The Humors of Falconbridge Part 19

"Do you keep this store?"

"No, we do not," we answered, watching the man as he put his bundle down upon the counter.

"Who does?" was the next question.

"The gentleman who keeps it," we replied, "is away to-day."

"Ah, gone to see a poor human being put out of the world, eh?"

We said "yes," or something of the kind, and thought to ourself, no doubt you know all that's going on of that sort of business like a book, and a host of other ideas flashed across our mind, while all the evil deeds of note transacted in that region for the past ten years, seemed awakened in our mind's eye, working up our nervous system, until the c.o.o.n skin cap upon our excited head stood upon about fifteen hairs, with the strange and overwhelming impression that our time had come! We would have given the State of Missouri--if it were in our possession, to have heard Captain V----'s voice, or even have had a fair chance to dash out at the door, and give the fellow before us a specimen of tall walking--lame as we were!

"Ain't you got a _light_? I'd think you'd be a little timid (a _little_ timid!) about laying around here, alone, in the dark, too?" said the fellow, sticking one hand into his coat pocket, and gazing sharply around the store. Mock heroically says we--

"Afraid? Afraid of what?" our valor, like Bob Acres', oozing out at our fingers.

"These outlaws you've got around here," said he. "They say the man they hanged to-day was a decent fellow to what some are, who prowl around in this country!"

We very modestly said, "that such fellows never bothered us."

"Do you sleep in this store--live here?"

"No, sir, we don't," was our answer.

"Where do you lodge and get your eating?"

"First house up the road."

"How far is it?" says he.

"Half a mile or less."

"Well, close up your shop, and come along with me!" says the fellow.

Now we were coming to the _tableaux!_ He wanted us to step outside in order that the business could be done for us, with more haste and certainty, and we really felt as good as a.s.sa.s.sinated and hid in the bushes! It was quite astonis.h.i.+ng how our visual organs intensified! We could see every wrinkle and line in the fellow's face, could almost count the st.i.tches in his coat, and the more we looked, and the keener and more searching became our observation, the more atrocious and subtle became the fellow and his purpose. With a firmness that astonished ourself, we said--

"_No, Sir_; if _you_ have business there or elsewhere, you had better _go!_" and with this determined speech, we walked up to the desk, and with the air of a "man of business" or the nonchalance of a hero, says we--

"What are you after--have you any business with _us_?"

"You're kind of crusty, Mister," says he. "I'm canva.s.sing this State,--_wouldn't you like to subscribe for a first-rate map of Missouri_, OR A NEW EDITION OF JOSEPHUS?"

We felt too mean all over to "subscribe," but we found a light, and soon found in the stranger one of the best sort of fellows, a man of information and morality, and, though he had _looked_ dangerous, he turned out harmless as a lamb, and we got intimate as brothers before Captain V---- returned that night.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Of all the public lecturers of our time and place, none have attracted more attention from the press, and consequently the people, than RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Lecturing has become quite a fas.h.i.+onable science--and now, instead of using the old style phrases for ill.u.s.trating facts, we call travelling preachers perambulating showmen, and floating politicians, _lecturers_.

As a lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson is extensively known around these parts; but whether his lectures come under the head of law, logic, politics, Scripture, or the show business, is a matter of much speculation; for our own part, the more we read or hear of Ralph, the more we don't know what it's all about.

Somebody has said, that to his singularity of style or expression, Carlyle and his works owe their great notoriety or fame--and many compare Ralph Waldo to old Carlyle. They cannot trace exactly any great affinity between these two great geniuses of the flash literary school.

Carlyle writes vigorously, quaintly enough, but almost always speaks when he says something; on the contrary, our flighty friend Ralph speaks vigorously, yet says nothing! Of all men that have ever stood and delivered in presence of "a reporter," none surely ever led these indefatigable knights of the pen such a wild-goose chase over the verdant and flowery pastures of King's English, as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In ordinary cases, a reporter well versed in his art, catches a sentence of a speaker, and goes on to fill it out upon the most correct impression of what was intended, or what is implied. But no such license follows the outpourings of Mr. Emerson; no thought can fathom his intentions, and quite as bottomless are even his finished sentences.

We have known "old stagers," in the newspaporial line, veteran reporters, so dumbfounded and confounded by the first fire of Ralph, and his grand and lofty acrobating in elocution, that they up, seized their hat and paper, and sloped, horrified at the prospect of an attempt to "take down" Mr. Emerson.

If Roaring Ralph touches a homely mullen weed, on a donkey heath, straightway he makes it a full-blown rose, in the land of Ophir, shedding an odor balmy as the gales of Arabia; while with a facility the wonderful London auctioneer Robbins might envy, Ralph imparts to a lime-box, or pig-sty, a negro hovel, or an Irish shanty, all the romance, artistic elegance and finish of a first-cla.s.s manor-house, or Swiss cottage, inlaid with alabaster and fresco, surrounded by elfin bowers, grand walks, bee hives, and honeysuckles.

Ralph don't group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster, Walker, &c., but rushes them out in torrents--rattles them down in cataracts and avalanches--bewildering, astounding, and incomprehensible.

He hits you upon the left lug of your knowledge box with a metaphor so unwieldy and original, that your breath is soon gone--and before it is recovered, he gives you another _rhapsody_ on t'other side, and as you try to steady yourself, _bim_ comes another, heavier than the first two, while a fourth batch of this sort of elocution fetches you a bang over the eyes, giving you a vertigo in the ribs of your bewildered senses, and before you can say "G.o.d bless us!" down he has you--_cobim!_ with a deluge of high-heeled grammar and three-storied Anglo Saxon, settling your hash, and brings you to the ground by the run, as though you were struck by lightning, or in the way of a 36-pounder! Ralph Waldo is death and an entire _stud_ of pale horses on flowery expressions and j.a.ponica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knock-kneed, antique, or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons and rhetoric exercises. He has a penchant as strong as cheap boarding-house b.u.t.ter, for mystification, and a free delivery of hard words, perfectly and unequivocally wonderful. We listened one long hour by the clock of Rumford Hall, one night, to an outpouring of _argumentum ad hominem_ of Mr. Emerson's--at what? A boy under an apple tree! If ten persons out of the five hundred present were put upon their oaths, they could no more have deciphered, or translated Mr. Ralph's argumentation, than they could the hieroglyphics upon the walls of Thebes, or the sarcophagus of old King Pharaoh! When Ralph Waldo opens, he may be as calm as a May morn--he may talk for five minutes, like a book--we mean a common-sensed, understandable book; but all of a sudden the fluid will strike him--up he goes--down he fetches them. He throws a double somerset backwards over Asia Minor--flip-flaps in Greece--wings Turkey--and _skeets_ over Iceland; here he slips up with a flower garden--a torrent of gilt-edged metaphors, that would last a country parson's moderate demand a long lifetime, are whirled with the fury and fleetness of Jove's thunderbolts. After exhausting his sweet-scented receiver of this floral elocution, he pauses four seconds; pointing to vacuum, over the heads of his audience, he asks, in an anxious tone, "Do you see that?" Of course the audience are not expected to be so unmannerly as to ask "What?" If they were, Ralph would not give them time to "go in," for after asking them if they see _that_, he continues--

"There! Mark! Note! It is a malaria prism! Now, then; here--there; see it! Note it! Watch it!"

During this time, half of the audience, especially the old women and the children, look around, fearful of the ceiling falling in, or big bugs lighting on them. But the pause is for a moment, and anxiety ceases when they learn it was only a false alarm, only--

"Egotism! The lame, the pestiferous exhalation or concrete malformation of society!"

You breathe freer, and Ralph goes in, gloves on.

"Egotism! A metaphysical, calcareous, oleraceous amentum of--society!

The mental varioloid of this sublunary hemisphere! One of its worst feelings or features is, the craving of sympathy. It even loves sickness, because actual pain engenders signs of sympathy. All cultivated men are infected more or less with this dropsy. But they are still the leaders. The life of a few men is the life of every place. In Boston you hear and see a few, so in New York; then you may as well die.

Life is very narrow. Bring a few men together, and under the spell of one calm genius, what frank, sad confessions will be made! Culture is the suggestion from a few best thoughts that a man should not be a charlatan, but temper and subdue life. Culture redresses his balance, and puts him among his equals. It is a poor compliment always to talk with a man upon his _specialty_, as if he were a cheese-mite, and was therefore strong on Ches.h.i.+re and Stilton. Culture takes the grocer out of his mola.s.ses and makes him genial. We pay a heavy price for those fancy goods, Fine Arts and Philosophy. No performance is worth loss of geniality. That unhappy man called of genius, is an unfortunate man.

Nature always carries her point despite the means!"

If that don't convince you of Ralph's high-heeled, knock-kneed logic, or _au fait_ dexterity in concocting flap-doodle mixtures, you're ahead of ordinary intellect as far as this famed lecturer is in advance of gin and bitters, or opium discourses on--delirium tremens!

In short, Ralph Waldo Emerson can wrap up a subject in more mystery and science of language than ever a defunct Egyptian received at the hands of the mummy manufacturers! In person, Mr. Ralph is rather a pleasing sort of man; in manners frank and agreeable; about forty years of age, and a native of Ma.s.sachusetts. As a lawyer, he would have been the horror of jurors and judges; as a lecturer, he is, as near as possible, what we have described him.

Humbug.

There is no end to the humbug in life. About half we say, and more than half we do, is tinged with humbug. "My Dear Sir," we say, when we address a letter to a fellow we have never seen, and if seen, perhaps don't care a continental cent for him; _dear_ sir! what a humbug expression! "Good morning," (what a lie!) says one, as he meets another _one_, on a stormy and nasty day, "quite a disagreeable wet day!" What's the use of such a humbug expression as that? If it's a disagreeable and stormy day, every body finds it out, naturally. Full half of the people who appear solicitous about your _health_, display a gratuitous amount of humbug, for your pocket-book is more beloved than your health; and we have often wondered why matter-of-fact people don't out with it, when they meet, and say--"How's your pocket to-day? Sorry to hear you're out of _money!_" Or, instead of soft soap, when they meet, why not discard humbug, and say, "Sorry to see you--was blackguarding you all day!"

instead of "Glad to see you--have been _thinking_ of you to-day!" or, "I'm glad to see you've been elected Mayor of the city!" when in fact they mean, "Curse you, I wish you had been defeated!" Compliments _pa.s.s_, they say, when _gentlemen_ meet, but, as there are so many counterfeit gentry around, now-a-days, you may bet high that half the _compliments_ that _pa.s.s_ are--_mere bogus!_

Hotel Keeping.

Fortunes are made--very readily, it is said, in our large cities, by Hotel keeping. It does look money-making business to a great many people, who stop in a large hotel a day or two, and perhaps, after eating about two meals out of six--walking in quietly and walking out quietly--no fuss, no feathers, find themselves _taxed_ four or five dollars!