1. CHAPTER I.
SCHOOL BEGINS.
Forty years ago Mr. Savory Gray was a prosperous merchant.
No gentleman on 'Change wore more spotless linen
or blacker broadcloth. His ample white cravat had an air of
absolute wisdom and honesty. It was so very white that his
fellow-merchants could not avoid a vague impression that he
had taken the church on his way down town, and had so purified
himself for business. Indeed a white cravat is strongly
to be recommended as a corrective and sedative of the public
mind. Its advantages have long been familiar to the clergy;
and even, in some desperate cases, politicians have found a resort
to it of signal benefit. There are instructive instances,
also, in banks and insurance offices of the comfort and value
of spotless linen. Combined with highly-polished shoes, it is
of inestimable mercantile advantage.
Mr. Gray prospered in business, and nobody was sorry. He
enjoyed his practical joke and his glass of Madeira, which had
made at least three voyages round the Cape. His temperament,
like his person, was just unctuous enough to enable him
to slip comfortably through life.
Happily for his own comfort, he had but a speaking acquaintance
with politics. He was not a blue Federalist, and
he never d'd the Democrats. With unconscious skill he shot
the angry rapids of discussion, and swept, by a sure instinct,
toward the quiet water on which he liked to ride. In the
counting-room or the meeting of directors, when his neighbors
waxed furious upon raking over some outrage of that old
French infidel, Tom Jefferson, as they called him, sending him
and his gun-boats where no man or boat wants to go, Mr.
Gray rolled his neck in his white cravat, crossed his legs, and
shook his black-gaitered shoe, and beamed, and smiled, and
blew his nose, and hum'd, and ha'd, and said, “Ah, yes!”
“Ah, indeed?” “Quite so!” and held his tongue.
Mr. Savory Gray minded his own business; but his business
did not mind him. There came a sudden crash—one of the
commercial earthquakes that shake fortunes to their foundations
and scatter failure on every side. One day he sat in his
office consoling his friend Jowlson, who had been ruined. Mr.
Jowlson was terribly agitated—credit gone—fortune wrecked
—no prospects—“O wife and children!” he cried, rocking to
and fro as he sat.
“My dear Jowlson, you must not give way in this manner.
You must control your feelings. Have we not always been
taught,” said Mr. Gray, as a clerk brought in a letter, the seal
of which the merchant broke leisurely, and then skimmed the
contents as he continued, “that riches have wings and—my
God!” he ejaculated, springing up, “I am a ruined man!”
So he was. Every thing was gone. Those pretty riches
that chirped and sang to him as he fed them; they had all
spread their bright plumage, like a troop of singing birds—
have we not always been taught that they might, Mr. Jowlson?—and
had flown away.
To undertake business anew was out of the question. His
friends said, “Poor Gray! what shall be done?”
The friendly merchants pondered and pondered. The worthy
Jowlson, who had meanwhile engaged as book-keeper upon
a salary of seven hundred dollars a year — one of the rare
prizes—was busy enough for his friend, consulting, wondering,
planning. Mr. Gray could not preach, nor practice medicine,
nor surgery, nor law, because men must be instructed in those
professions; and people will not trust a suit of a thousand dollars,
or a sore throat, or a broken thumb, in the hands of a
man who has not fitted himself carefully for the responsibility.
He could not make boots, nor build houses, nor shoe horses,
nor lay stone wall, nor bake bread, nor bind books. Men
must be educated to be shoemakers, carpenters, blacksmiths,
bakers, masons, or book-binders. What
could be done? Nobody
suggested an insurance office, or an agency for diamond
mines on Newport beach; for, although it was the era of good
feeling, those ingenious infirmaries for commercial invalids
were not yet invented.
“I have it!” cried Jowlson, one day, rushing in, out of
breath, among several gentlemen who were holding a council
about their friend Gray—that is, who had met in a bank parlor,
and were talking about his prospects—“I have it! and
how dull we all are! What shall he do? Why, keep a school,
to be sure!—a school!—a school! Take children, and be a
parent to them!”
“How dull we all were!” cried the gentlemen in chorus.
“A school is the very thing! A school it shall be!” And a
school it was.
Upon the main street of the pleasant village of Delafield
Savory Gray, Esq., hired a large house, with an avenue of
young lindens in front, a garden on one side, and a spacious
play-ground in the rear. The pretty pond was not far away,
with its sloping shores and neat villas, and a distant spire
upon the opposite bank—the whole like the vignette of an
English pastoral poem. Here the merchant turned from importing
pongees to inculcating principles. His old friends
sent some of their children to the new school, and persuaded
their friends to send others. Some of his former correspondents
in other parts of the world, not entirely satisfied with
the Asian and East Indian systems of education, shipped their
sons to Mr. Gray. The good man was glad to see them. He
was not very learned, and therefore could not communicate
knowledge. But he did his best, and tried very hard to be
respected. The boys did not learn any thing; but they had
plenty of good beef, and Mr. Gray played practical jokes upon
them; and on Sundays they all went to hear Dr. Peewee
preach.
