Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 58, August, 1862», страница 9
The other communication was a right royal greeting. Up to this time the letters to the Governor from the members of the Government, private as well as official, had been to him of the most gratifying character, to say nothing of the gift of the baronetcy. "I can give you the pleasure of knowing," Lord Barrington wrote to him, (April 5, 1769,) "that last Sunday the King spoke with the highest approbation of your conduct and services in his closet to me"; but in a postscript to this letter were the ominous words,–"I understand you are directed to come hither; but Lord Hillsborough authorizes me to say, you need not be in any inconvenient haste to obey that instruction." This order, in the manuscript, is indorsed, "Received June 10, 1769"; and being unique, it is here copied from the original, which has Hillsborough's autograph:–
"GEORGE R.
"Trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well. Whereas we have thought fit by our royal license under our signet and sign-manual bearing date the twenty-second day of June, 1768, in the eighth year of our reign, to permit you to return into this our kingdom of Great Britain: Our will and pleasure therefore is, that as soon as conveniently may be, after the receipt hereof, you do repair to this our kingdom in order to lay before us a state of our province of Massachusetts Bay. And so we bid you farewell. Given at our court at St. James the twenty-third day of March, 1769, in the ninth year of our reign.
"By His Majesty's command, "HILLSBOROUGH."
It was now an active time with the Patriots. Before the Governor had a chance to talk with General Mackay or to write to General Gage, the news spread all over the town that the two regiments were ordered off; and with this there was circulated the story, that Commissioner Temple had received a letter from George Grenville containing the assurance that the Governor would be immediately recalled with disgrace, that three of the Commissioners of the Customs would be turned off directly, and that next winter the Board would be dissolved; and Bernard, who tells these incidents, says that the reports exalted the Sons of Liberty as though the bells had rung for a triumph, while there was consternation among the crown officials, the importers, and the friends of Government. Here was thrust upon Bernard, over again, the question of the introduction of the troops.
The Governor was as much embarrassed by the requisition for an answer in writing as to the two regiments that were not ordered off as he was astonished at the order that had been given; and on getting a note from General Mackay, he gave the verbal answer, that he would write to General Gage. Meantime, while Bernard was hesitating, the Patriots were acting, and immediately applied themselves to counteract the influence which they knew was making to retain the two regiments. One hundred and forty-two of the citizens petitioned the Selectmen for a town-meeting, at which it was declared, that the law of the land made ample provision for the security of life and property, and that the presence of the troops was an insult. After a week's hesitation, the Governor wrote to General Gage, who had promised inviolable secrecy, that to remove a portion of the two regiments would be detrimental to His Majesty's service; to remove all of these troops would be quite ruinous to the cause of the Crown; but that one regiment in the town and one at the Castle might be sufficient. Of course, General Gage, if he paid any respect to the Governor's advice, could do no less than order both regiments to remain. Thus was it that the two Sam Adams Regiments continued in town, designed for evil, but working for the good of the common cause.
Governor Bernard, during the month of June, and down to the middle of July, was greatly disturbed by the manly stand of the General Court; and, because of its refusal to enter upon the public business under the mouths of British cannon, adjourned it to Cambridge. On the night after this adjournment, the cannon were removed. These irritating proceedings made this body still more high-toned. While in this mood, it received from the Governor two messages, (July 6 and 12,) asking an appropriation of money to meet the expenses which had been incurred by the crown officers in quartering troops in Boston. The members nobly met this demand by returning to the Governor (July 15, 1769) a grandly worded state-paper, in which, claiming the rights of freeborn Englishmen, as confirmed by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, and as settled by the Revolution and the British Charter, they expressly declared that they never would make provision for the purposes mentioned in the two messages. On the same day, it was represented in the House that armed soldiers had rescued a prisoner from the hands of justice, when two constables were ordered to attend on the floor who were heard on the matter, and a committee was then appointed to consider it. But Secretary Oliver now appeared with a message from the Governor to the effect that he was at the Court-House and directed the immediate attendance of the members. They accordingly, with Speaker Cushing at their head, repaired to the Governor, who, after a haughty speech charging them with proclaiming ideas lacking in dignity to the Crown and inconsistent with the Province continuing a part of the British Empire, prorogued the Court until the 10th of January.
The press arraigned the arbitrary proceedings of the Governor with great boldness and a just severity; while it declared that the action taken by the intrepid House of Representatives, with rare unanimity, was supported by the almost universal sentiments of the people. The last act of the Governor, the prorogation of the General Court for six months, was especially criticized; and after averring that such long prorogations, in such critical times, could never promote the true service of His Majesty or the tranquility of his good subjects, it predicted that impartial history would hang up Governor Bernard as a warning to his successors who had any sense of character, and perhaps his future fortune might be such as to teach even the most selfish of them not to tread in his steps.
On the day this prediction was written, (August 1, 1769,) Sir Francis Bernard, in the Rippon, was on his way to England. Congratulations among the people, exultation on the part of the press, the Union Flag on Liberty Tree, salutes from Hancock's Wharf, and bonfires, in the evening, on the hills, expressed the general joy. And yet Francis Bernard was hardly a faithful representative of the proud imperial power for which he acted. He was a bad Governor, but he was not so bad as the cause he was obliged to uphold. He was arbitrary, but he was not so arbitrary as his instructions. He was vacillating, but he was not so vacillating as the Ministers. When he gave the conciliatory reply to the June town-meeting, it was judged that he lowered the national standard, and it seriously damaged him at Court; when he spoke in the imperial tone that characterized the British rule of that day, he was rewarded with a baronetcy. The Governor after months of reflection, in England, on reviewing in an elaborate letter the political path he had travelled, indicated both his deep chagrin and his increase of wisdom in the significant words,–"I was obliged to give up, a victim to the bad policy and irresolution of the supreme Government."
The execution of a bad policy as directed by an irresolute Ministry was now the lot of Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson. It was embodied in the question of the removal of the troops; and this question was not decided, until, after months of confusion and distress, the blood and slaughter of His Majesty's good subjects compelled an indignant American public opinion to command their departure from the town of Boston.
LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR
BY THE AUTHOR OF "CECIL DREEME" AND "JOHN BRENT."
KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT
CHAPTER I
OFF
At five, P. M., we found ourselves–Iglesias, a party of friends, and myself–on board the Isaac Newton, a great, ugly, three-tiered box that walks the North River, like a laboratory of greasy odors.
In this stately cinder-mill were American citizens. Not to discuss spitting, which is for spittoons, not literature, our fellow-travellers on the deck of the "floating palace" were passably endurable people, in looks, style, and language. I dodge discrimination, and characterize them en masse by negations. The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain evening of July, 18–, were not so intrusively green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base would it be to exhibit their positive vices.
And so no more of passengers or passage. I will not describe our evening on the river. Alas for the duty of straight-forwardness and dramatic unity! Episodes seem so often sweeter than plots! The way-side joys are better than the final successes. The flowers along the vista, brighter than the victor-wreaths at its close. I may not dally on my way, turning to the right and the left for beauty and caricature. I will balance on the strict edge of my narrative, as a seventh-heavenward Mahometan with wine-forbidden steadiness of poise treads Al Seràt, his bridge of a sword-blade.
Next morning, at Albany, divergent trains cleft our party into a better and a worser half. The beautiful girls, our better half, fled westward to ripen their pallid roses with richer summer-hues in mosquitoless inland dells. Iglesias and I were still northward bound.
At the Saratoga station we sipped a dreary, faded reminiscence of former joys and sparkling brilliancy long dead, in cups of Congress-water, brought by unattractive Ganymedes and sold in the train,–draughts flat, flabby, and utterly bubbleless, lukewarm heel-taps with a flavor of savorless salt.
Still northward journeying, and feeling the sea-side moisture evaporate from our blood under inland suns and sultry inland breezes, we came to Lake Champlain.
As before banquets, to excite appetite, one takes the gentle oyster, so we, before the serious pleasure of our journey, tasted the Adirondack region, paradise of Cockney sportsmen. There through the forest, the stag of ten trots, coquetting with greenhorns. He likes the excitement of being shot at and missed. He enjoys the smell of powder in a battle where he is always safe. He hears Greenhorn blundering through the woods, stopping to growl at briers, stopping to revive his courage with the Dutch supplement. The stag of ten awaits his foe in a glade. The foe arrives, sees the antlered monarch, and is panic-struck. He watches him prance and strike the ground with his hoofs. He slowly recovers heart, takes a pull at his flask, rests his gun upon a log, and begins to study his mark. The stag will not stand still. Greenhorn is baffled. At last his target turns and carefully exposes that region of his body where Greenhorn has read lies the heart. Just about to fire, he catches the eye of the stag winking futility into his elaborate aim. His blunderbuss jerks upward. A shower of cut leaves floats through the smoke, from a tree thirty feet overhead. Then, with a mild-eyed melancholy look of reproachful contempt, the stag turns away, and wanders off to sleep in quiet coverts far within the wood. He has fled, while for Greenhorn no trophy remains. Antlers have nodded to the sportsman; a short tail has disappeared before his eyes;–he has seen something, but has nothing to show. Whereupon he buys a couple of pairs of ancient weather-bleached horns from some colonist, and, nailing them up at impossible angles on the wall of his city-den, humbugs brother-Cockneys with tales of vénerie, and has for life his special legend, "How I shot my first deer in the Adirondacks."
The Adirondacks provide a compact, convenient, accessible little wilderness,–an excellent field for the experiments of tyros. When the tyro, whether shot, fisherman, or forester, has proved himself fully there, let him dislodge into some vaster wilderness, away from guides by the day and superintending hunters, away from the incursions of the Cockney tribe, and let out the caged savage within him for a tough struggle with Nature. It needs a struggle tough and resolute to force that Protean lady to observe at all her challenger.
It is well to go to the Adirondacks. They are shaggy, and shagginess is a valuable trait. The lakes are very well,–very well indeed. The objection to the region is not the mountains, which are reasonably shaggy,–not the lakes and rivers, which are water, a capital element. The real difficulty is the society: not the autochthonous society,–they are worthy people, and it is hardly to be mentioned as a fault that they are not a discriminating race, and will asseverate that all fish are trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison,–but the immigrant, colonizing society. Cockneys are to be found at every turn, flaunting their banners of the awkward squad, proclaiming to the world with protuberant pride that they are the veritable backwoodsmen,–rather doing it, rather astonishing the natives, they think. And so they are. One squad of such neophytes might be entertaining; but when every square mile echoes with their hails, lost, poor babes, within a furlong of their camps, and when the woods become dim and the air civic with their cooking-smokes, and the subtle odor of fried pork overpowers methylic fragrance among the trees, then he who loves forests for their solitude leaves these brethren to their clumsy joys, and wanders elsewhere deeper into sylvan scenes.
Our visit to the Adirondacks was episodic; and as I have forsworn episodes, I turn away from them with this mild slander, and strike again our Maine track. With lips impurpled by the earliest huckleberries, we came out again upon Champlain. We crossed that water-logged valley in a steamboat, and hastened on, through a pleasant interlude of our rough journey, across Vermont and New Hampshire, two States not without interest to their residents, but of none to this narrative.
By coach and wagon, by highway and by-way, by horse-power and steam-power, we proceeded, until it chanced, one August afternoon, that we left railways and their regions at a way-side station, and let our lingering feet march us along the Valley of the Upper Connecticut. This lovely river, baptizer of Iglesias's childhood, was here shallow and musical, half river, half brook; it had passed the tinkling period, and plashed and rumbled voicefully over rock and shallow.
It was a fair and verdant valley where we walked, overlooked by hills of pleasant pastoral slope. All the land was gay and ripe with yellow harvest. Strolling along, as if the business of travel were forgotten, we placidly identified ourselves with the placid scenery. We became Arcadians both. Such is Arcadia, if I have read aright: a realm where sunshine never scorches, and yet shade is sweet; where simple pleasures please; where the blue sky and the bright water and the green fields satisfy forever.
We were in lightest marching-trim. Iglesias bore an umbrella, our armor against what heaven could do with assault of sun or shower. I was weaponed with a staff, should brute or biped uncourteous dispute our way. We had no impediments of "great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle." A thoughtful man hardly feels honest in his life except as a pedestrian traveller. "La propriété c'est le vol"--which the West more briefly expresses by calling baggage "plunder." What little plunder our indifferent honesty had packed for this journey we had left with a certain stage-coachman, perhaps to follow us, perhaps to become his plunder. We were thus disconnected from any depressing influence; we had no character to sustain; we were heroes in disguise, and could make our observations on life and manners, without being invited to a public hand-shaking, or to exhibit feats in jugglery, for either of which a traveller with plenteous portmanteaus, hair or leather, must be prepared in villages thereabouts. Totally unembarrassed, we lounged along or leaped along, light-hearted. When the river neared us, or winsome brooklet from the hill-side thwarted our path, we stooped and lapped from their pools of coolness, or tasted that most ethereal tipple, the mingled air and water of electric bubbles, as they slid brightly toward our lips.
The angle of the sun's rays grew less and less, the wheat-fields were tinged more golden by the clinging beams, our shadows lengthened, as if exercise of an afternoon were stimulating to such unreal essences. Finally the blue dells and gorges of a wooded mountain, for two hours our landmark, rose between us and the sun. But the sun's Parthian arrows gave him a splendid triumph, more signal for its evanescence. A storm was inevitable, and sunset prepared a reconciling pageant.
Now, as may be supposed, Iglesias has an eye for a sunset. That summer's crop had been very short, and he had been some time on starvation-allowance of cloudy magnificence. We therefore halted by the road-side, and while I committed the glory to memory, Iglesias entrusted his distincter memorial to a sketch-book.
We were both busy, he repeating forms, noting shades and tints, and I studying without pictorial intent, when we heard a hail in the road below our bank. It was New Hampshire, near the Maine line, and near the spot where nasal organs are fabricated that twang the roughest.
"Say!" shrieked up to us a freckled native, holding fast to the tail of a calf, the last of a gambolling family he was driving,–"Say! whodger doon up thurr? Layn aoot taoonshup lains naoou, aancher? Cauds ur suvvares raoond. Spekkleayshn goan on, ur guess."
We allowed this unmelodious vocalist to respect us by permitting him to believe us surveyors in another sense than as we were. One would not be despised as an unpractical citizen, a mere looker at Nature with no immediate view to profit, even by a freckled calf-driver of the Upper Connecticut. While we parleyed, the sketch was done, and the pageant had faded quick before the storm.
Splendor had departed; the world in our neighborhood had fallen into the unillumined dumps. An ominous mournfulness, far sadder than the pensiveness of twilight, drew over the sky. Clouds, that donned brilliancy for the fond parting of mountain-tops and the sun, now grew cheerless and gray; their gay robes were taken from them, and with bended heads they fled away from the sorrowful wind. In western glooms beyond the world a dreary gale had been born, and now came wailing like one that for all his weariness may not rest, but must go on harmful journeys and bear evil tidings. With the vanguard gusts came volleys of rain, malicious assaults, giving themselves the trouble to tell us in an offensive way what we could discover for ourselves, that a wetting impended and umbrellas would soon be nought.
While the storm was thus nibbling before it bit, we lengthened our strides to escape. Water, concentrated in flow of stream or pause of lake, is charming; not so to the shelterless is water diffused in dash of deluge. Water, when we choose our method of contact, is a friend; when it masters us, it is a foe; when it drowns us or ducks us, a very exasperating foe. Proud pedestrians become very humble personages, when thoroughly vanquished by a ducking deluge. A wetting takes out the starch not only from garments, but the wearers of them. Iglesias and I did not wish to stand all the evening steaming before a kitchen-fire, inspecting meanwhile culinary details: Phillis in the kitchen is not always as fresh as Phillis in the field. We therefore shook ourselves into full speed and bolted into our inn at Colebrook; and the rain, like a portcullis, dropped solid behind us.
In town, the landlord is utterly merged in his hotel. He is a sovereign rarely apparent. In the country, the landlord is a personality. He is greater than the house he keeps. Men arriving inspect the master of the inn narrowly. If his first glance is at the pocket, cheer will be bad; if at the eyes or the lips, you need not take a cigar before supper to keep down your appetite.
Our landlord was of the latter type. He surged out of the little box where he was dispensing not too fragrant rummers to a circle of village-politicians, and congratulated us on our arrival before the storm. He was a discriminating person. He detected us at once, saw we were not tramps or footpads, and led us to the parlor, a room attractively furnished with a map of the United States and an oblong music-book open at "Old Hundred." Our host further felicitated us that we had not stopped at a certain tavern below, where, as he said,–
"They cut a chunk er beef and drop 't into a pot to bile, and bile her three days, and then don't have noth'n' else for three weeks."
He put his head out of the door and called,–
"George, go aoot and split up that 'ere wood as fine as chaowder: these men 'll want their supper right off."
Drawing in his head, he continued to us confidentially,–
"That 'ere George is jes' like a bird: he goes off at one snappin'."
Our host then rolled out toward the bar-room, to discuss with his cronies who we might be. From the window we perceived the birdlike George fly and alight near the specified wood, which he proceeded to bechowder. He brought in the result of his handiwork, as smiling as a basket of chips. Neat-handed Phillis at the door received the chowder, and by its aid excited a sound and a smell, both prophetic of supper. And we, willing to repose after a sixteen-mile afternoon-walk, lounged upon sofa or tilted in rocking-chair, taking the available mental food, namely, "Godey's Lady's Book" and the Almanac.
