Two strange adventurers

Chapter I

New Jersey has always been a target for wits, and a liberally slandered State ; but it invariably found a champion in Mr. Peter Livingston. Yet he was a New Yorker, who only lived there in summer. He was wont to say : “ I ought to have been born a Jerseyman. I like to see the red Jersey mud on my boots, and I admire Jersey justice.” There is no accounting for tastes, as was said of the woman who kissed the cow.

Excepting Jersey lightning, he seemed to be on the best of terms with everything there, even the mosquitoes; and when a Wall Street wag of his acquaintance, who claimed to have once distinguished himself by being alternately a bull, a bear and a jackass the same day, asked him if he ever went after them with a shot gun, he replied with quiet humor, “ Oh, yes, we call them snipe.”

He was popular with his neighbors, of high and low degree, and whether they called him “Squire” out of respect or “Pete” out of good-fellowship, he was equally disposed to be friendly and affable,

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despite a natural tendency to stiffness and frigidity. Moreover, he was conspicuous for his contributions to charitable institutions and the campaign funds of his own political party in the State.

One reason, however, for this generosity and this courting of popularity was that he had political aspirations. A Scotchman would have said that he had a bee in his bonnet. This weakness alone had led him to make his legal residence in New Jersey instead of New York.

He wanted to be Governor of the State, for the sake of distinction, and no other office would have been acceptable to him. He was a cream-laid politician. It was harmless vanity, but a case of aut CcBsar aut nullus.

The Jersey politicians knew his weakness, and bled him freely whenever they wanted money. But he was entirely too refined and superior a man, socially, intellectually, and in other respects, to have had much, if any, chance of reaching the governorship ; for mediocrity, represented by the masses, is always jealous of superiority. He was not a man of the people, in the popular sense. It was that feeling — that antagonism between mediocrity and superiority — that prevented Daniel Webster from being nominated for the Presidency of the United States. He was unquestionably a great man, but the greatest of men have their weaknesses, and losing that nomination broke Webster’s heart.

“ I guess,” said a rival for the governorship, who was afterwards elected — a man with a face like a baked apple, an apple-jack red nose and a quid of tobacco which made him spit like a water cart — “ Livingston wants to be Governor to please his old woman. She’s put him up to it so that she may queen it in the State House. She wants to be at the tip-top of everything here below. There’s always a woman in the case, as the Frenchj’udge said, or a nigger somewhere in the fence.”

But although the suspicion was correct as to his wife's ambition, Mr. Livingston's home life was like a crown of glory to him. He was a happy man.

Chapter II

It was in the quiet and rambling town of Orange, in that small part of the vast domain of Uncle Sam which is humorously said to be out of the United States, and consecrated to apple-jack, chills and mosquitoes — Orange, with its wealth of foliage, its blooming gardens, and its green hillsides patched with cultivated crops, and dotted here and there with picturesque villas, weather-beaten farm-houses, browsing cattle and simple cottage homes, yet less than an hour's walk from busy and bustling Newark, with its bee-hive workshops, and clanging, whizzing and whirring manufactories, capped by red brick chimneys and festooned with smoke — that a spacious and elegant mansion, the summer home of the Livingstons, a wealthy and refined New York family of high social position, was, late one sultry afternoon, in the year preceding the panic of 1837, the scene of painful excitement.

So long a sentence almost merits sentence of death, but pardon me, and remember that there is nothing bad in this world that might not be worse, just as there is nothing good that might not be better. I once read a sentence by William M. Evarts, and it seemed as if I had got hold of an executioner's coil of rope. But no reader can be talked to death, A book can be shut up.

Mr. Peter Livingston was the head of the house, and besides being a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in the Empire State, he was a man of far more than ordinary culture and attainments. He had graduated with honors at Columbia College in his native city when he was only eighteen, and after studying law in the office of an uncle who had won celebrity in the profession, succeeded his father as principal of a mercantile firm of high standing, which he had established thirty years before, a position he still retained, honored and respected, for he was what the Italians call a galantuomo — an honest man — and moreover a vestryman of Trinity Church ; while to sterling integrity of character he added a laudable degree of public spirit, of which there is a sad lack in the community at large. “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him, that nature might stand up and say to all the world, ^ This was a man H " Yet Montaigne said the most virtuous man would ten times at least in the course of his life be considered a fit subject for the gallows were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the rigid scrutiny of the laws of his country, and certain it is that there is no virtuous man without some vice or weakness, nor any wicked man without some virtue, some redeeming point in his character.

Mrs. Livingston was a De Peyster, and had no less family pride than her husband, for the De Peysters in her estimation were in nowise inferior to the Livingstons, and the Livingstons, all the world knew, were of the creme de la creme of New York society. Here were two aristocrats under the flag of the republic. She had been beautiful when a young girl, and now that she was a matron of thirty-five her youthful charms still lingered, although her face was a little worn and her ex-

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quisite complexion somewhat faded. She had that chiseled beauty of feature which American women possess far more than Europeans, and not alone a beauty of feature but of form which made her a pleasant object to contemplate. It is rare to find a repulsive face among her sisterhood in the United States, yet the expression of hers was unusually sweet and refined, and it truly indicated the gentleness and amiability of her character and the purity of her heart. In figure she was rather petites and an embodiment of grace and elegance, with a fine classical head ; but there was a look of fragility about her which is unfortunately too common among her sex even in these days when, physically, American women, at least in the large cities, are greatly the superiors of those who were of their own age half or even a quarter of a century ago, owing to the greater attention that is paid to hygienic laws, particularly with regard to food, fresh air and exercise. But overheated houses still do their work of mischief, for the close and parching atmosphere breathed within doors impairs vitality and the power of resisting the cold out of doors, and hence consumption gathers a vaster annual harvest than it otherwise would.

Mr. Livingston was a thin, gentlemanly-looking man of about five feet ten and forty-five years, with a rather swarthy complexion and black hair, and keen dark eyes, and by his assiduous yet unobstrusive attentions to his wife it was evident that they were lovers still, as married couples ought always to be, but which, alas ! they are often not.

A beautiful sight it is to see the long-married lovers of our acquaintance strewing each other s path with roses — from which they have removed the thorns — on their pilgrimage through life ; and sad indeed is the reverse of the picture, where

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couples are matched but not mated. Happy are they who love and are loved in the bond that unites them, for marriage to them is bliss, and each feels the other so essential to happiness, that when death comes to sever them the survivor almost craves death too, so overwhelming is the calamity ! The deeper the love the more bitter the sting.

The happy couple here described had been married more than twelve years, and had been blessed with two children — a son and daughter, the latter being a little over eleven and the former under ten years.

The boy — with his big, bright dark eyes, rich complexion and wavy brown hair — was as handsome as the son of such a mother might be expected to be, and his sister was a little blonde beauty with red cheeks, large blue eyes and fine long golden hair, flowing like a sunlit waterfall over her shoulders and down her back. She was one of those girls to whom the Italian proverb would apply, — Che nasce bella nasce maritata — she who is born handsome is born married.

The cause of the painful excitement referred to will be apparent when I say that this only son of his parents had left the house about nine in the morning of the day in question — after his father had driven away on one of his frequent visits to New York — and, as it afterwards transpired, joined another boy of his acquaintance, who proposed it, in going for a sail on the Passaic River, the sequel to which was that nine hours afterwards a rough-looking man rang the door-bell of the Livingston Mansion, and thus delivered himself to the servant :

“Tell your missus that her boy and a young chap of about fifteen came to my place this morning and hired a sail-boat, saying they was going

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down the river a bit. I let ’em have it, and they went off after paying me fifty cents for an hour. But they didn't come back, though four or five hours it was since they went, and a tremendous high wind had come up, and squally. Says I to myself, I guess them young fellows need looking after, so I set off in another boat to hunt 'em up, and I inquired about 'em as I went along, but I couldn’t hear a thing, even after I got away down in the bay ; so, after cruising around a while to see if I could catch sight of 'em or a capsized boat — with the wind rising all the time, and great big waves rolling in shore — I came back, and hired a wagon to drive out here and let you know. I've no hopes of 'em, for it was as much as I could do to manage the boat I was in. They must have gone out in the bay and got upset, though they told me they was only going for an hour’s sail up and down the river, or I wouldn't have let 'em have the boat. Now they've gone and lost it for me, and drowned themselves, and their relations will be crying over 'em as if there were no more boys left. I wish there weren’t, for there’s no satisfaction in having anything to do with 'em, and the smaller they are the worse they be, drat ’em. But I'm sorry for your boy's folks, because they’ll feel badly, I know, and he was as handsome as any youngster I ever set eyes on.”

These tidings were communicated to Mrs. Livingston a few minutes afterwards on her return from a drive in search of him, and of course only intensified her anxiety and grief.

“Oh! my dear boy, my dear boy!” she exclaimed, piteously. “Can he really be drowned ? Great heavens, no ! Oh ! no, it cannot be ! God would not take him away from me so ! Oh ! Aleck ! Aleck ! my darling Aleck ! Come back, come back ! ” and meanwhile she wrung her hands and wept profusely.

A little later, and just before dusk, her husband arrived from the city, after a drive from the Jersey side of the North River, and she met him at the door and fell sobbing into his arms. “Aleck’s drowned ! Aleck’s drowned ! ” Was all she could say, and astounded by the intelligence, and overcome by those silent orators, a woman’s tears, he exclaimed, “Good heavens, Florence! Is that so ? ” while his eyes grew moist with emotion, for he loved that boy as dearly as ever father loved a son. He almost idolized his children. He was a man, however, who tried to preserve unruffled serenity under all circumstances, and it is a useful precci)t which tells us that if we wish to preserve ourselves in health and safety we must avoid all serious cares, and never give way to vehement passion, so he controlled any further exhibition of feeling by a strong effort.

Days and weeks passed by, and the faint hopes which he entertained on first hearing the boatman’s story, that, as the boat had not been found, the missing boy might still be among the living, and be yet restored to his sorrowing parents, were reluctantly abandoned. A pall of mourning, a settled gloom hung over the house that had beYoro been the happiest and most joyous of homes, and but that his wife had a child left to console her he feared that her mind would have given way under the dreadful strain to which it was subjected.

All search for the boat, or tidings of it, proved in vain, although five hundred dollars reward was offered for information of it, and the boatman’s opinion was that it had drifted out to sea, bottom up.

Months more came and went, but the anguish at the mother's heart remained to sadden her existence, and her constant yearning was for her lost boy’s return.

“ Hope deferred maketh the heart sick indeed, Madeline,” she said to her daughter, “and if it were not for you, my dear, mine would break ! ”

CHAPTER HI.

While not quite Chesterfieldian in the polish of his manners, Peter Livingston was always polite in the sense of politeness being the art of giving to every one in an easy and unconstrained manner those particular marks of attention which are his due, and which therefore he has a right to expect as a member of society ; yet with all his good qualities he was not without 'detractors, but for a man to be without an enemy would imply his possession of nothing for which he could be envied.

It was a matter of course that Mr. Livingston’s family moved in and represented the best and most cultivated society of New York, and his mansion in Washington Square enjoyed a local renown for the historical and art collections of its owner, and the elegant and hospitable manner in which he and his wife entertained.

Those were days when private art galleries in the United States were few and small and connoisseurs were fewer still, and when in a literary sense at least, American society was necessarily less advanced than it is now, in common with the world at large, for, recent as the time is, steam navigation and the railway system were then in their infancy, and science and the arts have since

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wrought a revolution by the rapidity of their progress.

He had been a European traveler and improved his taste by association with the dilettantioi London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg, and so became a virtuoso of no mean order. A visit to the old world, which is now no more of a novelty for Arnericans than a trip up or down the Hudson River used to be, was then sufficiently rare to make the untraveled friends of returned voyagers at least solicitous to learn their impressions of the countries they had passed through, and to cause them to be regarded as authorities whenever a disputed question arose in relation to the sights they had seen, whether they really knew or remembered anything about the subject or not ; and it is safe to say that most of them did not, for how many there are who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and see nothing !

But a load of grief now oppressed the once buoyant spirits of Peter Livingston, and he cared no more for politics or the governorship of New Jersey, while his wife even more deplored the loss of their only son. “We shall never see the poor dear boy again, Peter,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “ I feel that he is gone forever in this world, but I hope we shall meet him again in heaven.”

Chapter IV

“He, he, he, he, he ! — Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ! — Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho ! ” roars that comical bird the laughing- jackass in the Australian bush, and, from my eyrie, I feel inclined to laugh with him on general principles, for laugh and the world laughs with you, and cry and you are left alone. Bdt I have a somewhat serious story to till, and therefore it becomes me to appear as solemn as the laughing jackass, who invariably looks as sober as a judge notwithstanding his rollicking strain. I have often seen and heard him, and the contrast between the owl-like gravity of his appearance and the mirthfulness of his utterance, as he eyed me from his perch in a gum tree, was always amusing.

Considering that the world is wide and a novelist has all the world before him, from which to pick and choose his characters and scenes, there may seem to be nothing very felicitous in my selection of a quiet Massachusetts village *as a scene of action, and poor country folks as dramatis personcB ; but it is sometimes refreshing to turn from the beaten paths of fashionable and city life to contemplate rural life among the lowly. Fifth Avenue, Newport, Saratoga, Bar Harbor and Lenox are undoubtedly good social observatories from which to study mankind of the fashionable type ; but fashion's votaries are no more interesting and no more endowed with nobility of nature, than the great army of the unfashionable. The proper study of mankind is man in all his aspects, and man in every walk of life i» often a very curious animal, while woman is everywhere a perpetual riddle, an everchanging chameleon.

On the principle that it is well to begin at the beginning, I will introduce my New England scenes with the birth of my hero, although I could just as easily introduce mystery by introducing him at the end of his career, and tracing him back through a perplexing labyrinth of dark passages and changing scenes. Like a good Christian,! prefer the straight and narrow path.

“So it’s a boy — eh? Thank the Lord! ” said a big horny-handed man — a sturdy fellow sprung from an oak and not from a willow — as he looked upon a very pink baby which was presented to him as his first-born, late one afternoon in September in the year 1827, when he came home from his work ; and taking it up gently, he held it before his eyes and surveyed it with paternal pride.

To talk to a baby was something new to him, but he instinctively took that way of expressing his feelings and making its better acquaintance ; and although the mother was in the same apartment, his attention for the moment was engrossed by the newcomer.

“Welcome, little stranger ! ” he began. “ Does he know his daddy ? I’ll bet he doesn’t. What does he shake his head at me for ? Is it too heavy for his little neck ? What a flat little nose he’s got ; what soft, silky hair; what tiny fat fists, full of dimples.” Then he paused and looked still more intently at the living object he held as if lost in admiration. “What, you want to fight me — eh.?'" And now you be going to cry, be you ? I guess you want to go to your mammy, — do you? You wouldn’t give shucks for me, I know : it’s your mammy you want ; not a cent you’d give for anybody else ? Well, here, go to her, go 1 ” and he placed the child gently on the bed beside its mother.

“Well, old woman, how be you?” he asked, addressing the latter in his rough but kindly way ; “ I hope you’ll soon be about as well as ever, and that this young fellow, with the help of God, ’ll live to be a comfort and a blessing to us both. Don’t answer me, Hepzy, if you ain’t strong enough. I’ll do what’s wanted about the house, and keep things straight, and Mrs. Bates here ’ll do the rest, won’t you, mam ? ” the person alluded to being an elderly widow, who was not only a neighbor but a doctress.

The wife answered him in a faint voice, and folded her infant to her breast.

“It’s a kind of nat’ral that these things should come along once in a while just this way,” he observed reflectively, turning to Mrs. Bates, as if for corroboration of the truth of his remark, “isn’t it ? ”

“I guess you’re about right, Zachary. Now that you’re a father I suppose you hardly know what to make of it, but you’ll get used to it. This has been the way with us all, and the way we come into the world is nearer the way we go out of it than anything else in natur’.”

This conversation took place in the small frame house — with its great square brick chimney — in which Zachary Fenwick and his wife had lived since their marriage about two years previously. He was a carpenter by trade, and he had built it himself, with another man to help him, on a half acre lot of land which he had bought and paid for out of his savings. The house consisted of two stories and four rooms — a kitchen and sitting-room on the ground floor, and two bedrooms up a short, narrow flight of stairs, and in the rear, covering the remainder of the lot, was a small vegetable garden much in need of hoeing.

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It was in the village of Sandlake in eastern Massachusetts, at the head of Cape Cod, and less than three miles from the town of Shoreham, a port of entry on Buzzard’s Bay, where from time to time a sloop, a schooner or a brig was built, but whose commerce was so small that the position of collector of customs there was almost a sinecure, and for a month or two every winter the harbor was closed by barriers of ice. A quiet, slow-going town was Shoreham, with a sandy main street, a muddy back street, and two or three sandy cross streets, and sandy roads stretching beyond and a couple of nail factories, and a short line of wharves where the few coasting vessels belonging to the place lay to discharge and take in their cargoes. There was a sprinkling of small farms hemmed in by fences and rude stone walls in all directions beyond the main street, and of rather quaint old houses among the more modern ones, and of old barns, wood-piles, and haystacks, and of brindled cows at pasture — some with bells round their necks — that looked up wisely with their large and eloquent eyes, at passers-by — who were few and far between — as if to see whether milking time had come.

The spiritual wants of Shoreham were supplied by a small Presbyterian church — which Protestants who were not Methodists attended regularly or irregularly as the case might be — a Methodist meeting-house — the preacher in which was also the preacher in the one at Sandlake — and a Roman Catholic chapel, the latter attended only by the Irish-born part of the population, all three being situated at safe distances from each other on the sandy back street referred to.

A road through the woods connected Shoreham with Sandlake, and in these solitary sylvan wastes

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sombre pines alternated with oaks, not tall and majestic trees, but such dwarfish specimens as might be expected to spring from such a sandy, unprolific soil, and whose fate — if disturbed at all — was to be felled and chopped at long intervals in the course of ages, for firewood — an inglorious destiny compared with that of being turned into ships to sail the sea, or employed in the building of the dwellings of men. Tangled underbrush grew here and there in patches among the trees — huckleberry and blackberry bushes showing themselves at times in the midst of scrub oaks — and russet pine needles strewed the ground.

Sandlake owed its name to a small lake, or large pond, in its vicinity, which, however, was merely one of a hundred ponds, small and large, within a circuit of ten miles. Indeed, Sandlake was covered with an eruption of ponds, all fish-bearing, and beautifully clear, fed by gushing springs, and picturesque enough to please the eye of an artist. It was just the -spot in which anglers would have taken delight, for trout were abundant, especially in the early summer and fall, in the running brooks, and the river, while white and red perch and pickerel were in the river and the ponds, and, at a later period, black bass were added to these by transportation — otherwise “stocking" — from Saratoga Lake through the public spirit of an ardent lover of the gentle art residing in the neighborhood.

The angler, not satisfied with the fishing in these inland waters, could repair to the bay two or three miles away, and there — above the oyster-beds by its clam-strewn shores — reap a harvest of bluefish, tautog, squiteeg and scup from the briny deep, while if he drove his boat-wagon to the other side of the cape — a distance of about ten miles — he could, if he chose, launch out, and, not far from

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where the lobster pots were set, catch codfish and large haddock. But the inhabitants were so averse to the trouble of catching them, that whoever wanted fish in this region, where it was so abundant, had to fish for himself.

The prosperity of Sandlake was, like that of Shoreham, mainly dependent on its manufacturing industry, which was represented by a single nail factory and rolling mill, for the soil was so sandy and poor as to be incapable of supporting the scanty population by farming. The village was laid out in streets, but it consisted almost entirely of workmen’s cottages, with here and there the more commodious and pretentious dwelling of a retired sea captain, who had finally, after a roving career, settled down on his native heath.

It is a peculiarity of seafaring men from Cape Cod to do this, and it is a touching tribute to their birthplace. Hyannis, at one point of the cape, is a town of retired sea-captains, and all the way down from Shoreham to Provincetown their neat and often handsome domiciles are numerous. So fittingly rest from their labors these thrifty old whalers — these bygone toilers of the sea.

Here in this part of eastern Massachusetts intellectual culture was and still is greatly neglected by all but a few of the people, some of whom have a quiet, semi-vacant, staring look, as if their mental faculties were lying partially dormant, and they needed something to rouse them to action. There is, of course, a corresponding lack among them of that refined society and ambition to improve themselves and their lot which are such prominent characteristics of the more progressive people of the western part of the same State, whose bright intelligence and almost metropolitan habitudes are conspicuous. A sort of Boston

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literary atmosphere pervades the pleasant towns of the Housatonic Valley and its neighborhood — Pittsfield and Lenox, Sheffield and Great Barrington in particular — while those nearer, but, beyond a certain distance, to the eastward of “the Hub,” are distinguished by its absence, and sesthetics are almost entirely lost sight of in the hum-drum routine of practical every-day life, and the further down Cape Cod we go the more strongly marked is the contrast between the two sections of the old Commonwealth.

Newspapers are almost as scarce as books among the great majority of the population of the Cape, very few subscribing for even the nearest local — generally far off — or a Boston weekly, much less a daily, or a New York journal, and the news of the world never reaches them unless it is important enough to be talked about by those who do read a paper, in which case they glean all their knowledge of it from casual remarks, or the talk at village stores. They are contented not to “get on,” but to live all their lives in the same house, following the occupations of their fathers on the same farm, or in the same place, or cultivating the same cranberry bog, excepting those who have a taste for the sea and who are enterprising enough to go cod or mackerel fishing from Provincetown, Yarmouth, Hyannis, or even Gloucester, which last, although not on Cape Cod, is a port from which the cod fishery is largely conducted. But in these days of rapid wear and tear in great cities it is soothing and perhaps refreshing to find people who enjoy vegetating, who are satisfied to lead quiet, unostentatious lives on small earnings and frugal fare, with few or no excitements or yearnings after pomps, vanities and wealth, and as little curiosity to know the fashions as the news. The houses and the towns, and the sandy roads, and the whole country, but for the railway, seem to look as they might have done a hundred years ago, and some of the inhabitants seem, too, to be wearing the same old clothes, for indifference to new ones and to the picturesque in costume are in keeping with their homely but kindly ways, and their well-tanned faces, dark as leather and prunella. As for money, they have so little of it that they are very properly careful of what they get, and a five-cent piece is equal in the eyes of most of them to a dollar as viewed by a New Yorker, and they know the virtue of Yankee thrift.