You went to California in 1852. You return home, for the first time, in 1872. Your home, in an eastern state, is Dozeville.
For the last twenty years, you have persisted in regarding Dozeville as still possessed of all the attractiveness it had for you in youth. Reflection told you it must have changed. People who had visited Dozeville and returned, bore back gloomy stories of its dullness and monotony. But you had not seen this. You could not realize it. There was, for you, but one Dozeville, young Dozeville, always young, because you saw it last in youth.
In day-dreams, in river and bank claims, picking and shovelling up to the middle in mud, slum, and water; by your cabin door, smoking the evening pipe; on the sterile ridges of Nevada, prospecting for “ledge,” you have, in imagination, many times visited Dozeville. You have shaken hands with all its old citizens; you have been, for a time, the newly-returned lion of the place. No matter that letter after letter told you how sires, and grandsires, and matrons, and blooming, bright-eyed schoolmates had dropped off; you would see yourself, on the first Sunday home at Dozeville, standing in the village church; and with what congregation could you fill it, save the one you had left?
The dream is realized; the continent is crossed; you stand bodily in Dozeville. None knows of your coming. It is night; the train has stopped at the depot. The railroad has been extended to Dozeville since you left; Dozevillians were talking of building this road when you were a boy. The “branch” is thirty miles in length. They were thirty years talking it over. Old Dozevillians had lived and died talking of it. At last, a brisk New York speculator came along, and in a few months the road was built.
There is a feeble effervescence about the Dozeville depot when the train stops. Compared with the roaring, hustling, crowding bustle of a wide-awake town, it is as the languid pop of a stale champagne bottle to the roar of a forty-two pounder. You get in a coach and are driven towards the family deuce. It is a cold, clear, winter’s night. You look-out; the wind is roaring through the leafless sycamores; every street has its old curve; every house is in its old place. You recognize them all, as though you had left but yesterday; yet a gloom seems to hang about them, for you realize, now, that you not to meet this or that old neighbor, whose daily coming and going from those gates seemed as unchangeable as the rising and setting of yonder moon. You have met your mother and sisters: you have almost been obliged to prove to them your identity! It was a surprise, but not exactly of the (quality you had hoped for. They were hardly prepared to see a middle-aged man, worn by toil and exposure. The last photograph you sent home, ten years ago, implied still some appearance of youth. And after a few days, sometimes after a few hours, you make a discovery; you are not acquainted with your own mother and sisters. Twenty years is too long an absence; there is a great gap, a whole lifetime of incident and event between you and them. You are bound to a thousand Californian sympathies and associations, of which they know nothing. You betray them every hour. You are continually proving, now that you are back at the old home, seated in the old arm-chair, and on the very carpet over which you tumbled in your babyhood, that three-fourths of your heart is back in the land of geysers, grizzlies, and gold. The mother involuntarily sighs. This is not the boy’s heart that left her twenty years ago; it is a strange man’s heart, full of hopes, fears, plans, and remembrances unknown to her. It is a heart recast, remodelled. It was a beardless boy who left her; from the cradle to that last parting she had known his whole life; but this is a bearded man who has returned, with dashes of gray in his hair, with a different manner and a different voice. He brings with him the volume of twenty years of life, but she cannot read it all at once. He shows, carelessly, a page here and there; but it is broken and fragmentary to her. Her eyes brighten when he speaks concerning some event of his childhood; there she is upon familiar ground; that seems a piece of her own son. Hers, during your entire absence, has been the quiet Life at Dozeville, not making half a dozen new acquaintances; you have made hundreds in the same time, and you bring them all home with you.
There is a younger sister in the house. She has held a dim recollection of you; all her life has she longed to see the mysterious brother in California, who is always writing home that he is on the eve of making a fortune. She has painted an ideal of him in mind, and often touched up the picture with many perfections. And this, you, are the reality! She will not, to herself, own any disappointment; but she did suppose him a differently appearing man. In a crowd, he is not the very last man she would have singled out for her brother; but he would not have been the first.
The morning after your arrival you behold Dozeville by daylight. It is very much the same as when you left; the woods, fences, and corner posts are all in their old places; the vacant lots, fenced in and not built upon when you left, are still fenced in and vacant. A few veteran trees upon the main street have disappeared. Six new houses in twenty years! One church has been moved from its former location. Consequent on the change, there was great dissatisfaction among the congregation; a part seceded, and joined another denomination. It was all the work of a new minister, who had a mania for moving churches wherever he was settled. This occurred seven years ago; you hear all about it before being in Dozeville three days. The unpleasantness has not lost its first lustre; they pickle old contentions in Dozeville, and so keep them ready for use in winter, when things are dull, and the branch road snowed up.
Dozeville and the surrounding territory seem to have shrunk. The day-journeys of your youth to Long Beach and Big Pond have dwindled to mere morning strolls. For years, in the mines, did you tramp two or three miles, over mountain and valley, to the nearest store, for your flour, beans, coffee, and pork, sometimes alter a hard day’s work. Dozeville miles are mere parlor promenades, compared to the rolling, rugged, steep miles from Mexican Flat to the Long Gulch store.
There are three hundred old acquaintances in Dozeville to be met and shaken hands with. All, after the first greetings, make the remark, “Growing old, I see, like the rest of us.” This, to one of thirty-five, from sexagenarians, septuagenarians, and octogenarians, is hard to bear. The next inquiry is, “How have you been all this time? “ This is a difficult question, also, to find an appropriate and applicable answer for, fifteen or twenty times a day. The long-wished-for welcome back to Dozeville proves a tedious operation. The apples wither in your grasp. Finally, you deem it advisable to restrict the number of these greetings to three per day. You court retirement, and avoid more the locality of the dozen stores, constituting the pulsating centre of Dozeville.
Let us read the Dozeville signs:
“William Barnes, Books and Stationery.” This is your first youthful playmate. Twenty years ago you left him, just launched in the Dozeville bookstore; he keeps it still. Then he was a ruddy-faced, lively young man, just married; now he has a shop-worn look of age. For twenty years he has stood behind that counter, selling primers, slates, slate pencils, worsted, and dolls, to little boys and girls. For twenty years he has trudged four times a day—breakfast, dinner, supper, and bedtime—to his dwelling-house, three hundred yards up the street. This, and a yearly trip to the city, for replenishing the stock of dolls, slates, pencils, and primers, has been his voyaging. What changes and hurry-skurryings have been yours during these twenty years! Up to Cariboo; down to Arizona; over the mountains to Nevada; looking on the rise and hustle of new mining towns; looking on them decayed, quiet, and deserted, years afterwards; living now in this community, now in that, composed of keen, sharp, clever men, gathered from the ends of the earth; witnessing their gradual dispersion and dropping away, some to new fields, some to the grave; forming associations, and collecting remembrances never to be forgotten; and through all this, William Barnes has clung to Dozeville, and Dozeville has clung him, and has kept stationary.
“Samuel Scoy, Attorney-at-law.” Another old playmate. Samuel Scoy was a very troublesome boy in the neighborhood. He does well to practice law now, for he was always breaking it in his youth. He was your partner in ringing door-bells, changing signs and robbing melon patches. He is now a sober man of family. You are-seated in his parlor. Your conversation with Samuel Scoy partakes, not of the easy, hilarious nature of former days; somehow you cannot find the scapegrace of old. The satan in him seems to have entirely died out. But the door opens, and an elegant woman enters. Sam Scoy—no, Samuel Scoy, Esq., attorney-at-law, introduces you to his eldest daughter. Why are you surprised? You might have known this. Sam Scoy was married before you left home. This is Samuel Scoy, attorney-at-law, with whiskers inclining to gray, and a manner rather stern and severe; and this is his daughter. You are old enough to be the father of that self-possessed, elegant young woman. You never thought of that before; yet were she to visit Coyote camp, you and half a dozen other middle-aged bachelors would be ordering new suits from San Francisco. What a steady old worker is Time! Tadpoles will grow to frogs; infants will develop into elegant women. And this is Miss Scoy, the daughter of Sam Scoy, whom old Tom Bangs once gathered up by the coat collar and the baggy portion of his pantaloons, and chucked off the end of Little Neck wharf, for tampering with his eel-pots; and you are nearly old enough to be a grandfather. Now you begin to feel your years.
You are invited to a Dozeville evening party. Being a single man, you are deemed eligible for this sort of thing. There are present a score of old schoolmates’ daughters, just like Miss Scoy. But Bill Barnes and Sam Scoy are not there. They renounced such parties years and years ago; they are old family men. They would as soon be caught playing marbles on the sidewalk. You prepare to go, and attire yourself with all the scrupulousness, the care, and the anxiety of youth. You go, and find yourself a worn, out of place, aged bovine, amid a crowd of calves. The young ladies. Misses Scoy and Barnes, charming olive-branches of your school-fellows, survey you curiously. They have often heard their parents speak of you. You were young and gay along with their sires. That period, by the glass in which they survey life, was ages and ago, coeval with the American Revolution, or the discovery of America, or the flood. You are an “old fellow.” You are introduced to one after another; but there is no affiliation, as in days of yore. The gap of years, crow’s-feet, and straggling gray hairs, lie between you and them. They listen for a period consistent with civility, to the cracked old love-song of this, their fathers’ friend, and then fly away to young Mr. Cock Sparrow, just returned from his first collegiate term. Cock Sparrow was not even an infant when you left. Now, you feel older. More apples have withered.
It is your first Sunday at Dozeville, and you sit once more in the family pew at the old church. But the congregation seems thin. You miss many a stately gray head. The elders are the young men of 1852. Still, the edifice is for you thickly peopled, but not with the living. When last you sat here, another and an older minister preached a farewell and admonitory sermon to that company of young men, bound for California. They sat together in that pew yonder. They expected to return in five years, at least, with much gold. All had sweethearts, and those sweethearts expected, at the expiration of those five years, to become wives. Most of them sat in the choir. Some of their daughters sing in the choir today. But the fathers of those young songsters never went to California, and forgot the pastor’s admonitory sermon, while they mined, and traded, and drank, and gambled, and fought, and talked a language half Mexican, half English, and ran for office, and died violent deaths, and were elected to magnificent shrievalties worth $20,000 per annum, and learned to bake their own bread, and cook their own beans, and wash their own clothes. They never “made their piles” in the dry diggings, and lost them in turning the bed of the river, or were “broke,” “strapped,” or “panned out” at faro; then made more piles, to be “broke,” “strapped,” or “panned out” at monte. They never went to Kern River, Gold Bluffs, Frazer, Colorado, Montana, or Nevada. They remained at home; and when those five years were up, they married the girls wearied of waiting for the California adventurers, but few of whom ever returned; and those who did, brought back sad tales of many who remained. Thomas Spring was a bartender; William Dimple, a mule driver; Jeremiah Goodboy, a confirmed gambler; and it was whispered that Isaiah Sweetbriar, the deacon’s son, had been hanged in the southern mines for stealing a mule. So the girls became Mrs. Barnes and Scoy, instead of Goodboy and Sweetbriar. All these memories come crowding thickly upon you, as you look on the pew where the young men bound for California sat twenty years ago. Are not Dozevillians impressed, also, by these remembrances, on coming here every Sunday? No; the change has been gradual for them. They are not looking now over the wide and freshly cut gap of twenty years. They are thinking of their dinners, of Monday’s washing, of the forthcoming festival for raising funds to repaint the steeple. What a lofty steeple that was once! Now the vane reaches up to the first limb of the right hand “Sentinel” at the Big Tree Grove.
Some of the Dozevillians hold but a dim remembrance of California’s grand opening day,—the rush and gold fever of 1849; yet vessels, twenty odd years ago, carrying away the pick of their young men, sailed directly from Dozeville to San Francisco. But other and greater events have since transpired. California, to many of these Dozevillians, is almost the California of thirty years ago—a land remote and unknown. Some of them scarcely know the existence of the Yosemite Valley or the Big Trees. You are disgusted. Worse than this; some of them have quite forgotten certain of the young men born and bred in Dozeville, long resident in California. You speak of Tom Travers, who was a “Dozeville boy.” Half of California knows Tom Travers. Here are men in Dozeville who shake their heads feebly at mention of Tom Travers. “Why, Uncle Abraham Travers’ son, next to the oldest, say you? Well, yes, ’pears if they do remember something of him.” And then they stop, for they are hardly certain whether they do or not. It is not strange. Year after year in Dozeville have they trotted around a little circus-ring of life; sitting about the same grocery stove in winter, sitting in the same chairs in front of that grocery in summer, droning over the weight of the last murdered hog, or the last strange face seen in the village; reviewing all the Dozeville tattle, until all other recollection is beaten and stamped out. The mental horizon of these Dozevillians has settled thickly just outside their little circus-ring of thought. No wonder that they should forget the well-known Thomas Travers.
You call on old Mr. Scott. He was old to you when a boy. He lives in and on books. He has travelled all over the world in books. He knows California well by books. He speaks of the Yosemite Valley, the Ca-lav-erous Grove of Big Trees, and the San Joe-a-kin River. You venture to correct his pronunciation, but he has his own laws for pronouncing California proper names, and will not stay corrected by a snip of thirty-five. There is another trial for you. Dick Harvey, the pioneer resident of Whiskey Flat, named by and for himself, has done little in California for the last twenty years, save dig, drink, dance and play poker. Dick’s parents reside in Dozeville. Dick was one of that pewful of young men, westward bound, who listened to the admonitory sermon. Old Mr. Harvey, Dick’s father, calls on you, that he may learn something of his son; he has not heard directly from him for fifteen years. Dick long since renounced writing home, and with it all idea of ever-coming home. Unfortunately, you know too much of Dick. “What is he doing?” asks old Mr. Harvey. You believe he is mining, and doing tolerably well. (Dick has been “doing” every one he could “make a raise” from, for years and years. His best suit is a gray shirt and a pair of blue jean overalls. He never-comes to camp without making a disturbance. He was once offered $50 to quit the neighborhood and betake himself to other parts, but refused to leave under $100.) With all this fresh in your mind, you sit before old Mr. Harvey, who longs to hear something comforting from his lost and never-to-be-found son. You wish that he would go, because it is hard work, in answering his inquiries, to equivocate, and squirm, and sneak, and dodge about the truth, which is not to be told at all times about Dick.
One certain opinion possesses all Dozeville. It is that any man in good health, who has spent years in the land of gold, ought to have a fortune. Vainly you reason, and attempt some explanation on this point. Vainly you talk concerning the risks of mining; of the months idly spent on Pacific Flat, waiting for water; of the years employed in baring the river’s bed at drizzly Canon; of the race, so expensively cut through a solid granite ledge; of the flume at Split Bar, costing thousands, only to be swept down stream by the fall freshets; of the gravel, which did not prospect a cent to the cart load when you did get into the bed of the river; of the tunnel it took years to bore through the rim-rock of Table Mountain; of the high prices paid for water, which took all the life out of your profits in the hydraulic claim at Coyote Creek; of the capital you put into the Columbia quartz-lead, whose rock assayed a cent per pound, and whose actual returns fell a little short of a cent per ton; of the fruitless scrambles to Krazer River, to Colorado; of the unsuccessful hunt for the Comstock extension in Nevada. All this is useless. Dozevillians have it firmly rooted in their brains, that when a man goes to California, it is his duty to get rich. That he does not, is an indication of a loose screw in his moral machinery. You cannot alter their minds. They have been locked in this conviction for twenty years, and the wards are too old and rusty to be turned back, without danger of breaking to pieces.
You remain in your dear old Dozeville a couple of months. Would you stay there for life? Will you call it your home now?
No. no, no! There is another land, nearer the setting sun, which claims you for its own. You are longing now for San Francisco, with its afternoon gales, and mosaic of nationality; for the sight of the Contra Costa hills, flecked in the springtime with their thousand, shades of green, and cloud, and sunshine; for Tamalpais at eve, with avalanches of white fog rolling down its sides; for the great inland plains, walled westward by the dimly blue Coast Range, eastward by the far-away snow-tipped Sierras; for the dark green chaparral, and the scent of pine and balsam in the foothills, with their rich fruitage and heavy laden vines. Dozeville is clear, but it is not galvanic enough for you. You require earthquakes, grizzlies, and periodical gold fevers. Dozeville is pleasant, calm, and quiet, but it seems the calm and quiet of a well kept church-yard. It abounds overmuch with widows, carefully husbanding the property of deceased partners. It is outflanked by too many rheumatic aunts, with lame backs and Dutch clocks. Dozeville is dear, because it was your boyhood’s home. But the lively Dozeville of your youth no longer exists. The realized Dozeville of 1872 has passed away forever.
My French teacher from East Haddam, on the banks of the Connecticut River, taught me French some thirty odd years ago. He was a good, honest man, and the only reason he was a fraud in certain respects was, that he did not know he was one. He made me commit some words and sentences to memory, and I repeated these to him.
In those days this was called “ learning,” though I never could see how mere words committed to memory out of a book, taught a man or a woman to ride a horse, or sail a boat, or shoot well, or swim well, or manage a primary meeting, or even plead a case in plain, clear, common-sense fashion before a jury, or do anything else in which brains, clear-sight, decision, courage, or energy were required.
However, he taught me something called French in America. It was never recognized for French in Paris. It wouldn’t wash over there. I tried it first on a French cabman. He didn’t understand a word I said, until I showed him printed French in my guide-book, that I had been trying on him. He insisted on driving me to one place, when I wanted to go to another. I wanted to go to a certain hotel mentioned in my guide-book. I showed him the name of this hotel, as printed in that book. The cabman shook his head. He talked a good deal of his French, and in a very decided manner. I talked a good deal of my French, in a very decided manner. As we did not understand each other, the result finally arrived at by either party was not clear. Finally I jumped into his cab. He drove off. I wondered to myself, as my bones rattled over the stones, where Connecticut French was carrying me. He took me to a mean-looking house, in a mean-looking street. It was not the place mentioned in my guide-book. I again showed the cabman the former name and number in the book, he shook his head, and poured on me torrents of Gallic unintelligibility. I was obstinate. He drove at last to the street and house I desired, and pointed triumphantly with his whip to the number of the building I had pointed out. It was not a hotel at all. It had been a hotel, but was changed into an immense clothing store. I understood then what the cabman had been trying to tell me. Mine was an old guide-book, behind the times and changes of the times. However, I got out with my two carpet-bags and set out down the street, I knew not whither. I was ashamed of my ignorance. I pretended, however, so far as manner went, that it was all right; that I knew where I was going; that I knew what I wanted. And so I did. I wanted to get out of sight and sound of that cabman. He looked at me as I walked off, and grinned. I felt his grin all through me. It made my flesh creep, crawl, and quiver. I knew that he knew that I was trying to play a part, and he knew that I knew that he knew it. I turned the first corner I came to, walked along the street a short distance, turned back, peeped round the corner, and saw with relief that the fiend and his cab had gone. I felt better, breathed easier, and perspired freer. The first trial was over. I was alone in Paris; alone, homeless and languageless, with my two carpet-bags. In traveling, it is well to carry two bags. One can be taken, and the other left full of bricks at your hotel, as security for your board bill, in case your remittances don’t come. In foreign lands, the American is never cashless for any other cause than that of his remittances from home not coming, which is always strictly true. They do not come in cases, because they never started to come, nor had anything or anybody to start them, either.
I found a roof to shelter me at last, with a very kind lady, who pitied me because I should return to that barbarous United States, in her geographical estimation but a cab-drive from Brazil; who caught me trying to eat my first snails raw; who taught me how to cook them, by setting the shells on the coals, and so allowing the butter with which they close the shell, to run down and cook the reptile within, and which were to me equally tasteless, either raw or cooked. As an edible, I cannot indorse the snail, and think him better employed in his old occupation as the symbol of laziness, and am not sure he’s not lazy as made out, and think he knows his own business best, anyway.
I started out on my first morning in Paris, not knowing, not caring, where I went. I had neither guide nor guide-book. I didn’t want so much to see what others had seen, as what they hadn’t seen. I was hungry. I found a restaurant. I found, on entering, that the meal was served on an upper floor. I didn’t want then to go upstairs, but had no French at hand which would explain why I didn’t want to go upstairs. So I felt compelled to go upstairs, to avoid seeming suspicious. I found a long table, and some forty Frenchmen seated thereat at their half-past-ten breakfast. There was no written bill of fare. I had relied on the written bill of fare, because I could point to the things on the paper I would eat. The waiter gabbled over the dishes they served. I could not understand a word. I was speechless. Forty Frenchmen were looking at me. I said at last in despair, “Pommes de terre—potatoes.” The waiter talked and talked. I know now he was asking me how I would have them served. In France potatoes are served variously. How could I name the style I wanted? I said simply, “potatoes.”
Potatoes—potatoes. Yet I realized the absurdity of ordering a breakfast of potatoes only, when there were so many other things to eat. I knew there were other good things, because I saw them and smelled them to the right and left on my neighbors’ plates, but I knew not their French names. I dared not point to my neighbor’s plate, and say. “I want some of that.” The waiter brought potatoes. He brought them first plain boiled, in their jackets; then he brought them fried; then he brought them stewed. Then a suspicion of a horrible truth commenced to dawn upon me. It had been assumed that I would have a potato breakfast, and of all possible styles; and potatoes are cooked in many fashions in France. I don’t know how many dishes of potatoes they did bring. I did know that I was an object of curiosity and amusement to my foreign friends present.
I ate and perspired and was ashamed, and wished I was out of it, and still the potatoes kept coming. Somebody called for a dish which sounded like marengo. I counseled to myself, that if I called for “marengo” it might stop the avalanche of potatoes, as well as the quiet ridicule of my neighbors. Potatoes and ridicule together are appetizing. I didn’t know what marengo would result in, whether fish, flesh, or fowl. It was a sort of gastronomical lottery. The real name is maringot.
I don’t know now exactly what that maringot was. I don’t want to know. If I must eat my peck of extraneous matter, ere I shuffle off my body this expensive suit of mortality, which is always singing out for something to put on it or in it, why should I insist on a chemical analysis of all I eat? But the maringot was good, better than the monotony of ever-changing and diversified courses of potatoes. I made it last a long time, because I wanted to put off, as long as possible, my next sure exposure of ignorance, when the waiter should come and gabble. It was a painful breakfast. It lasted nearly an hour. It gave me no good. It did give me the dyspepsia; any mental strain or misery will when you’re eating. Anxiety is much harder to digest than fat pork. And all this came of learning French by the eye instead of the ear, of a Gaul from East Haddam, Conn.
I went to a bath-house. The attendant young woman asked me whether I would have a bath simple or otherwise. I said simple. I was shown my bath-room, She turned on the water, and left me without soap or towels. Then I understood, as regards a bath, what simplicity meant in France. I rung for soap and towels. The girl brought me programmes of each. There were four kinds of soap, and five kinds of towels—prices extra. In Europe everything is extra.
There were head towels, ear towels, a sheet to put on the bottom of the bath-tub, and other towels. I chose a thing called a p-e-i-g-n-o-i-r, which happened, of all the list, to be no towel at all. It turned out to be a hot baked linen night-gown or wrap, with sleeves, and open in front. When buttoned up, it was very becoming to me. It was hot, just as if it had come from the oven. On coming from my bath, I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it on and sat in it. It was comfortable, a little too hot at first in places, but soon cooled off. I had to get my money’s worth out of it somehow. Its real use is to sit in it while you call the attendant to turn off the hot water and turn on the cold.
After taking that bath I went to the station-house. I went there on a tour of investigation, and because I was obliged to go there. Some people seek station-houses as some people seek greatness. Other people have them thrust upon them, as they have greatness. I had this station-house thrust upon me, or rather I was thrust inside this station-house.
Naturally, you wish to know why. Your curiosity is excited. I shall let it remain excited. I shall not tell you, because so long as your curiosity remains excited, you are on the qui vive. That’s French. It means there’s something more in this world you want to find out, and that, consequently, you have a purpose in life. That’s a good thing to have. If I told you what caused my arrest in Paris, and detention for a night in the station-house, your curiosity would be satisfied, and you might no longer have a purpose in life, or something to live for.
The non-committal and unsatisfactory reason I shall give for becoming a temporary, if not an honored guest in the Parisian station is, that I disturbed temporarily the peace of the French Republic. The French Republic then existed on a slender foundation. It didn’t take much to shake its foundation. I was the “Not much.”
My cell was furnished with a floor, a ceiling, and a bench. It was as simple and primitive as Eve’s costume before the fall. In front of it was a French soldier with a gun. I do not know whether it was loaded. I know I was “loaded,” though, when I went in that cell.
Being “loaded,” I was taken in the morning before a judge of some sort, examined, and discharged. Not knowing the language, I don’t know what he found when he examined and discharged me. I should like to have examined him, but couldn’t, as he did not speak Connecticut French. This trial was nothing as compared with the one which followed immediately. I had then to appear before a lady I had previously married, and account satisfactorily, or otherwise, for my staying out all night. I accounted otherwise, and was “found guilty.” But it was by no means all over. In France, it appears they discharge you first, and try you afterward. At least so they did with me.
I don’t know where I was tried. I don’t know when, I don’t know who tried me. I don’t care; I know only that, two months after my release, a State official left a long paper at my lodgings, informing me of the circumstance, and the amount of the fine and costs. When first I looked at the paper and column of figures, I felt as if the balance of my earthly life might be spent in making money enough to pay this fine. On closer examination, I discovered, that while the column of figures was imposing as to length, it was very weak as to actual amount. On reducing it to American currency, I found the entire sum to be $4.20. Justice is cheap in France, even if it is rather slow in transit.
I was then worth $4.20, and desired to pay the fine immediately. I so desired, not so much from honorable and high-minded motives, as to keep the costs from swelling up. If they swelled, I feared in time they might amount to $5, and “bust” me. I never could find anybody who felt authorized to take my fine. I went to three or four different mayors’ offices. In Paris and around it there’s a mayor for every ward, who has a court and a court-house, and marries people and does other work. I went to the Boulogne mayor’s office. They would not take my fine. They told me to go to Sevres. The Sevres mayor said he was not entitled to take the fine, and told me to go somewhere else. I went somewhere else. It was always the same story.
You see, in France, nobody will take money unless they feel authorized to do so. In this particular, the French are wonderfully like us here in New York and the surrounding towns. I began then to fear that I might spend the remainder of my days in hunting an authority authorized to receive this fine, because if I didn’t pay it I might never be able to quit Paris, for the reason, that within forty-eight hours after you enter that city, your name, age, occupation, size, weight, complexion, are taken down by an officer appointed for that purpose, and you are known and booked and registered, so that you can be nabbed if you’re wanted.
I went then to my landlord for advice. He said to me, “ Soyez tranquille.” That’s French. It means, “ Keep quiet, keep shady. Stop chinning. Mind your own business, and let the French Republic take care of its own. If you won’t run after the French government, it won’t run after you.” I did so. I soye’d tranquille. I left Paris undisturbed. I left, a defaulter to the French Republic in the sum of $4.20; and I know not now to what dimensions it may have grown, at the rate of three cents for serving repeated summons. It may amount to $6. I am liable to rearrest for this cause the moment I re-enter Paris.
I took French lessons in Paris of M. Charles and family. We met by appointment two evenings a week, and hurled murdered French and English alternately at each other. M. Charles was a scholar, and well versed in English grammar. But of the idiom of our Language he knew nothing. He used English words with reference entirely to their signification in French, just as I did French words relative to their meaning in English. He wished once to ask me to accompany the family to a picnic in the country. “Sir,” said he (he always called me “Sir Mulford,” for he said he must have something to answer for the invariable French prefix of monsieur), “Sir, will you to go for me to dine upon the herbs?”
Grass diet, I thought. Does he take me for that ancient vegetarian, Nebuchadnezzar? He corrected himself instantly. “No,” said he. “What a fool I am! I mean will you travel with me, to eat up in the trees?” He takes me for a giraffe now, I thought. But M. Charles once more corrected himself. Said he: “ No, no, I am a foolish to ask you to dine with me like one leetle bird.” You may see, at this rate, it took us some time to travel over a small amount of territory; and you will recollect, also, that when you learn your French mostly from translation and grammar, you run the risk of making just such mistakes in conversing with a Frenchman.
M. Charles, who lived over the foundations of the old Bastile, was a true French gentleman, pure in thought, faithful to a bed-ridden mother. Loving, faithful and considerate to his wife, who, in her long black blouse, was his daily assistant in business (photography), and a more loving and pleasant family I never met, huddled, as eight of them were, in four small rooms. I met others like him. Don’t believe all you hear about French immorality. Don’t accept implicitly, an impression of that nation, current among us for so many generations, given out and coming from a people on the other side of the channel, among whom, on a Saturday night, you may find thousands of gin palaces full of boozing, drunken men and women; among whom in London’s east end, the drunken woman is an every-day sight, as common as the wife-beating husband. I am neither defending nor abusing. The French have sins. So have the English. So have I. So, possibly, have you. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak—especially on an empty stomach, when the lord of creation has to wait ten-minutes overtime for his dinner, and while so doing finds his wife’s milliner’s bill three times as much as he expected, when he has been fruitlessly running that morning all over town, to borrow money to meet a bank obligation, and just then the bungling servant girl smashes the new soup tureen.
I will now for a moment become dogmatic and oracular. If you want really to learn any foreign language, get its pronunciation in your ear first, and before anything else. Get one, two, three words of it, even before you know their meaning. Get the swing of their sound. Learn it as you really learned you own native tongue, when you were two, three, or four years old. If you are with people who talk correct English, you will talk correct English. If you are much with people who talk correct French, you will in time talk correct French. The ear must be educated first, and before the eye. If you learn to translate much French, and you are not hearing it spoken, you are teaching only your eye, and your mental ear is talking most of that French, or German, or Italian to yourself, with the English accent; and for all talking purposes, with Frenchman, German or Italian, you are worse off than if you had never so studied at all; for as regards pronunciation, you must unlearn nearly all your errors of accent so acquired, before you can commence squarely, and then when you go to France, you will not be a red-handed murderer of their language. Of course in France, no matter how great your blunders, they will compliment you on your growing proficiency in their language, providing you pay your bills regularly. For the French are a very polite people, and I like them for so being. Politeness, even if only on the surface, is, I think, more agreeable than boorishness on the surface. One of my French landladies told me how they lived, during the siege of Paris, on horse and donkey meat. She explained or symbolized donkey to me, by raising her large hands to her ears, and working them donkey fashion. I understood. I tumbled to her vernacular racket. Then she complimented me on my rapid proficiency in French, and I have no doubt afterward remarked to her cronies, that the American was at home when a brother donkey was raised.
After visiting the tomb of the Emperor Napoleon, I told a French lady, with appropriate seriousness, that I had visited the emperor’s tambour, which meant the emperor’s drum. She tried to be polite, but failed. She laughed in my face. I justified her in so doing, and I believe that to this day, one Frenchwoman believes that one American believes that the emperor carried the bass drum. Friends, it’s a hazardous business handling a foreign tongue, when you’re all at sea among a foreign people, because you don’t always know what you’ve said when you’ve said it, and its embarrassing, when you think you’ve complimented a lady on her looks, to find, possibly, that you’ve called her an aged chicken, or words to that effect.
If you want to learn French, pitch in and talk it when you have a chance to talk it with the French. Mangle it. Mutilate it. Murder it. You must blunder at first in learning anything. You tumbled down ten thousand times in learning to walk. A great many of us are afraid to learn anything new, because we must blunder and show awkwardness in learning. What’s the use of learning French? What’s the use of learning anything new when our bodies are forty, fifty, sixty years old. This: To keep young. You know, of course, that your body is only an instrument; that your mind is the unseen power that uses it; that if you are always in a fright, a fret, a worry, your body, your face, soon has the lines and marks of that state of mind carved on it.
What’s the use, then, of learning French, of learning new games, plays, diversions, arts? This: To keep young, fresh, vigorous in mind. To keep so in mind, and your body will follow suit. Half the vigor and elasticity of youth comes because it’s the season for learning new things. Put a man at a desk, make him a mere copyist, a machine, with nothing else to do or think of, no new plans or enterprises, and he ages more in ten years than others do in thirty. When your mind stops growing, and becomes a treadmill, the body soon commences to decay.
It is thinking the same old things from year to year, that makes men and women old.
When a boy or a girl, man or woman stops learning new things, they commence to fossilize. There are old fogies at thirty as well as sixty—of both sexes. There is a science or faculty of Learning to learn. The more things you learn to do, whether with the hands or the head, the more power you gather to do—anything. When people live up to this idea,—and more do live up to it now than ever before,—there will be no old age of senility, of lethargy, of giving up all interest in life, of yawning, and singing out “Heigh-ho!” every five-minutes, as if life was a burden, and you were tired of waiting for the undertaker to come and bury you.
LIFE BY LAND AND BY SEA
One June morning, when I was a boy, Captain Eben Latham came to our house, and the first gossip he unloaded was, that “them stories about finding gold in Californy was all true.” It was “wash day” and our folks and some of the neighbors were gathered in the “wash house” while the colored help soused her fat black arms in the suds of the wash-tub.
That was the first report I heard from California. Old Eben had been a man of the sea; was once captured by a pirate, and when he told the story, which he did once a week, he concluded by rolling up his trousers and showing the bullet-scars he had received.
California then was but a blotch of yellow on the schoolboy’s map of 1847. It was associated only with hides, tallow, and Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast.” It was thought of principally in connection with long-horned savage cattle, lassoes, and Mexicans. Very near this in general vacancy and mystery was the entire region west of the Rocky Mountains. What was known as the Indian Territory covered an area now occupied by half a dozen prosperous States. Texas was then the Mecca of adventurers and people who found it advisable to leave home suddenly. The phrase in those days, “Gone to Texas” had a meaning almost equivalent to “Gone to the——” Then California took its place.
The report slumbered during the summer in our village, but in the fall it commenced kindling and by winter it was ablaze. The companies commenced forming. It was not entirely a strange land to some of our people.
Ours was a whaling village. Two-thirds of the male population were bred to the sea. Every boy knew the ropes of a ship as soon if not sooner than he did his multiplication table. Ours was a “travelled” community. They went nearer the North and South Poles than most people of their time and Behring Straits, the Kamschatkan coast, the sea of Japan, Rio Janeiro, Valparaiso, the Sandwich Islands, the Azores and the names of many other remote localities were words in every one’s mouth, and words, too, which we were familiar with from childhood. Many of our whalers had touched at San Francisco and Monterey. There had recently been a great break down in the whale fishery. Whale ships for sale were plentiful. Most of them were bought to carry the “’49” rush of merchandise and men to California.
By November, 1848, California was the talk of the village, as it was all that time of the whole country. The great gold fever raged all winter.
All the old retired whaling captains wanted to go, and most of them did go. All the spruce young men of the place wanted to go. Companies were-formed, and there was much serious drawing up of constitutions and by-laws for their regulation. In most cases the avowed object of the companies, as set forth in these documents, was “Mining and trading with the Indians.” Great profit was expected to be gotten out of the California Indian. He was expected to give stores of gold and furs in exchange for gilt watches, brass chains, beads, and glass marbles. The companies bought safes, in which to keep their gold, and also strange and complex gold-washing machines, of which numerous patterns suddenly sprang up, invented by Yankees who never saw and never were to see a gold-mine. Curious ideas were-entertained relative to California. The Sacramento River was reported as abounding in alligators. Colored prints represented the adventurer pursued by these reptiles. The general opinion was that it was a fearfully hot country and full of snakes.
Of the companies formed in our vicinity, some had more standing and weight than others, and membership in them was eagerly sought for. An idea prevailed that when this moral weight and respectability was launched on the shores of California it would entail fortune on all belonging to the organization. People with the lightning glance and divination of golden anticipation, saw themselves already in the mines hauling over chunks of ore and returning home weighed down with them. Five years was the longest period any one expected to stay. Five years at most was to be given to rifling California of her treasures, and then that country was to be thrown aside like a used-up newspaper and the rich adventurers would spend the remainder of their days in wealth, peace, and prosperity at their Eastern homes. No one talked then of going out “to build up the glorious State of California.” No one then ever took any pride in the thought that he might be called a “Californian.’ So they went.