“Other
hands may grasp the field or forest,
Proud
proprietors in pomp may shine;
Thou
art wealthier,—all the world is thine.”
But look! the clouds are breaking. “Fair
weather cometh out of the north.” The
wind has blown away the mists; on the gilded spire
of John Street glimmers a beam of sunshine; and there
is the sky again, hard, blue, and cold in its eternal
purity, not a whit the worse for the storm.
In the beautiful present the past is no longer needed.
Reverently and gratefully let its volume be laid aside;
and when again the shadows of the outward world fall
upon the spirit, may I not lack a good angel to remind
me of its solace, even if he comes in the shape of
a Barrington beggar.
“Send for the
milingtary.”
Noah Claypole in Oliver
Twist.
What’s now in the wind? Sounds of distant
music float in at my window on this still October
air. Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones,
wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment,
hurrahs from the urchins on the crowded sidewalks.
Here come the citizen-soldiers, each martial foot
beating up the mud of yesterday’s storm with
the slow, regular, up-and-down movement of an old-fashioned
churn-dasher. Keeping time with the feet below,
some threescore of plumed heads bob solemnly beneath
me. Slant sunshine glitters on polished gun-barrels
and tinselled uniform. Gravely and soberly they
pass on, as if duly impressed with a sense of the
deep responsibility of their position as self-constituted
defenders of the world’s last hope,—the
United States of America, and possibly Texas.
They look out with honest, citizen faces under their
leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work
of the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at
this moment as innocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder
worthy tiller of the Tewksbury Hills, who sits quietly
in his wagon dispensing apples and turnips without
so much as giving a glance at the procession.
Probably there is not one of them who would hesitate
to divide his last tobacco-quid with his worst enemy.
Social, kind-hearted, psalm-singing, sermon-hearing,
Sabhath-keeping Christians; and yet, if we look at
the fact of the matter, these very men have been out
the whole afternoon of this beautiful day, under God’s
holy sunshine, as busily at work as Satan himself
could wish in learning how to butcher their fellow-creatures
and acquire the true scientific method of impaling
a forlorn Mexican on a bayonet, or of sinking a leaden
missile in the brain of some unfortunate Briton, urged
within its range by the double incentive of sixpence
per day in his pocket and the cat-o’-nine-tails
on his back!
