University of Virginia Library

24. XXIV.
Showing No Hope in Harry.

THE Americans are in the habit of boasting
their security against revolution. It is true
enough that we have no wicked kings to pull down,
and no idols to set up; but, in place of this, there
is going on, in a quiet fashion, a prodigious social
revolution, which undermines, year by year, the
thrones of the Jenkinses, and the Pinkertons, and
the What-nots; and paves a golden road to supremacy
for the Browns, and the Smiths, and the
What-d'ye-call-ems.

Let the police of the mantua-makers and bill-brokers
do what they will, and they cannot arrest

that stupendous swell of golden principles which
swamps, one by one, the inhabitants of small houses
and the keepers of one-horse gigs, and establishes
upon their dismembered ruins the successful jobbers
of John street, and the contractors for the Corporation.

Well may all ambitious spirits exclaim: “Would
that I were born a cousin to the Common Council,
or an inventor of paving-stones!”

We have not even the consolation of possessing,
among the débris of revolutions, a party of the
ancien régime. The wreck of the past sinks not
only out of power, but out of all position. The
city incense is consumed by only one set of nostrils.
The foremost noses catch it all; and the hindermost
titillate the mucous membrane with cheap
snuffs, and bide their time.

I am aware that I am figurative, and perhaps,
like most figurative writers, obscure. I mean to say,
however, in plain language, that the elegant will
not be always elegant, the Pinkertons always Pinkertons,
or the Fudges always Fudges. Four generations—as
generations count in the New York
cycle (shorter than most)—are sufficient, in ordinary
centuries, to effect the revolution at which I
have hinted. If Solomon Fudge, wife, daughter,
and son, shall have reached, during the present

epoch, a mentionable place upon the social calendar;
if the Papa guards well the stocks, realty, or bonds
which underlie the family structure; if Madame
offends not against religion, and continues to buy
hats of Lawson; if Mademoiselle accomplishes her
French, and gets always her gowns of Gavelle; if
Washington is recognized as a nice young man,
there is reason to believe that the suns of the next
generation will ripen the remnants of my aunt's
stock into one of the “first families” of New York.

But, the zenith once reached, decline becomes
inevitable; and there is reason to fear that the
grandchildren may linger out a wretched existence
on club-room door-steps, or in the society of artistes;
and as for their descendants (supposing them
honestly married), they may very likely droop into
professional employment, or some unknown and
honest occupation.

But, even here, the third or fourth in descent
from the stout Phœbe will have a hard struggle to
make their place good against the strong-witted fellows,
who have been schooled by country-poverty,
and strengthened by a country-heaven; and who
have come to the city, if they come at all, very
resolute to make their way sure.

Many a time, in philosophic humor, I single out
upon the walks of the town some coarse-clad boy,

with an awkward kind of wonder, and yet spirit in
his eye, with a quick, firm step, and a bold daring
in his carriage, who, I fancy, will thirty years hence,
have accumulated some great store of influence, if
not of money, and command the key to those halls
at which he gazes now so wonderingly. And in the
same mood, I am apt to cast some pitiful horoscope
for the weak-limbed children who are reared under
city glass, and the corrupting notion that effeminacy
creates refinement; and as I see them staggering
along, in the leading of French nurses, and
under clouds of lace, their frail walk seems to me to
epitomise the life through which they will stagger
on, always beclouded; and with never the gain of
that self-supporting energy, without which, under
such institutions as ours, a man sinks below the
level of a citizen.

I have said thus much, in a sermon-like way, as a
preface to some further account of those two representatives
of young manhood, Mr. Harry Flint, now
Attorney at Law in the city of San Francisco, and
Mr. Washington Fudge—elegant young gentleman,
suspected of duellism and of intrigue in Paris. At
the present epoch of their history, as it appears in
these “observations,” there is scarce a city-mother
of them all, but would welcome to their arms (meaning
their daughters' arms) the elegant Wash; and

there is hardly one but would blush to give our
friend Harry a corner-seat in their Sunday pew.

Let those who will, mourn over the last; I shall
reserve my own tears for my exquisite cousin
Wash.

San Francisco has proved the grave of a great
many young and vigorous hopes; chiefly, however,
belonging to those who fancied, that to be in the
neighborhood of gold, was to get it; and that if
they carried their pitchers to a good well, they
would fill without a dipping. Such adventurers
might have stayed their appetites by looking in at
the windows of Ball, Tompkins, and Black; and
would have learned Spanish by attentively regarding
the cover of Baretti's octavo Dictionary.

It is my opinion, that without work, and spirit,
and nerve, a young, or an old man, is as well in a
Dauphin “dip,” as in a Sonora placer. But Harry
Flint had them all; clouded, very likely, with the
“overcast” of leave-taking, and vague, shadowy
creations of that active boy-fancy which, in the
past years of all of us, has kindled home-glories not
very far from the places that cherished us—glories
that fade. I will not venture to say that, in the
lulls of the short ocean-crossing, there did not
course over Harry's mind, doubts and questionings
which almost took the edge away from his stronger

purpose. But he put them down, even as the broad
sunshine and soft south breezes put down the waves
which high and cold winds had blown up.

Harry had, moreover, I dare say, his share of
those gigantic thoughts which pile out of ocean's
level, to the eye of youth, and which seem to lift,
and spread in rays of light, like a golden-sunrise;
dashed, however, I do not doubt, with clouds, when
the thought leaned over him, in times of musing, of
the pretty country Kitty, who had chased butterflies
with him in the summer days gone—no more
butterflies for the man: no more such summer gambollings;
no more of Kitty for ever.

And the mellowing of such thought may, very
likely, have made him cling more lovingly to the old
prayer-book, in which a mother, that he once had,
had written (with ink now grown pale) his name
and her own. Dreamy religious hopes, and vague
worldly griefs, or disappointments, touch each other
very closely; and make up between them a delicious
kind of sentiment, without, I am sorry to say, much
active force in any direction, and not abiding a single
swift call of duty. They are like, if I may
serve myself of a rhetorical figure, the pretty coils
of mist which float from the river-tops of a summer's
morning, seeming almost to be clouds, but drank up
and consumed utterly when the sun has mounted.

Crowding griefs, like crowding joys, are great
kindlers of the religious element; which, in the
ordinary roads of life, where are neither dangers of
pit-fall, nor any bows of promise, is but too apt to
play the part of a stupid and drowsy sentinel.
When, therefore, we are disposed to praise a man
for any show of religious fervor, it is worth while to
inquire whether his spirit has been stirred by past
suffering, or quickened by present hope.

A man is judged by his temptations, as much
as by his actions; and forces which give rapid
motion on descending ground, will grow tame enough
upon a level, and vanish altogether where hills are
to be mounted.

All which has very little to do with our friend
Harry, and his ventures in San Francisco; I, therefore,
march straight back to my subject.

Harry knew how to work; and did work; he
had, moreover, an open, honest face, which tempted
trust in others; and this is not without its effect,
even among sharpers. He had, moreover, the less
serviceable quality of trusting others too blindly—a
youth-like fault, which is cured with using—most of
all, in such intercourse as our growing State of
California affords. A small token of this harmful
quality of our friend Harry's nature, must be joined
to this history: I speak of nothing less than the

loss of a snug bit of capital which he had borne
across the seas with him, and which the offer of
large returns tempted him to loan, upon that uncertain
kind of security which, from no small observations
of my own, I am satisfied, is apt to accompany
the percentages which are reckoned by the month.
As a general rule, that interest-money which much
exceeds the marketable rates of the world, is found
to leak out of the capital which serves as security;
and, in the metallic, as well as in the vegetable
world, excess of flowering and fruit is found to
exhaust the juices of the trunk.

But there was left to Harry, for a time, at least,
the capital of a stout arm and a quick brain; than
which, in my opinion, no better capital can belong
to a hopeful American, who has youth and health
for his endorsers.

It will be remembered that he had left Newtown
a few days before the final leave-taking of Mr.
Bodgers; and the news of that old gentleman's
sudden decease did not reach him until he had
gained his new home upon the Pacific. I need not
say it was a surprise to him, and had almost said it
was a relief; for I do believe that, had he still
remained in the ancient village, he would have made
one of the most cheerful mourners at the old gentleman's
tomb.

Indeed, had his funds been in a less exhausted
condition, I am inclined to think that he would,
most unwisely and foolishly as it seems to me, have
given up his new projects of life, re-crossed the two
oceans, and paid his tribute of melancholy at the
grave of Squire Bodgers. And if, in such event, he
had witnessed the confiding way in which a certain
Kitty Fleming leaned upon the arm of an elegant
and youthful Mr. Quid, I think his religious fervor
would have left him utterly, and the third commandment,
in a mild form, have been broken.

It was fortunate, then, that he had lost his capital.
The letters which conveyed to him the news
of the river-accident, gave no intelligence of the
state of the affairs of the Bodgers estate; and it
was only at a very much later date that he received
from the gossiping aunt, who cherished kindly the
fortunes of his little sister, a very rigmarole account
of expectancies, on the part of Fudges, Quids, and
Flemings. I shall take the liberty of subjoining a
portion:

“You have heard,” she says, “of the old Squire's
death; nobody knows yet to whom his property is
going. Some said to Mrs. Fudge, or to Mrs. Fleming;
but now there is talk of a city young fellow,
who is connected, nobody knows how, with an elder

sister or brother of the Squire's, and so lays a claim
to the whole of the property. They do say, too,
that young Mr. Quid, which is the name of this
person, is courting Mistress Kitty, who has grown,
they say, very city-like, and it may be true. I don't
like the furbelowing she has got in the town; and
there are as nice fish in the sea, Harry, as ever
were caught: which will be true when you come
home.

“Squire Bivins looks very wise about matters, as
is of right he should, and shakes his head in the
talk about Kitty, and Mrs. Fleming, and Quid, and
the rest, and seems to know more than he tells.
They do say he made the Squire's will, and keeps it
in his pigeon-hole. Hitty Bivins says that Kitty
won't be so rich as people think; and that she is no
better than the country-folks in Newtown.

“The Squire's house is shut up, and people say is
haunted with an old gentleman with an arm slung
in a bandana handkerchief, as when he died, which I
do not believe. Bessy is charmingly, the dear thing,
and sends a kiss to you.”

And Harry takes the kiss joyfully, and the chitchat
of the old lady very thankfully; and abandoning,
or trying hard to abandon, all other memories
of the leafy by-ways of Newtown, rustling in his

night-ear often, girds himself to work like a man.
But crosses, and vexations, and sicknesses lie across
the way of almost all of us, as we push on to fortune;
and soon the harsh, dry atmosphere of that
Pacific coast, with its burden of dust, cut through
the health armor, that friend Harry had long
worn so bravely, and laid him a very repining and
desponding mortal, upon a sick-bed.

Sickness is awkward anywhere, with the fretting
of nurses, and the long-delayed visits of doctors,
and the consciousness that you, and all you have to
work for, is at a stand-still, while the world, roaring
in at your window, is pushing on fastly, and shaking
you from its remembrance. But most of all is this
true in a far-away place, where no coming friends
can cheat you of the outside lapse of things, and
where time and work are all that keep you afoot in
the noisy whirl.

Poor Harry, then, suffered bitterly; and his
uneasy delirium took strange and ungracious phases,
in which a little friend, of dainty summer-hat,
appeared transformed into a fine lady driving in a
claret-coach, and with a strange-faced companion.
The doctor looked doubtfully upon his case.

I could heartily wish, with every sympathetic
reader, that he could now have the care of even the
lean Mehitable, and be restored again to the “corner-office,”

and the hum-drum life of the deserted
village. It might well be that the air would restore
him again; it might well be, too, that he should
have an important word to add to the discussions
of administrators upon the Bodgers estate, around
the dusty table of Ebenezer Bivins.

And if Fate, which plays such odd pranks with
all of us, had not just now tossed him away across
the seas, and stretched him on a bed, from which
there is faint hope of his rising again, Harry might
give important testimony. Indeed, had he never
shown the absurd jealousy which misled him on a
certain occasion; and had he taken a reasonable
view of the old uncle's intent; and could he now
acquaint the officiating administrator with his witnessing
the will; and could he trace up the paper
to the hands of the discomfited Blimmer, and the
Jerry-like copy of the instrument; and could he,
thereafter, leave a bouquet at the door of Mrs.
Fleming; and follow up such advance with a moonlight
walk in the company of Mistress Kitty; and
thrust into her hands the rent-roll of the late Mr.
Bodgers; and swear that, being an heiress, he will
never think of her more; and shortly after repent,
and swear that he will love her “for ever and a
day”—I might close my observations of the Fudge
family, with the present chapter, in a very effective

manner. But historians cannot dispose of Providence;
and even biographers are compelled to show
a reasonable regard for facts.

Harry, as I said, is upon a sick bed, from which
there is a likelihood that he may never rise again.
The will, which, perhaps, might place the Bodgers
estate in the hands of my cousin Kitty, is in the
keeping of the Quids—if, indeed, it be not destroyed.
The discomfited Blimmer is sold doubly to secresy.
Kitty is beset with snares, if she has not altogether
lost the innocence of her country nature. Mr. Solomen
Fudge is in a difficult position. My aunt, Mrs.
Phœbe, delighting in an elegant round of acquaintances,
sympathizes, for once, with the straitened
condition of her husband. Wilhelmina is doubtful
of the Salle, and despairs of the Spindle. In short,
I am confounded with the mass of my material and
the intricacy of events. So far from finishing my
story with the present chapter, I must open a new
one, with the Fudge and Guerlin intrigue.