University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE.

IT happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored
to the dock on a Fourth of July; and half an hour
after landing, hustled by the riotous crowd near Faneuil
Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by
a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered
banner, inscribed with gilt letters:

It was on Copps' Hill; within the city bounds, one of
the enemy's positions during the fight, that our wanderer
found his best repose that day. Sitting down here on a
mound in the graveyard, he looked off across Charles
River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient monument,
at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling
sprig of corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights,
fifty years before, his now feeble hands had wielded both

ends of the musket. There too he had received that slit
upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with the
Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him
now the bescarred bearer of a cross.

For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about
him. The sultry July day was waning. His son sought
to cheer him a little ere rising to return to the lodging
for the present assigned them by the ship-captain. “Nay,”
replied the old man, “I shall get no fitter rest than here
by the mounds.”

But from this true “Potter's Field,” the boy at length
drew him away; and encouraged next morning by a
voluntary purse made up among the reassembled passengers,
father and son started by stage for the country of
the Housatonic. But the exile's presence in these old
mountain townships proved less a return than a resurrection.
At first, none knew him, nor could recall having
heard of him. Ere long it was found, that more than
thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his
family in that region, a bachelor, following the example
of three-fourths of his neighbors, had sold out and removed
to a distant country in the west; where exactly,
none could say.

He sought to get a glimpse of his father's homestead.
But it had been burnt down long ago. Accompanied by
his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted, he next went to find
the site. But the roads had years before been changed.
The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new
one ran straight through what had formerly been orchards.
But new orchards, planted from other suckers,

and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by,
where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel.
At length he came to a field waving with buckwheat.
It seemed one of those fields which himself had often
reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry, that but three
summers since a walnut grove had stood there. Then
he vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes
talked of planting such a grove, to defend the neighboring
fields against the cold north wind; yet where precisely
that grove was to have been, his shattered mind could not
recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during his long
exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested,
as well as the annual crops preceding and succeeding it,
on the very same soil.

Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient
natural wood, which seemed some way familiar, and
midway in it, paused to contemplate a strange, mouldy
pile, resting at one end against a sturdy beech. Though
wherever touched by his staff, however lightly, this pile
would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it
preserved the exact look, each irregularly defined line, of
what it had originally been—namely, a half-cord of stout
hemlock (one of the woods least affected by exposure to
the air), in a foregoing generation chopped and stacked
up on the spot, against sledging-time, but, as sometimes
happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned
to oblivious decay—type now, as it stood there,
of forever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting
in early mishap.

“Do I dream?” mused the bewildered old man, “or

what is this vision that comes to me of a cold, cloudy
morning, long, long ago, and I heaving yon elbowed log
against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay, I cannot be
so old.”

“Come away, father, from this dismal, damp wood,”
said his son, and led him forth.

Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man
ploughing. Advancing slowly, the wanderer met him by
a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry, like a tumbled
chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire-place, now
aridly stuck over here and there, with thin, clinging,
round, prohibitory mosses, like executors' wafers. Just as
the oxen were bid stand, the stranger's plough was hitched
over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone
at the ruin's base.

“There, this is the twentieth year my plough has
struck this old hearthstone. Ah, old man,—sultry day,
this.”

“Whose house stood here, friend?” said the wanderer,
touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh
furrow overlapped it.

“Don't know; forget the name; gone West, though, I
believe. You know 'em?”

But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now
fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the
bemossed stone jambs.

“What are you looking at so, father?”

“`Father!' Here,” raking with his staff, “my father
would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant,
would totter between, even as now, once again, on the

very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends
meet. Plough away, friend.”

Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself,
to a close.

Few things remain.

He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain
caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He
dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But
long ago it faded out of print—himself out of being—
his name out of memory. He died the same day that
the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.