University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.
FORTY-FIVE YEARS.

FOR the most part, what befell Israel during his forty
years wanderings in the London deserts, surpassed
the forty years in the natural wilderness of the outcast
Hebrews under Moses.

In that London fog, went before him the ever present
cloud by day, but no pillar of fire by the night, except
the cold column of the monument, two hundred feet
beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top, at the
stone base, the shiverer, of midnight, often laid down.

But these experiences, both from their intensity and
his solitude, were necessarily squalid. Best not enlarge
upon them. For just as extreme suffering, without hope,
is intolerable to the victim, so, to others, is its depiction
without some corresponding delusive mitigation. The
gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for
his theme the calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior
and private persons; least of all, the pauper's;
admonished by the fact, that to the craped palace of the
king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng; but

few feel enticed to the shanty, where, like a pealed
knuckle-bone, grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.

Why at one given stone in the flagging does man
after man cross yonder street? What plebeian Lear
or Œdipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there by the
corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we
too cross over and skim events to the end; omitting the
particulars of the starveling's wrangling with rats for
prizes in the sewers; or his crawling into an abandoned
doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts were three
dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh
Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness,
fell sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he
received that injury, which, excluding activity for no small
part of the future, was an added cause of his prolongation
of exile, besides not leaving his faculties unaffected
by the concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.

But these were some of the incidents not belonging to
the beginning of his career. On the contrary, a sort of
humble prosperity attended him for a time; insomuch
that once he was not without hopes of being able to
buy his homeward passage so soon as the war should
end. But, as stubborn fate would have it, being run over
one day at Holborn Bars, and taken into a neighboring
bakery, he was there treated with such kindliness by a
Kentish lass, the shop-girl, that in the end he thought
his debt of gratitude could only be repaid by love. In
a word, the money saved up for his ocean voyage was
lavished upon a rash embarkation in wedlock.

Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the

dilemma of impressment or imprisonment. In the absence
of other motives, the dread of those hardships
would have fixed him there till the peace. But now,
when hostilities were no more, so was his money. Some
period elapsed ere the affairs of the two governments
were put on such a footing as to support an American
consul at London. Yet, when this came to pass, he could
only embrace the facilities for a return here furnished,
by deserting a wife and child, wedded and born in the
enemy's land.

The peace immediately filled England, and more especially
London, with hordes of disbanded soldiers; thousands
of whom, rather than starve, or turn highwaymen
(which no few of their comrades did, stopping coaches at
times in the most public streets), would work for such
a pittance as to bring down the wages of all the laboring
classes. Neither was our adventurer the least among the
sufferers. Driven out of his previous employ—a sort of
porter in a river-side warehouse—by this sudden influx
of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with the ingenuity
of his race, he turned his hand to the village art
of chair-bottoming. An itinerant, he paraded the streets
with the cry of “Old chairs to mend!” furnishing a
curious illustration of the contradictions of human life;
that he who did little but trudge, should be giving cosy
seats to all the rest of the world. Meantime, according
to another well-known Malthusian enigma in human affairs,
his family increased. In all, eleven children were born
to him in certain sixpenny garrets in Moorfields. One
after the other, ten were buried.

When chair-bottoming would fail, resort was had to
match-making. That business being overdone in turn,
next came the cutting of old rags, bits of paper, nails,
and broken glass. Nor was this the last step. From
the gutter he slid to the sewer. The slope was smooth.
In poverty,

But many a poor soldier had sloped down there into
the boggy canal of Avernus before him. Nay, he had
three corporals and a sergeant for company.

But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently
to appear. In 1793 war again broke out, the great
French war. This lighted London of some of its superfluous
hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean society of
his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering
forlorn through the black kingdoms of mud, he
used to spin yarns about sea prisoners in hulks, and
listen to stories of the Black Hole of Calcutta; and often
would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect strangers,
at the more public corners and intersections of sewers—
the Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other
by his remainder button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects
of a rise in bread, or the tide; while through the
grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty skylights of
the realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers' carts,
with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected
gnomes of the city lived.

Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers,
Israel returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting
Covent-Garden market, at early morning, for the

purchase of his flags, that he experienced one of the
strange alleviations hinted of above. That chatting with
the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks
yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that
being surrounded by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks
and ricks in the field; those glimpses of garden produce,
the blood-beets, with the damp earth still tufting the roots;
that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him of
whence they must have come, the green hedges through
which the wagon that brought them had passed; that
trudging home with them as a gleaner with his sheaf of
wheat;—all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want and
bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had
rural returns of his boyhood's sweeter days among them;
and the hardest stones of his solitary heart (made hard by
bare endurance alone) would feel the stir of tender but
quenchless memories, like the grass of deserted flagging,
upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes, when
incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself,
thoughts of home would—either by gradually working and
working upon him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection—overpower
him for a time to a sort of hallucination.

Thus was it:—One fair half-day in the July of 1800,
by good luck, he was employed, partly out of charity,
by one of the keepers, to trim the sward in an oval enclosure
within St. James' Park, a little green but a three-minutes'
walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked
and grimy Old Brewery of the palace which
gives its ancient name to the public resort on whose

borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced in with
iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure
peered forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods
from its cage. And alien Israel there—at times staring
dreamily about him—seemed like some amazed runaway
steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on the
shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New
England our exile was called in his soul. For still working,
and thinking of home; and thinking of home, and
working amid the verdant quietude of this little oasis,
one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind settled
intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image
of Old Huckleberry, his mother's favorite old pillion
horse; and, ere long, hearing a sudden scraping noise
(some hob-shoe without, against the iron pailing), he insanely
took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall, hailing
him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down
goes Israel's hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively
snatched, he hurries away a few paces in obedience
to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping
midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he
bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval
of the ocean, must be crossed ere his crazy errand could
be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry would be found
long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless, being dead
many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And
many years after, in a far different part of the town, and
in far less winsome weather too, passing with his bundle
of flags through Red-Cross street, towards Barbican, in a
fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks of
houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges
on ranges of midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral
sort of sounds—tramplings, lowings, halloos—and was suddenly
called to by a voice to head off certain cattle,
bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.
Next instant he saw the white face—white as an orange-blossom—of
a black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove,
gleaming ghost-like through the vapors; and presently,
forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and gesture, he was
more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their owners,
in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican. Monomaniac
reminiscences were in him—“To the right, to
the right!” he shouted, as, arrived at the street corner,
the farmers beat the drove to the left, towards Smithfield:
“To the right! you are driving them back
to the pastures—to the right! that way lies the barnyard!”
“Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming,
old man.” And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched
by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself
home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains;
ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different
the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed
from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple
peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down,
pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the
cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the
sky.

In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second
peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London,

so that all kinds of labor were overstocked. Beggars,
too, lighted on the walks like locusts. Timber-toed cripples
stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots.
And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had
heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An
honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or
Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for his most gracious
Majesty, King George!” so now, in presence of the still
surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry
was anew taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates,
“An honorable scar, your honor, received at
Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at Trafalgar!” Yet not a
few of these petitioners had never been outside of the
London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way,
who, without having endangered their own persons much
if anything, reaped no insignificant share both of the
glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed;
while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to
beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down
quietly in corners and died. And here it may be noted,
as a fact nationally characteristic, that however desperately
reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the American,
never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.

Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance
threepenny job by the added thousands who contended
with him against starvation, nevertheless, somehow he
continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks of the cliffs,
which, though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and
even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still,
however cramped by rival trees and fettered by rocks,

succeed, against all odds, in keeping the vital nerve of
the tap-root alive. And even towards the end, in his
dismallest December, our veteran could still at intervals
feel a momentary warmth in his topmost boughs. In his
Moorfields' garret, over a handful of reignited cinders
(which the night before might have warmed some lord),
cinders raked up from the streets, he would drive away
dolor, by talking with his one only surviving, and now
motherless child—the spared Benjamin of his old age—
of the far Canaan beyond the sea; rehearsing to the lad
those well-remembered adventures among New England
hills, and painting scenes of nestling happiness and plenty,
in which the lowliest shared. And here, shadowy as it
was, was the second alleviation hinted of above.

To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted
by one who had been there, the poor enslaved
boy of Moorfields listened, night after night, as to the
stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his father
take him there? “Some day to come, my boy,” would
be the hopeful response of an unhoping heart. And
“Would God it were to-morrow!” would be the impassioned
reply.

In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of
his eventual return. For with added years, the boy felt
added longing to escape his entailed misery, by compassing
for his father and himself a voyage to the Promised
Land. By his persevering efforts he succeeded at last,
against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right
quarter to his extraordinary statements. In short, charitably
stretching a technical point, the American Consul

finally saw father and son embarked in the Thames for
Boston.

It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in
early manhood, had sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate
from the same port to which he now was bound. An
octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed locks
besnowed as its foam. White-haired old Ocean seemed
as a brother.