Part 2 (2/2)

Let it be remembered that at this time Philadelphia, and even the world, were as yet to a great degree in the Middle Ages as compared to the present day. We had few steamboats, and no railroads, or telephones, or percussion-caps, or a tremendous press, or Darwinism, or friction matches. Even the introduction of ice-cream, and stone coal as fuel, and grates was within the memory of our elders. Apropos of matches, the use of tinderbox and brimstone matches was universal; bold young men had tinder pistols; but the wood fire was generally kept under ashes all night, and I can well remember how our negro servants, when it had gone out, were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of coals from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it was handed over the garden fence, the recipient standing on our pump handle and the donor on hers.

I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam, and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats.

I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort--this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown.

I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the princ.i.p.al people signed a pet.i.tion against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads; it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same.

The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on them. As Was.h.i.+ngton Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, ”Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land.” Trees grew abundantly in rows in almost every street--one before every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at twilight the _pea-ak_ of the night-hawk could be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the place where our city stands; there were in Coaquannoc, or the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, which claims to be the oldest gentleman's club in Anglo-Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a ”fish-house punch” as delicious as that of London civic banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now; they have all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has its merry banquets in its ancient home; for, as the French say, ”_Chacun peche a sa maniere_.” In graveyards lone or over gardens green glittered of summer nights millions of fireflies; there was the scent of magnolias, roses, pinks, and honeysuckles by every house; for Philadelphians have always had a pa.s.sion for flowers, and there never was a Quaker, much less a Quakeress, who has not studied botany, and wandered in Bartram's Garden and culled blue gentians in the early fall, or lilies wild in Wissahickon's shade. There still remains a very beautiful relic of this olden time in the old Swedes Church, which every stranger should visit.

It is a quaint structure of more than two hundred years, and in its large churchyard (which is not, like Karamsin's graves, ”deserted and drear,”

but charming and garden-like) one can imagine himself in rural England.

In the spring of the year there was joyous activity on the Delaware, even in town; for, as the song hath it--

”De fis.h.i.+n' time hab come at last, De winter all am gone and past;”

and there was the casting of immense seines and the catching of myriads of shad, the typical fish or emblem of the Quaker Philadelphian, because in the profile outline of the shad people professed to discern the form according to which the Quaker coat was cut. With the shad were many herring, and now and then a desperate giant of a sturgeon, who in his struggles would give those concerned enough to do. Then the yells of the black fishermen, the flapping of the h.o.r.n.y knife-backed prey--often by the flas.h.i.+ng of a night-fire--formed a picture worthy of Rembrandt.

Apropos of these sturgeon, the fresh caviare or roe (which has been p.r.o.nounced at St. Petersburg to surpa.s.s the Russian) was always thrown away, as was often the case with sweetbreads, which were rarely eaten.

But if the caviare or roe was really in those days ”caviare to the general” mult.i.tude, the _nose_ of the fish was not, it being greatly coveted by us small boys wherewith to make a ball for ”s.h.i.+nny,” which for some occult reason was preferred to any other. Old people of my acquaintance could remember when seals had been killed at Cape May below the city, and how on one or two occasions a bewildered whale of no small dimensions had found its way to Burlington, some miles above.

Now and then there would be found in the bay below the city a tremendous, square-shaped, hideous, unnatural piscatorial monster, known as a devil- fish, or briefly devil. It was a legend of my youth that two preachers or ministers of the Presbyterian faith once went fis.h.i.+ng in those waters, and having cast out a stout line, fastened to the mast, for shark, were amazed at finding themselves all at once careering through the waves at terrible speed, being dragged by one of the diabolical ”monsters of the roaring deep” above mentioned. Whereupon a friend, who was in the boat, burst out laughing. And being asked, ”Wherefore this unrestrained hilarity?” replied, ”Is it not enough to make a man laugh to see the Devil running away with two clergymen?”

There was a very excellent and extensive museum of Matters and Things in General, founded by an ancient artist named Peale, who was the head-central charm and delight of all young Philadelphia in those days, and where, when we had been good all the week, we were allowed to repair on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. And here I may say by the way, that miscellaneous collections of ”curiosities,” oddities, and relics are far more attractive to children, and stimulate in them far more interest and inquisitiveness and desire for general information, than do the best scientific collections, where everything is ranked and numbered, and wherein even an Etruscan tiara or a Viking's sword loses much of its charm when placed simply as a ”specimen” in a row of others of the kind.

I am not arguing here in the least against scientific or properly arranged archaeologic collections, but to declare the truth that for _children_ museums of the despised curiosities are far more attractive and infinitely more useful.

I owe so very much myself to the old Peale's Museum; it served to stimulate to such a remarkable degree my interest in antiquities and my singular pa.s.sion for miscellaneous information, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I cannot pa.s.s it by without a tribute to its memory.

How often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth--how small did that of a great elephant seem beside it--and recalled the Indian legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys--one shaving another--what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us! No; _that_ was the museum for us, and the time will come when there will be such collections made expressly for the young.

”Stuffed monkey” was a common by-word, by the way, for a conceited fellow. Therefore the _Louisville Journal_, speaking of a rival sheet, said: ”Reader, if you will go into the Louisville Museum, you will see two stuffed monkeys reading the _Courier_. And if you will then go into the office of the _Louisville Courier_, you may see two living stuffed monkeys editing the same.” The beautiful sallies of this kind which appeared in these two newspapers for years would make a lively volume.

Never shall I forget one evening alone in that Museum. I had come with Jacob Pierce's school, and strayed off alone into some far-away and fascinating nook, forgetful of friends and time. All the rest had departed homewards, and I sought to find them. The dark evening shades were casting sombre tones in the galleries--I was a very little boy of seven or eight--and the stuffed lions and bears and wolves seemed looming or glooming into mysterious life; the varnished sharks and hideous s.h.i.+ny crocodiles had a light of awful intelligence in their eyes; the gigantic anaconda had long awaited me; the grim hyaena marked me for his own; even deer and doves seemed uncanny and goblined. At this long interval of sixty years, I can recall the details of that walk, and every object which impressively half-appalled me, and how what had been a museum had become a chamber of horrors, yet not without a wild and awful charm. Of course I lost my way in the shades, and was beginning to speculate on having to pa.s.s a night among the monsters, and how much there would be left for my friends to mourn over in the morning, when--Eureka!

Thalatta!--I beheld the gate of entrance and exit, and made my latter as joyously as ever did the souls who were played out of Inferno by the old reprobate of the Roman tale.

Since that adventure I never mentioned it to a living soul till now, and yet there is not an event of my life so vividly impressed on my memory.

My father took me very rarely to the theatre; but my Quaker school-mates had never seen the inside of such places at all, and therefore listened greedily to what I could tell them of the sights. One of the wonders of my youth was the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play called ”The Englishman in Siam.” It was indeed very curious, and it is described as such in works on natural history. And I saw Edwin Forrest (whom I learned to know in later years) in ”Metamora,” and f.a.n.n.y Kemble in ”Beatrice,” and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, to every place of amus.e.m.e.nt whenever he pleased, and talked familiarly of actors, some of whom he actually knew, and their lives, in a manner which awoke in me awe and a feeling as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we grew older, Boker and I, from reading ”Don Quixote” and Scott, used to sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and marvellous romances. It was in the year when it first appeared that I read (in the _New Monthly_) and got quite by heart the rhyming tale of ”Sir Rupert the Fearless,” a tale of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham.

I can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in after years it inspired (allied to Goethe's _Wa.s.sermadchen_) my ballad of _De Maiden mit Nodings on_, which has, as I now write, been very recently parodied and pictured by _Punch_, March 18, 1893. My mother had taught me to get poetry by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had imbibed, so to speak, an immense quant.i.ty; for, as in opium-eating, those who begin by effort end by taking in with ease.

There was something else so very characteristic of old Philadelphia that I will not pa.s.s it by. In the fall of the year the reed-bird, which is quite as good as the ortolan of Italy, and very much like it (I prefer the reed-bird), came in large flocks to the marshes and sh.o.r.es of the Delaware and Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with firearms of every faculty and form, followed by dogs of every degree of badness, in all kinds of boats, among which the _bateau_ of boards predominated, intermingled with an occasional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many, however, crept on foot along the sh.o.r.e, and this could be seen below the Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock after flock of once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell in flurried flight, there would be such a banging, cracking, and barking as to suggest a South American revolution aided by blood-hounds. That somebody in the _melee_ now and then got a charge of shot in his face, or that angry parties in dispute over a bird sometimes blazed away at one another and fought _a l'outrance_ in every way, ”goes without saying.” Truly they were inspiriting sights, and kept up the martial valour, aided by frequent firemen's fights, which made Philadelphians so indomitable in the Rebellion, when, to the amazement of everybody, our Quaker city manifested a genius or love for hard fighting never surpa.s.sed by mortals.

There were, of course, some odd episodes among the infantry or gunners on foot, and one of these was so well described by my brother Henry in a poem, that I venture to give it place.

REED-BIRDING.

Two men and a bull-dog ugly, Two guns and a terrier lame; They'd better stick out in the marsh there, And set themselves up for game.

But no; I mark by the c.o.c.king Of that red-haired Paddy's eye, He's been ”reeding” too much for you, sir, Any such game to try.

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