Tales of the Chesapeake Part 34

Wise is the wild duck winging straight to thee, River of summer! from the cold Arctic sea, Coming, like his fathers for centuries, to seek The sweet, salt pastures of the far Chesapeake.

Soft 'twixt thy capes like sunset's purple coves, Shallow the channel glides through silent oyster groves, Round Kent's ancient isle, and by beaches brown, Cleaving the fruity farms to slumb'rous Chestertown.

Long ere the great bay bore the Baltimores, Yielded thy virgin tide to Virginian oars; Elsewhere the word went, "Multiply! increase!"

Long ago thy destinies were perfect as thy peace.

Still, like thy water-fowl, dearly do I yearn, In memory's migration once more to return, Where the dull old college from the gentle ridge, O'erlooks the sunny village, the river, and the bridge.

On the pier decrepit I do loiter yet, With my crafty crab-lines and my homespun net, Till the silver fishes in pools of twilight swam, And stars played round my bait in the coves of calm.

Sweet were the chinquapins growing by thy brink, Sweet the cool spring-water in the gourd to drink, Beautiful the lilies when the tide declined, As if night receding had left some stars behind.

But when the peach tints vanished from the plain, Or struggled no longer the shad against the seine, Every reed in thy march into music stirred, And to gold it blossomed in a singing bird.

Eden of water-fowl! clinging to thy dells Ages of mollusks have yielded their sh.e.l.ls, While, like the exquisite spirits they shed, Ride the white swans in the surface o'erhead.

Silent the otter, stealing by thy moon, Through the fluttered heron, hears the cry of the loon; Motionless the setter in thy dawnlight gray Shows the happy hidden cove where the wild duck play.

Homely are thy boatmen, venturing no more In their dusky pungies than to Baltimore, Happy when the freshet from northern mountains sweeps, And strews the bay with lumber like wrecks upon the deeps.

Not for thy homesteads of a former s.p.a.ce, Not for thy folk of supposit.i.tious race; Something I love thee, river, for thy rest, More for my childhood buried in thy breast.

From the mightier empire of the solid land, A pilgrim infrequent I seek thy fertile strand, And with a calm affection would wish my grave to be Where falls the Chester to the bay, the bay unto the sea.

OLD WAs.h.i.+NGTON ALMSHOUSE.

A stranger in Was.h.i.+ngton, looking down the wide outer avenue named "Ma.s.sachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points straight to the Was.h.i.+ngton Asylum, better known as the District Poor-House, an inst.i.tution to become hereafter conspicuous to every tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that when the whistle, like

"the pibroch's music, thrills To the heart of those lone hills,"

the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more frequent signs of habitation and visitation.

To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor, physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called "Georgia" he will pa.s.s to his right the Congressional burying-ground, and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.

It is a smart brick building, four stories high, with green tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, standing on the last promontory of some gra.s.sy commons beloved of geese and billygoats. The short, black cedars, which appear to be a species of vegetable c.r.a.pe, give a stubby look of grief to the region round the poor-house, and, thickest at the Congressional Cemetery, screen from the paupers the view of the city. Across the plains, once made populous by army hospitals, few objects move except funeral processions, creeping toward the graveyard or receding at a merry gait, and occasional pensioners, out on leave, coming home dutifully to their bed of charity. The report of some sportsman's gun, where he is rowing in the marshes of the gray river, sometimes raises echoes in the high hills and ravines of the other sh.o.r.e, where, many years ago, the rifles of Graves and Cilley were heard by every partisan in the land. Now the tall forts, raised in the war, are silent and deserted; the few villas and farm-houses look from their background of pine upon the smart edifice on the city sh.o.r.e, and its circle of hospitals nearer the water, and its small-pox hospital a little removed, and upon the dead-house and the Potter's Field at the river brink. We all know the melancholy landscape of a poor-house.

The Potter's Field preceded the poor-house on this site by many years.

The almshouse was formerly erected on M Street, between Sixth and Seventh, and, being removed here, it burned to the ground in the month of March, fourteen years ago, when the present brick structure was raised. The entire premises, of which the main part is the almshouse garden, occupy less than fifty acres, and the number of inmates is less than two hundred, the females preponderating in the proportion of three to one. Under the same roof are the almshouse and the work-house, the inmates of the former being styled "Infirmants," and of the latter "Penitents." The government of the inst.i.tution is vested in three commissioners, to whom is responsible the intendent, Mr.

Joseph F. Hodgson, a very cheerful and practical-looking "b.u.mble."

Every Wednesday the three commissioners meet at this almshouse and receive the weekly reports of the intendent, physician, and gardener.

Once every year these officers, and the matron, wagoner, and baker are elected. Sixteen ounces of bread and eight ounces of beef are the ration of the district pauper. The turnkey, gate-keeper, chief watchmen, and chief nurses, are selected from the inmates. The gates are closed at sunset, and the lights go out at eight P.M. all winter. The inmates wear a uniform, labelled in large letters "Work-house," or "Was.h.i.+ngton Asylum."

The poor-house is an inst.i.tution coeval with the capital. We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Was.h.i.+ngton City, was haggling with General Was.h.i.+ngton over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate of the poor-house.

Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a Congressman, and was buried in a "mausoleum" on H Street, Remus died without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.

The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind--for such was Was.h.i.+ngton, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every capital of Western Europe--drew to its site artists, adventurers, and speculators from all lands. From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in the Potter's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of official society, and the defective education of the young men of tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new cla.s.s of native-born errants and broken profligates at Was.h.i.+ngton, and many a life whose memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were prosperous?

In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the District Almshouse contains few government employes. Now and then, as Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of manfulness, and of labor. The cla.s.s of well-bred young men who are ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and hear no response in the public tone. Duelling is over; visiting one's relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man.

The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one's friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a jest to precipitate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of some old parish church, horses. .h.i.tched to the gravestones, and punch mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence, decay! Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain thresholds.

The Was.h.i.+ngton poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one respect: under the same roof, divided only by a part.i.tion and a corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate for refuge.

We pa.s.sed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless women, semi-imbecile girls--the relicts of error, the heirs of affliction--three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong, rosy Irish nurse. Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third upon the floor halloaing for joy. Such n.o.ble specimens of childhood we had never seen; heads like Caesar's, eyes bright as the depths of wells into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the complexions and carriage of high birth. The woman was suckling them all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and walls light up as with pictures. A few yards off, though out of hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and fro restlessly. Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where bad cases were locked up. The a.s.sociation of the poor and the wicked affected us painfully.

Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead--those who have escaped the dissecting-knife. Scattered about, with little stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plas.h.i.+ng against the low banks, we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of "Give me neither poverty nor riches!"

1871.

OLD ST. MARY'S.

This is the river. Like Southampton water It enters broadly in the woody lands, As if to break a continent asunder, And sudden ceasing, lo! the city stands: St. Mary's--stretching forth its yellow hands Of beach, beneath the bluff where it commands In vision only; for the fields are green Above the pilgrims. Pleasant is the place; No ruin mars its immemorial face.

As young as in virginity renewed, Its widow's sorrows gone without a trace, And tempting man to woo its solitude.

The river loves it, and embraces still Its comely form with two small arms of bay, Whereon, of old, the Calvert's pinnace lay, The Dove--dear bird!--the olive in its bill, That to the Ark returned from every gale And found a haven by this sheltering hill.[4]

Lo! all composed, the soft horizons lie Afloat upon the blueness of the coves, And sometimes in the mirage does the sky Seem to continue the dependent groves, And draw in the canoe that careless roves Among the stars repeated round the bow.

Far off the larger sails go down the world, For nothing worldly sees St. Mary's now; The ancient windmills all their sails have furled, The standards of the Lords of Baltimore, And they, the Lords, have pa.s.sed to their repose; And nothing sounds upon the pebbly sh.o.r.e Except thy hidden bell, Saint Inigo's.

[Footnote 4: The Catholic settlers of Maryland had a s.h.i.+p called The Ark, and a pinnace called The Dove.]

There in a wood the Jesuits' chapel stands Amongst the gravestones, in secluded calm.

But, Sabbath days, the censer's healing balm, The Crucified with His extended hands, And music of the ma.s.ses, draw the fold Back to His wors.h.i.+p, as in days of old.

Upon a cape the priest's house northward blinks, To see St. Mary's Seminary guard The dead that sleep within the parish yard, In English faith--the parish church that links The present with the perished, for its walls Are of the clay that was the capital's, When halberdiers and musketeers kept ward, And armor sounded in the oaken halls.

A fruity smell is in the school-house lane; The clover bees are sick with evening heats; A few old houses from the window pane Fling back the flame of sunset, and there beats The throb of oars from basking oyster fleets, And clangorous music of the oyster tongs, Plunged down in deep bivalvulous retreats, And sound of seine drawn home with negro songs.

Night falls as heavily in such a clime As tired childhood after all day's play, Waiting for mother who has pa.s.sed away, And some old nurse, with iterated rhyme Of hymns or topics of the olden time, Lulls wonder with her tenderness to rest: So, old St. Mary's! at the close of day, Sing thou to me, a truant, on thy breast.