just as much in this free and enlightened country as any where else. I have schemes on foot—not political—no matter what they are—out in the western country; and I happen to know that a degree from Harvard University is the medicine that suits my case; with that for my credentials, I shall carry it over all competitors. Yes, boys, gammon is the word; and the man who would rise in the world must use the stepping stones."
"You're a victim of the national disease, Rosny," said Chester. "Rising in the world!—that's the idea that ruins us. It's that that makes us lean, starveling, nervous, restless, dyspeptic, hypochondriac—the most prosperous and most uncomfortable people on earth. Sit down, man, and take your ease. What garden will thrive if every plant in it must be dug up every day, and set out in a better place?"
"Ah, that's good doctrine for you. You have got nothing to gain, and a good deal to lose. Stand up for the status quo, old boy; I would, in your place. Look at me, though. I was cut adrift at fourteen—parents dead—not a cent in my pocket—and since then I have tumbled along through the world as I could. You can't kill me. I have more lives than a cat. I have been thrown on my back a dozen times; but the harder I was flung down, the higher I bounced up again. Why, I have known the time when I was glad to earn a shilling by shovelling snow off a sidewalk. I have tried my hand at every thing—printer's work, lecturing, politics, editing, keeping school—and do you suppose I shall be content to rest in the mud all my days? Not a bit of it. I know my cue better. The time will come when you'll see me shooting up like a rocket."
Here a broad glare against the window interrupted him, and, looking out, his auditors saw a bonfire blazing with peculiar splendor under the windows of the chamber where the Faculty were at that moment in solemn session. Three proctors and a tutor were hastening towards the scene of outrage, when a stentorian voice from the adjacent darkness roared forth a warning that there was a canister of gunpowder in the fire expected every moment to explode. The prudent officers therefore kept their distance, busying themselves with noting down the names of several innocent spectators, while the bonfire subsided to a natural death, the gunpowder hoax having perfectly succeeded.
Mr. Wren's guests resumed their seats, mingling with graver matters the usual badinage of a college gathering; and when at length they separated, only a lonely light or two glimmered from among the many windows of the academic barracks which overlook the college green.
CHAPTER VI.
| As if with Heaven a bargain they had made To practise goodness—and to be well paid, They, too, devoutly as their fathers did, Sin, sack, and sugar, equally forbid; Holding each hour unpardonably spent That on the leger leaves no monument.—Parsons. |
Mr. Erastus Flintlock sat at his counting room, in his old leather-bottomed arm chair. Vassall Morton, his newly emancipated ward, just twenty-one, stood before him, the undisputed master of his father's ample wealth.
"What, no profession, Mr. Morton? None whatever, sir?"
"No, sir, none whatever."
The old man's leathery countenance expressed mingled wrath and concern.
Flintlock was a stanch old New Englander, boasting himself a true descendant of the Puritans, whose religious tenets he inherited, along with most of their faults, and not a few of their virtues. He was narrow as a vinegar cruet, and just in all his dealings. There were three subjects on which he could converse with more or less intelligence—politics, theology, and business. Beyond these, he knew nothing; and except American history and practical science, he had an indistinct idea that any thing more came of evil. He distrusted a foreigner, and abhorred a Roman Catholic. All poetry, but Milton and the hymn book, was an abomination in his eyes; and he looked upon fiction as an emanation of the devil. To the list of the cardinal virtues he added another, namely, attention to business. In his early days, he had come from his native Connecticut with letters to Morton's father, who, seeing his value, took him as a clerk, placed unbounded trust in him, and at last made him his partner. He was a youth of slow parts, solid judgment, solemn countenance, steady habits, and a most unpliable conscience. He had no follies, allowed himself no indulgences, and could enjoy no other pleasures than business and church-going. He attended service morning, afternoon, and evening, and never smiled on Sundays. His old age was as upright and stiff-necked as might have been augured from such a youth. He thought the rising generation were in a very bad way, and once gave his son a scorching lecture on vanity and arrogance, because the latter, who had been two years at college, very modestly begged to be excused from carrying a roll of sample cotton, a yard and a half long, from his father's store at one end of the town, to the shop of a retail dealer at the other.
"What, no profession, Mr. Morton?"
"None whatever, sir."
Morton was prepared for the consequence of these fatal words, and sought to arm himself with the needful patience. It would be folly, he knew, to debate the point with his guardian, who was tough and unmanageable as a hickory stump; who would never see any side of a question but his own, and on whose impervious brain reasons fell like rain drops on a tarpauline. Flintlock, therefore, opened fire unanswered, and discoursed for a full hour on duty, propriety, and a due respect for what he called the general sense of the community, which, as he assured his auditor, demands that every one should have some fixed and stated calling, by which he may be recognized as a worthy and useful member of society. Sometimes he grew angry, and scolded his ward with great vehemence; then subsided into a pathetic strain, and exhorted him, for the sake of his excellent father, not to grow old in idleness and frivolity. Morton, respectful, but obdurate, heard him to an end, assured him that, though renouncing commerce and the professions, his life would by no means be an idle one, thanked him for his care of his property, and took his leave; while the old merchant sank back into his chair, and groaned dismally, because the son of his respected patron was on the road to perdition.
A moment's retrogression will explain the young man's recusancy.
On a May evening, some two months before the close of his college career, Morton sat in lonely meditation on a wooden bench, by the classic border of Fresh Pond. By every canon of polite fiction, his meditation ought to have been engrossed by some object of romantic devotion; but in truth they were of a nature wholly mundane and sublunary.
He had been much exercised of late upon the choice of a career for his future life. He liked none of the professions for itself, and had no need to embrace it for support. He loved action, and loved study; was ambitious and fond of applause. He had, moreover, enough of the American in his composition never to be happy except when in pursuit of something; together with a disposition not very rare among young men in New England, though seldom there, or elsewhere, joined to his abounding health and youthful spirits—a tendency to live for the future, and look at acts and things with an eye to their final issues.
Thierry's Norman Conquest had fallen into his hands soon after he entered college. The whole delighted him; but he read and re-read the opening chapters, which exhibit the movements of the various races in their occupancy of the west of Europe. This first gave him an impulse towards ethnological inquiries. He soon began to find an absorbing interest in tracing the distinctions, moral, intellectual, and physical, of different races, as shown in their history, their mythologies, their languages, their legends, their primitive art, literature, and way of life. The idea grew upon him of devoting his life to such studies.
Seated on the wooden bench at the edge of Fresh Pond, he revolved, for the hundredth time, his proposed scheme, and summed up what he regarded as its manifold advantages. It would enable him to indulge his passion for travel,
