called to go on again. His vital
electricity, also, had the Western peculiarity of becoming
vocal with excitement. In his backwoods' early education
poetry had not chanced to fall much in his way, and now,
as he sat up late at night, very much worked upon by
Byron and Tom Moore, his various utterances of emotion
at the exciting passages—whistling, squealing, howling, or
yelling, according to the sentiment to be sympathized
with—was very disturbing to Paul's slumbers. For one
of these hoosier yells, given with fearful suddenness at an
eloquent climax in the Tutor's prayer, during a period of
religious excitement in the college, Bosh was threatened
with rustication.

In addition to point-blank differences of habit and manner
on such points, the Westerner and Down-Easter were
diametrically opposite in some qualities of character.
Paul was an absorbent—eager only to receive the magnetism
of other minds, and expressing himself always with
modest deference; Blivins was a demonstrative—eager
only to impress, and saying all he meant, if not considerably
more. Then, while Paul had a very keen sense of the

ludicrous, habitually moderating his own language and
manners by his knowledge of laugh-shot distance, Blivins
was sublimely safe among his superlatives, and, though
ready enough for broad fun when explained to him, wholly
without natural recognition of that element in the intellectual
atmosphere, and blissfully unconscious of being by
any possibility in danger of ridicule himself.

It is not unlikely, that, in the very contradiction of the two
characters, lay half the secret of the friendship that soon
grew up between them; but they had some strong qualities
in common, besides, and, after rooming together for
the Freshman year, they were more than content to send
in their names as “chums” in perpetuam. And so, for
Sophomore year, Fane and Blivins hooked arms and vicissitudes.

But, toward the end of this second year, an active principle
of Blivins' character began to get uneasy. Stilted
as he certainly was on most subjects, he had the most flat-footed
downrightness of perception as to “what would
pay.” He had taken a cool look at the two upper classes
of students in their third and fourth years, and made up
his mind that the difference between them and him wasn't
quite worth waiting so long for. “College life might be
very well for slow folks, but it was a one-horse affair, and
he was a whole team.” “Sophomore, perhaps—but he was
seventeen years old, and had cut his eye-teeth.” “Latin

and Greek don't sell.” “Time a boy like him was making
money.” And with deductions like these, drawn from his
long arguments with Paul, Blivins brought his college education
to a close with the end of the Sophomore year, and
was off for what he called a “faster place,” his native
Indiana.

With no capital except sanguine for one, Bosh's first
pick of customers for his imaginative goods was of course
somewhat experimental, and, after various unsuccessful
trials of the different professions, he found himself, in the
second year after parting with Paul, profiting by some
taste he had caught, and some little instructions he had
received from his room-mate in his favorite occupation of
drawing. He had become scene-painter to a dramatic
company who had a floating theatre in a flat-boat on the
Mississippi. With his hand thus got in, he looked around
for what was wanted in that line, and soon found that such
patriotic or pious pictures as he could paint—say two per
week, more or less—found a ready sale. This “opened
up.” He worked at it a while, till the demand came in
faster than he could finish off, and he then raised his
prices, and began to think of fame. Italy was a country
where he could work cheaper, and, at any rate, a better
place for his pictures to hail from. To make sure, however,
he began with a tour through the back settlements;
and, calling on the religious farmers and leading politicians,

he procured commissions for such subjects as they severally
preferred, established an agency in Cincinnati, and so
organized his market. And, by due return of the merchantmen
with cargoes of oil and wine from Leghorn,
came home scores of Blivins' masterpieces from Florence,
which stood, splendid witnesses of republican appreciation
of native talent, on the mantel-pieces of the glorious West.