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+Project Gutenberg's Observations of a Retired Veteran, by Henry C. Tinsley
+
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+Title: Observations of a Retired Veteran
+
+Author: Henry C. Tinsley
+
+Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #
+]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on January 20, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Phil McLaury, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN
+
+By HENRY C. TINSLEY
+
+("P. Boyzy")
+
+
+
+
+Introduction.
+
+The essays contained in this little book comprise a selection from
+many of a like character which were contributed at intervals through
+a series of years to the columns of the VINDICATOR, a weekly newspaper
+of Staunton, Virginia, by its editor, the late Henry C. Tinsley, under
+the pen-name of "P. Boyzy." The perusal of them in their present form
+will serve to confirm the opinion of those who read them as they then
+appeared, that they possess in marked degree the unusual quality of
+a winning humor coupled with the pathos that is often humor's most
+exquisite accompaniment; and that they combine a shrewd if homely wit
+with a profound knowledge of the workings of the human heart.
+
+In the more strenuous life of political journalism, to which Mr. Tinsley
+devoted his energies from the time when he laid down his arms at the
+close of the War between the States to the beginning of his last
+lingering illness, these "Observations" were for him but an inadequate
+outlet for the expression of the courageous and hopeful philosophy
+which was always his distinguishing characteristic. To cover his pain
+with a jest,--to preach without cant the gospel of love,--to do the
+best that he could do according to the lights before him--these generous
+motives and high purposes are to be read between the lines by those
+who knew him as legibly as if they shone out in words upon the printed
+page.
+
+During his lifetime he was frequently asked to gather into book form
+these little essays which had delighted so many of the readers of his
+newspaper; but to all such requests he smilingly turned a deaf ear.
+His innate modesty esteemed their value at far below their real worth.
+They are given here just as they were written by him and printed in
+the VINDICATOR, without change or correction other than of typography.
+It goes without saying that if their author might have revised them
+with a view to their publication in a permanent form, there would
+probably have been many changes; but it is believed that as they came
+warm from heart and brain, they will serve to reproduce him most vividly
+for those who knew him best and to illustrate once more for them in
+all its dignity and sweetness the simple courage of his life.
+
+It is for such friends that this book is published.
+
+                                              ARMISTEAD C. GORDON.
+Staunton, Virginia.
+October, 1904.
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
+
+
+Henry C. Tinsley was born April 7, 1834, in Richmond, Virginia, and
+lived on the corner of Franklin and Governor streets, in his father's
+residence, which was opposite the old WHIG office. His father was a
+native of Ireland and died at the early age of 28, the day after the
+birth of his only daughter, Ella, who was educated at the Virginia
+Female Institute in Staunton, while presided over by the Rev. Dr.
+Phillips. She and his mother have since died, and it is not believed
+that he has at this time any living relative.
+
+Mr. Tinsley's education was obtained at the old Richmond Academy of
+that city, a classical school. In his 18th year he began his
+journalistic career as a reporter for the Richmond DISPATCH, in which
+profession of his choice he soon attracted attention.
+
+The war coming on, he enlisted in the Richmond Howitzers and served
+during the whole war as a faithful and brave soldier.
+
+After the war he returned to the Richmond DISPATCH and soon became one
+of the most valued men upon its working corps.
+
+Early in the '70's he became by purchase, half owner and editor of the
+Staunton VINDICATOR, being associated with the late W. H. H. Lynn until
+1876 when Mr. Lynn sold his interest to Capt T. C. Morton. The paper
+was then for eight years conducted under the style of Tinsley & Morton.
+After this Capt. Morton retired from the paper and his eldest son, A.
+S. Morton, became in turn half owner, the firm continuing as before
+until 1895 when it was dissolved, Mr. R. S. Turk purchasing the office
+and good will of the VINDICATOR and consolidating it with the SPECTATOR,
+since which time it has been known as the Staunton SPECTATOR and
+VINDICATOR, Mr. Tinsley retiring from the paper of which he had been
+chief editor for twenty-four years.
+
+Mr. Tinsley died in Staunton, after a long and painful illness, August
+21, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN I
+
+
+I saw the Sweet Harbinger of Spring last week. A violet? No. A swallow?
+No. A bud? No. Ah! no; put up your encyclopedia of Spring information
+and I'll tell you. It was the annual boy with his shoes off for the
+first time since the warm weather. He stepped gingerly; he stood still
+longer than usual; he hoisted the bottom of his foot for inspection
+often; he let a cat go by, though a rock lay in a yard of him; he
+picked out a velvety place on the tan-bark sidewalk before he put his
+feet firmly down and squared himself on them to give the two-finger
+whistle for his chum, which is the terror to the nervous. Much of the
+boy had gone out of him. He moved with the motion and sloth of decrepit
+age. Next week you will not know him for the same boy. His feet will
+be hardened, he will dance over the macadam mixed streets with the
+callosity of a stone-crusher, and the fugacious cat will be lucky if
+it gets its tail through the fence in time. The mourner's bench humility
+of today will have changed to the noisy glee of the hardened criminal.
+His baseball practice will pervade the middle of every street, and his
+large and assorted stock of general trouble and annoyance will be
+displayed under all our noses with the request that we will call and
+examine before purchasing elsewhere. I cannot understand how any man
+can be indifferent to the blessings of the church, when he remembers
+that one of them is the Sunday School--invented by the Fathers as an
+ingenious and effective place of torment for this Boy. Through the
+week he is intolerable, but the blessed Sabbath is to him a day of
+retribution. It is the awful day when his ears are washed and touseled
+about; when his eyes are punched out by the towelled but unsparing
+hand of a Christian mother; when his shoes are put back on him for a
+day, and when, with a neck encircled by a collar starched to maddening
+stiffness, and with a pocket handkerchief the consistency of pasteboard,
+he is sent to the place of punishment. I have read many beautiful poems
+about the sweet quiet of the Sabbath, but few of the poets have given
+the right solution of it. It is because all over the civilized world
+on that day, millions of Boys have been captured and corraled in Sunday
+schools. The very church bells understand it, and in the early hours
+ring out triumphantly, "Got-'em-in-here! Got-'em-in-here!"
+
+       *        *        *        *        *
+Of course, as we move on through this alternately delightful and
+disagreeable world, we must be brought face to face with bores of many
+varieties. Setting aside that pest, the egotist, for whom there can
+be no excuse, I should like to mention the man or woman who conceives
+that the way to talk about books is to deal with the acts and characters
+instead of what they say. It seems to me that it is just one of the
+modes, if I may call it that, of talking literature that is little
+better than no mode at all. It is a rare thing to meet with even the
+most modern work--I am speaking of fiction--by a fairly successful
+writer, that does not contain some utterance to arouse thought and
+challenge us to mental debate. The acts must of necessity be commonplace
+from familiarity, for man has behaved himself for a million of years
+from the same motives and only varied his manner with the advancing
+material circumstances which surrounded him. But his thoughts are not
+obliged to be commonplace. The thoughts of men are marching in ever
+moving procession towards the Light, and as each one emerges from the
+darkness it catches on its forehead a ray which transforms it. It is
+these that are to be discussed when we talk about books, and not the
+mere acts of the actors therein. What, as a matter of conversation,
+is the suicide of Dido, compared with the fine lines in which she so
+touchingly summarizes what her life would have been had the false
+AEneas never seen her? I lately heard two exceptionally intelligent
+young people discussing the novel--Put Yourself in His Place--which
+though a very second rate work was written with a very first rate
+purpose. Their criticism and discussion was confined wholly to the
+action of the characters and they seemed to have thought the purpose
+of no account compared with the plot and love-making. And it is not
+young people alone who are given to this skimming process. I have known
+people who really deserved the title of readers, to find their chief
+if not their only criticism in the decision of how well this or that
+character was drawn, and what surprises the plot contained; while as
+to the thoughts, good or bad, old or novel, the critics seemed to be
+oblivious. If we expect really to improve ourselves by books--still
+I am speaking of fiction--we should try to remember and afterwards
+discuss the thoughts they contained and which we found in the mouths
+of the characters or in the comments of the author. There has never
+been in my recollection a time when the fiction of the day was more
+completely abreast of the advancing thought of the world, or in which
+it teemed with more new and practical views logically connected with
+passing events and new situations. It is when, closing the book, we
+take away with us those seeds and subject them to the attrition of
+discussion, which wears off the pollen, that we arrive at, possibly,
+a new and valuable thought which may deserve the name of knowledge.
+
+       *        *        *        *        *
+
+"It seems to me your observations are nothing but opinions," said Mrs.
+Boyzy to me the other evening. She called it o-pin-ions. Women have
+an art of expressing contempt by syllabic emphasis that men never
+acquire. It is their failure to accomplish this that induces men to
+substitute profanity. Nevertheless, as that excellent woman remarked,
+the things I say in these papers are for the most part opinions. But
+what of that; what moves the world but opinions--what has moved it up
+to where it is now, but opinions? Where would the world be if it were
+not for new opinions; where would men be? Suppose every public man
+clung to precedents in public affairs; every politician pinned his
+faith on his party policy, and every preacher planted himself on
+orthodoxy--all with a determination to go no further. The world would
+come to a standstill. There would be no progress. Opinions are the
+lever that works the world. Precedents become mouldy, politicians
+change with the times, and creeds advance with the public thought.
+What do we care what a man thought two hundred years ago, when we have
+what a man thinks to-day? What is to us the policy of a political party
+when the moss has commenced to grow over it. Who would attempt to
+enforce in this day the medieval creeds and religious practices and
+church government? What are we put here for, if it is not to learn,
+every year, every day, every hour if we can. And of what use is all
+this learning if we are not to advance by means of it? And how could
+we move a step if we did not tell our neighbor what we think we have
+learned--that is, tell him our opinions. I say to you, Madam (and I
+say it the more freely that she is out of hearing), that opinions rule
+the world, and while it may be possible that mine do not rule my own
+household, it impairs their value no more than imprisonment and
+persecution did those of other philosophers in the past. An opinion
+is a valuable thing--in its information if it is true, in the mental
+exercise it gives in combating it, if it is error, and in any event
+as a feather that indicates which way the wind is blowing--in what
+direction the blind mole of man's finite judgment is groping around
+its prison in search of an outlet to the infinite. And that is true,
+Madam, whether you call them opinions, or o-pin-ions!
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN II
+
+
+You have been to the Conference? So have I, but it was twelve years
+ago. Still I shall never forget a scene I witnessed there. It was in
+the same Methodist church that this one is being held in. For days I
+had been interested in a plain, homely-faced minister, considerably
+past his half century, who came in evidently with great pain on
+crutches. The town bell striking the hour was not more punctual than
+the sound of his crutches. His hands were distorted by rheumatism, his
+limbs twisted, and his face had a patient look as of one who had
+suffered for a hundred years. His face was rough, but somewhere about
+its expression there was a graciousness that attracted my attention.
+One other expression in it struck me; it was the air of a man who had
+finished his work. Not that he hadn't frequent consultations with the
+ministers who approached him, or showed any lack of interest in what
+was going on, but just a look as if he was doing anything for the last
+time. Once he got up and made an official report of some kind to the
+Bishop. As he closed it, his eyes burned with an intense anxiety and
+he opened his lips as if to say something. But it was left unsaid, and
+as he painfully resumed his seat the old look returned. As the close
+of the Conference approached, I saw him several times with his head
+bent over the back of the pew. It was on an evening very near the
+close. The rays of the westering March sun shone through the windows
+with a cold, cheerless light. His name was called. He raised his head.
+His face was flushed. He struggled to his feet and with his crutches
+hobbled around the aisle to the front of the pulpit, where he stood,
+balancing himself on his crutches. And then the story came out. It was
+told to those in the seats rather than to the Bishop. He had entered
+the ministry young and had hoped to give his whole life to God. But
+of late years disease had overtaken him. He had struggled against it
+and tried to do his duty through great suffering, but lately he had
+found that he could be of no further use and he asked--here he paused
+and turned from the pews to the Bishop. It seemed that he was about
+to say something that he had striven for years not to say. His eyes
+filled and in a thick voice he said: "I ask to be put on the
+superannuated list." And then he sat down on the nearest seat and wept
+like a child. What it would have broken the heart of other men to have
+staid in, it broke his heart to leave. I viewed him with intense
+curiosity. Five or six of his brother ministers came up one by one,
+and silently took hold of his twisted hands. I don't think they said
+a word; I am sure he did not. He did not look at them, for his head
+was buried on one of his cheap, home-made crutches, and from his pocket
+he had taken a worn and faded handkerchief, with which he was checking
+his tears. After he had gotten back to his pew, some ministers here
+and there over the audience got up and testified to what the man had
+been and what work he had done. Some of them had seen him, crippled
+as he was and suffering the agony of rheumatism, driving miles through
+the falling snow to fill an appointment to preach. Somehow it seemed
+to me a eulogy of the dead--and it was. When I saw him the next morning
+he had the air of a man who had met a great loss, instead of a man who
+had just parted with a life of labor and physical anguish, but there
+was still the last time look about him. And it was the last time. In
+six months from that time he was dead. What shall we say when such a
+life of self-sacrifice passes on to the stars? What can we say, except
+to speculate on the boundless possibilities that eternity must contain
+for such a life. What must such a little minute-hand life as sixty
+years, develop into on the dial plate of eternity, when it is begun
+as this man's was. Such a man as this, it seems to me, must at some
+time or other have touched the very hem of the Master's garment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I saw in your paper this week an expression which continues to run
+through my head. It is an advertisement of a poultryman for poultry,
+in which he says with rough frankness, "Old roosters not wanted."
+Whether it is good policy in him, while attempting to secure tender
+and succulent birds for the clerical stomach, to affront that venerable
+class of fowls upon which we sinners are to live long after the clergy
+have left, I will not say. I do not believe, however, that it will go
+unresented or unpunished. I believe that many an old rooster will so
+beplume himself and take on such an extra strut, that he will at last
+succeed in forcing himself as a young bird between the teeth of our
+clerical visitors. This will be a sweet revenge. But with this I have
+nothing to do; what I have now to do with, is the fact that over every
+department of life I see the same announcement. In society where the
+sweet amenities of life are monopolized by the young, the aged beau
+is met by the flaming inscription, "Old roosters not wanted." In
+politics we hear the cry that the favorite candidate is a representative
+of the "Young Democracy" or "Young Republicans," as the case may be,
+and that, except at the ballot-box, "Old roosters are not wanted." If
+a congregation loses its pastor and commences looking around for a
+successor, the first thing it does is to print in large letters across
+the pulpit, "Old roosters not wanted." Across the door of every new
+enterprise is the same inscription. What, I desire to know, is to
+become of us old roosters? Not fit for broiling, too tough for roasting,
+too old for congressmen, for preachers--what are you going to do with
+us? Ah, the very question shows where we stand. It used to be a few
+years ago, what we were going to do with you, but the tables have been
+turned and now it seems to me that the cemetery gate is the only place
+not decorated with the legend, "Old roosters not wanted." There they
+are more than welcome; indeed, if it were not for their patronage that
+institution would do an amount of business very unsatisfactory to its
+stockholders. Having then this refuge, brethren, let us take courage!
+Let us take consolation in the thought that we have gotten over so
+much of the rough road over which those following us have yet to travel,
+and that having once passed that portal we shall have reached perfect
+peace. Let us find a spiteful satisfaction in the fact that long after
+we have entered the silent gates, the young roosters will still have
+to rise early and crow hungrily for corn, still will have to skirmish
+with other roosters for bread, and the highest pole in the roost, and
+that as they show up in the race of life, they will have to read, in
+their turn, the fatal sign-board along the track--"Old roosters not
+wanted."
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN III
+
+
+I have often heard people lament ill-health because, they say, sickness
+loses to a man friends. On the contrary, I hold that it brings him
+many new and unexpected ones. Let me see--December 15,--July; seven
+months; that was long enough to make the experiment, wasn't it? Well,
+let me look over some of the new friends I have made lying all this
+time in bed. The first new friend that I made, and one who had evidently
+seen better days, was a Tomato Can, that ever present denizen of the
+back-yard. On his head he jauntily flew a cocked hat bearing a damaged
+new picture of himself evidently taken in youth, and across his red
+waistcoat, in blue letters, was the word "Trophy." There he stood, day
+after day, leaning jauntily against the doubtful company of a whiskey
+barrel hoop, telling me the time of day, as if that was his only
+business in life. If the sun's light lay across his red stomach it was
+9 o'clock, if it glistened on his cocked hat it was noon, and if it
+soberly lighted up the cherry red tomato on his side, it was 6 o'clock.
+"Sir," he seemed to say, "I have not been always as you see me. I have
+seen the day when I roosted on the highest shelf in the family grocery,
+and when I was dusted daily by well dressed clerks--if the employer
+was around. I was for many years the tenant of a French plate glass
+window and I have been carried by the soft hand of Beauty, sir, and
+laid gently in the market-basket. I do not boast, but Beauty itself
+has carried me through the streets in its arm. I have seen great larks,
+sir. I have travelled that Main Street at the rate of a mile a minute
+at the tail of valuable dogs, and at the midnight hour I have bounced
+into the midst of cat caucuses with great sport. I have been the friend
+of Man, sir, but what has Man done for me. He has left me here in this
+miserable back-yard, company of barrel-hoops and brick-bats and bottles.
+He has--" But here the next door neighbor's servant threw a bucket of
+slop-water on my friend and cut off his complaint. His red vest peeled
+down a little further, his cocked hat depressed further over his face,
+and a potato skin stopped his mouth. How true it is that no person can
+be in such disreputable circumstances that he has not the remembrance
+of better days to soothe him, and like the Tomato Can, ever find true
+comfort in the top-shelf on which he long ago may have roosted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But as a new friend, the Street must always take the first place with
+a sick man. How new everything in the Street becomes to the man who
+views it from a sick bed! You would think he had never seen it before.
+Nor has he. No man in health lies and sees the Street wake up in the
+morning. Nor does the man in health, walking about the Street, see how
+prettily it goes to sleep. The lengthening shadows make it drowsy for
+a little while, but as evening comes it makes a great stir. It sends
+hundreds of hustling people along its walks hurrying home. It lights
+up hundreds of windows and shop fronts and looks as much as to say,
+"I think I will make a night of it. I've sent all the children to bed
+and now I'll have a time of it." But the steady old Street on which
+I live gives up its dissipated idea early, turns off light after light,
+and soon the lonely sidewalks are without a passenger. The Street does
+one thing for the sick man you wouldn't expect; it arouses a spirit
+of rebellion that is astonishing. Resignation is a beautiful virtue,
+but it chiefly exists on side streets and out of town. The man who is
+sick on a main street and professes to be resigned is a hypocrite. My
+friend, the Street, presents to me Thompson. What do I say? "Ah,
+Thompson, take the blessing of a sick man?" Not a bit of it. I say,
+what right has Thompson to be walking along attending to business and
+possibly taking surreptitious cooling drinks, while I am doomed to
+staring out of the window and drinking beef tea? But Thompson don't
+drink? Oh, well, what do I care if he don't! I threw that in about
+drinks to make it as hard on him as possible. It makes a good point
+on a man just to suggest it. There; there goes Robinson going to church
+with a new suit on, and a wife hanging on his arm! What has he done
+to deserve that sort of luck? Why, isn't he up here flat of his
+back--and there they all go. Resigned? Ah, no, the sick are not
+resigned. It is only the dead who are resigned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A perfectly new friend is the Sky. How often does one in health look
+at the Sky save to see about the weather? But once a year. But in
+sickness it is an ever present friend. You watch for day breaks in it,
+and for the fading stars, and find an exciting interest in which of
+two stars will go out first, something like you were betting on a race.
+And then the figures in the blue field all day long; for it is not at
+evening and night alone that they appear. What have I not seen march
+across my window in the procession--a castle, a fan, a swan, a kerosene
+can, the king of spades, a cream jug, troops of angels, in short,
+anything that an idle imagination wants to conjure up. And when it
+dresses for the evening, in what glorious costumes does it appear. But
+all that is garish compared with the Sky upon which the night has
+settled down. That is the sort of Sky to bring calmness and content.
+The quiet lighting up of the stars, with no step ladders and no hurried
+match scratching of the police; the ease with which the moon climbs
+up her route, no puffing, no machinery clanking; the deepening of the
+blue to better show the celestial sparks that glow on it--and the
+knowledge that all this will go on without failure and without your
+having to turn over in bed to work some lever to help it move, makes
+the coming of night a comfort to the sick. Who thinks of the stars in
+health? No one. We think of supper, of the theatre, of the band concert,
+of the church, of the lecture--but who thinks of the stars they are
+walking under. It is given to the sick to remember them, and in return
+they remember the sick. Whoever else fails us the Stars are there.
+Steady, faithful, unchanging, always waiting. Shall I remember them
+after this? Ah, I can't tell, I am like the rest and will soon forget
+them in the busy street. But to-night while all is still, I look with
+reverence and curiosity on our future homes, my newest friends, the
+Stars.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another new friend is the News Gatherer. I give you my word that one
+sick man gets more news--political, gossip, scandal--than any twenty
+well ones. You see he is always there and easy to find. Human nature
+can't keep news long and it always hunts up the man that is easy to
+find and unloads on him. There is a sense of security in talking to
+a man flat of his back--he can't get out to repeat it. Many things
+combine to make the News Gatherer the sick man's friend. He is helpless,
+weak and can't talk back. That secures a good listener. He is sick and
+wants to be entertained. That makes him an eager listener. And finally
+being confined and unable to get out he is presumably an empty vessel
+waiting to be filled. And with this inviting prospect the News Gatherer
+moves his machine up to the side of the bed and monotonously pumps,
+pumps, pumps. It is well for that kindly hearted man that the patient
+is not only stretched out on his bed, but also unarmed. Ah! how many
+men earn sudden death and yet in the mystery of Providence escape it!
+I have often wondered at the persistency with which habit has fixed
+on women the exclusive reputation of gossipers. For I say unto you,
+brethren, that Woman, who with empty head and silly tongue toys with
+her neighbor's character unto its destruction, is not more full of
+gossip than her brother Man, who knows better and yet cannot stand the
+temptation of a sick man and a safe chance to chatter about matters
+with which he has no business. I am afraid like the idea of original
+sin we all have just a little spice of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A relief to this friend, and a friend I never saw before, was my Moth.
+I think he came into the world about February, having been deceived
+by the hot room into the belief that Spring had come. Many days after,
+when snow could be seen on the ground, I have seen him feebly climbing
+up the window pane and looking out with the air of one whose whole
+life had been a dreadful mistake. The first time I saw him was one
+night sitting in the light and heat of the lamp, his grey wing shining
+like silver and his brown little body giving a soft, velvety light,
+his face grave with owl-like stupidity, and two big black eyes. After
+the snow passed away he seemed to get settled, and at night would sit
+on a match box staring for hours at the lamp, as one who should say,
+"Well, I understand the medicine vials, and the blisters, and the
+inkstand, and all that, but this great bright thing is quite beyond
+me." He never once thought of flying into it to see how it was done,
+and I thought of writing to the Bug Professor at the Smithsonian that
+here was a species of moth that light did not attract. But what will
+not bad company do? After the warm weather came and the windows were
+open, what should come in but other moths, of little character I think,
+who commenced pranks of humming and buzzing and butting the lamp. My
+Moth watched it with deep interest for two nights, but on the second
+night, I saw from his rubbing his nose with his paws that he was getting
+excited. Sure enough on the third night he remarked, "Well, I guess
+I'll try a little of that myself," and hopping back to the mucilage
+bottle for a start he took a header at the lamp. Except that his silver
+wings trembled, and his velvet legs drew up, he never moved again. I
+had lost a good friend whose innocent ramblings I had watched for hours
+and whose antics, when he tasted the ink or got a sniff of the ammonia,
+had much amused me. I don't know that he died too early. He had learned
+a bad habit, and for a man or a Bug who has learned a bad habit, I am
+not certain that death can come too soon. He died thinking he knew
+everything worth knowing, for I have no doubt that through the panes
+of my window and across my narrow street he thought he had seen the
+World. Just as we larger, but not wiser animals think that after gazing
+through our little theological panes, we have seen clear through
+Eternity, and into the mind of the Father. After all, my Moth was not
+worse off than the rest of us. We have all our little streets which
+we call the World, and our little pane of glass through which we think
+we see all that is worth seeing, and we need but a soupcon of bad
+example to make us blindly dash into the worst of follies. Let us never
+forget that, more than for this Moth, there is for us an unseen Hand
+that after these follies picks us up and starts us on our course again,
+with a pitying touch, and that, more than this, when the last twilight
+of evening shall gather around us, and the hands of those we love can
+be no longer seen, there shall appear to us through the gray mist of
+Death, that bright and gentle Hand, and with it the face of a Father
+and a Friend.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN IV
+
+
+I must tell you of the Major's Last Love. I had thought I would leave
+it in my note book, but a letter, which I can only read through a mist
+of tears, has changed my mind.
+
+Strolling out as the sun was setting, on the first evening of my stay
+at a village hotel last summer, I saw two shadows cast across the
+street; one so very long, and one so very short, as to look ridiculous.
+They were the shadows of the Major and his Last Love. The Major,
+hatless, was swinging musingly the torn straw hat of his love, while
+the little three-year-old lady herself was struggling along with the
+Major's hat piled with flowers and toys and teacups on her return from
+having "a party" on the river edge. The little feet stumbled, the party
+crockery flew, and the two shadows melted in one as the prattling owner
+and the tall Major knelt together to gather them up. That was my first
+sight of the Major and his love.
+
+I cannot say that any of us knew, or came to know, all about the Major;
+always excepting that we loved him. He was tall, straight, and
+frost-haired. His regular features were of that sort that might have
+belonged to a man of forty-five or a man of sixty, and he was a
+changeable sort of a person who one day would look one age and the
+next another. Of his means, we knew absolutely nothing. It was said
+that his wealth had been carried away by the civil war and that he was
+living on a small but sufficient remainder, which was doubtless true.
+Over his gray moustache there was a blue eye that sometimes looked as
+it might belong to a boy of eighteen and sometimes had the weary look
+of a man long acquainted with grief. His skin was as soft as a woman's
+and often suffused with a faint blush which would have better become
+a woman. He was the very spirit of gentleness to both men and women,
+and it seemed hard to realize, looking at him, that, as we heard
+afterwards, this man had been wounded and captured in a battle and set
+apart to be executed in reprisal. We did not learn that from him, for
+he never talked about himself, but from an old army comrade who met
+him and was the only man that we boarders ever saw the Major familiar
+with. Not that he was distant, but after a gentle smile of salutation
+or recognition he never seemed anxious to converse, and like most men,
+silence gave him an air of mystery. There were many solutions of the
+mystery by the lady boarders, particularly by Mrs. Pointlace, a restless
+little widow, who was never at peace unless she was in love with
+somebody or somebody was in love with her. Her theory was that the
+Major had suffered, at some period or other, a great shock to his
+affections--a supposition that failed to find confirmation in the
+regular appetite and the eccentric neatness of the person who had
+received the shock. Whether the lady's theory was correct or not, none
+of us had an opportunity to know, for we would as soon have expected
+to see the Major come into the dining-room without his coat as to have
+heard him speak of his personal affairs. The widow was a new boarder;
+if she had been there as long as the rest of us she would have known
+that whatever he might have suffered in the past, the Major's heart
+was now full to the brim of affection for a female, and that female
+not longer than his arm.
+
+She couldn't have been over three years old, and was the only girl
+among four boys, running up like stair steps. I can see her now under
+a broad summer hat that would have covered the top of a barrel. The
+crown had given away and her little blue eyes would be oftener looking
+out through the gap than from under the brim. Her stockings were never
+both tied up at the same time, except when her mother turned her over,
+fresh dressed, in the morning to the Major, or when she put on her
+"tose" in the evening to walk with him. How the Major had gotten such
+possession of her, I think even her father and mother hardly knew, but
+certain it was that she had become his personal property. They went
+the rounds of the town stores every day, and took long walks from which
+the little lady always came back tired and asleep in the arms of the
+"Mady," as she called him. I suppose sometimes the Major had carried
+her for miles, and he would mount the steps of the hotel veranda in
+those sultry days, mopping his face wet from fatigue. And then he would
+unload his pockets of all the shells and rocks and sticks and strings
+that the little one had gathered in the waking part of her walk, and
+put them away for her carefully. One day the usual load had a marked
+variety in the shape of a large watermelon and three kittens. In
+managing all of which the little lady was assisting by bringing one
+kitten tail foremost under each arm. Much time was spent by the little
+tyrant in directing the Major as to where each article of that
+remarkable load was to go. If she had become, the Major's property,
+I think I may say that the Major had also become her property. I think
+that on rainy days from his vest to his heels, the Major's clothing
+was marked with little muddy foot prints; that his hat was used as a
+carryall for all manner of toys and sweetmeats; that his watch was
+demanded at all hours of the day to see if it was "bekfus time" yet,
+and that his cane served as an Arab steed for races around the porch
+without limit. The "Mady" and all he had were the undisturbed possession
+of the little one.
+
+It was the close of the summer that, one morning, the little one did
+not appear. She was sick of fever, they said. At breakfast, the Major
+looked disturbed. But in a hotel we are not apt to think seriously of
+the troubles of our neighbors, even if they are next door to us, and
+few of us thought to ask about the baby. One night coming in late from
+the theatre, I saw a large rocking chair at the end of the floor on
+which the baby slept, and I was astonished on looking closer to see
+the Major in it. His gentle face had a worn and weary look on it, and
+the waiter told me next morning that the Major had walked the hall
+pretty much all night for several nights, and that he had carried the
+chair there for him to rest in. The baby, the waiter said, was not
+likely to live. As I went up after breakfast, I stopped to inquire,
+and the little one's mother, whose eyes were red with weeping, said
+I could come in, adding, "It would hardly make any difference, now."
+There sat the Major by the bed, with all manner of toys and dolls
+spread out on the coverlet, before the sick child's eyes. Like a man's
+idea of doing something, he had bought them. Poor fellow! it was all
+he could think of to do. The little blue eyes were changed and the
+thin little hands were restless. They would pick out a toy and lay it
+aside, and then the dear old Major would arrange them freshly, so as
+to attract her attention. I think she was delirious, for she asked
+that her "tose" be given her, that she might talk with the "Mady." And
+then the poor fellow would look up to the mother, and say: "I think
+she can to-morrow, madam; I think she can to-morrow, don't you?"
+
+I think he hardly knew what he said it for, except with the vague idea
+of giving somebody hope. Anyhow, his voice seemed to arouse the little
+one, and she drew her little thin hand over his face, and said, in an
+inquiring tone, "Mady?" I think the world was floating out of sight
+and she wasn't certain. The Major turned, with a look of alarm, to the
+mother at the window, and said, "Oh, do you think--" But whatever he
+was going to ask was answered before he asked it, for the mother leaned
+her head against the window pane and sobbed. He looked around the room
+quickly, as one who would look for help from somewhere, he knew not
+where, and then slipping out of his chair to his knees by the bedside,
+took the child's hand and laid his head on the coverlet. It seemed to
+stop the fast going spirit for a moment, and the other little thin
+hand wandered to the gray head and nestled there, and once more the
+weak voice said "Mady." As I softly closed the door, I could hear the
+poor old Major, between his sobs, repeating over and over, "Oh, my
+little one! my little one!"
+
+The next night several of us went to the Ladies' Parlor to set up with
+baby. At the head of the little coffin sat the Major. He was in full
+evening dress--none of us had seen him in evening dress before--and
+in his lapel was a bouquet of white flowers, evidently arranged by
+himself. He looked years older; indeed, about all there was left of
+his old look was the patient gentleness that had won us all. In the
+coffin, in the little hand, was another bouquet of white flowers, as
+awkwardly arranged as the one the Major wore. We did not need to be
+told where it came from. Always shy, he was even more so that night,
+from the unaccustomed duty he seemed struggling to perform. As the
+boarders dropped in, to look at the child, he seemed glad of the
+opportunity to go up again and look into the coffin, but he never went
+by himself. He had nothing to say, but if spoken to, replied with his
+never-failing sweetness of manner. Often during that night he was out
+for water, but those of us who saw his wet lashes, knew what took him
+out. Towards morning a lady watcher found lying on the centre table
+a broken doll which had belonged to the little one and which she had
+named after the "Mady." The Major went out quickly and came back no
+more.
+
+At the funeral next day it looked to us, though the parents of the
+little one were there, as if the chief mourner was not, for the Major
+was absent. Indeed, he was not at the hotel during the day, and it was
+late in the evening before he came home. He still had the dress suit
+on, but the bouquet was gone. It needed no one tell us on what little
+mound of earth it had been left. I think I have said that the Major
+was not easy to be intimate with, and to that fact I ascribe none of
+us trying to console his grief by reference to his little love. He
+resumed his every day suit--he wore his full dress suit for several
+days, I think, as a sort of silent expression of mourning--and resumed
+his old seat in the corner of the veranda, where he and the little one
+had such gay larks and which was their headquarters when they came
+from walk. He was the same gentle, sweet old man, except if anything
+a shade gentler to all and especially to children. When I came away
+he walked to the depot with me, and as we walked, told me he expected
+always to live where--well, where he lived now. That was the nearest
+he ever came to speaking of what filled his heart. I can see him now,
+as the cars started, waving his hand and his blue eyes lighted up.
+
+And now to the letter. It is just a few days since I got it. In writing
+to one of my hotel acquaintances I had sent my regards to the old
+Major, and asked if he had kept his promise to live there always. The
+answer shocked me. He had not kept his promise, the writer said, but
+he had gone to live in a another and Better Country. His health of
+late had not been strong, and a few weeks ago it had become clear that
+he was fast going. His last walk was out to the resting place of his
+little love. As he grew worse and weaker he asked that the rector be
+sent for. When he came, the Major told him that he had long ago placed
+his hopes on the Heavenly Father and tried to live as a child of His,
+and--with his old time gentle hesitation--he added, "as a poor unworthy
+child of His." But it was not for that he had sent for him, it was
+this, and here the Major took from under his pillow a letter addressed
+to baby's parents, which he asked the rector to deliver. It had been
+written just after her death and was a simple request that he might
+be buried by her side. One thing he questioned the rector anxiously
+about: as to whether in the Better Country we would know each other.
+The letter was delivered and the next day baby's father and mother
+came to see her old friend. He was fast going, and lay with his eyes
+closed. Somehow, it seemed to cross his mind that they would know, and
+as they were leaving, he said, "You think I'll know the little one?
+Oh, I hope I will know her." After he was buried, adds the writer, we
+found some of her broken toys in his desk, and a list, written way
+back in the fall, of Christmas gifts to buy for her.
+
+Has he seen her again? It cannot be that the loving Father has not
+taken this simple hearted of His by the hand and led him to the little
+one who went before. And that in this blessed Christmas time, in that
+far off and better land, listening to the songs of angels and gazing
+at the glories of a brighter world, there walk, once more, hand in
+hand, the Major and his Last Love.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN V
+
+
+The people are taking their vacation--an imposing three-syllable name
+for a very tiny slice of holiday taken off an immense lump of work.
+Of all the impositions that I know, this vacation business, in the way
+we take it, is greatest. Somehow, by some inexplicable way, it has
+grown into a custom with men who have business, to understand that a
+vacation means two weeks, fourteen days, out of three hundred and
+sixty-five, or one week out of every twenty-six. And then back again
+to work. It is like taking a poor devil out of a box once a year, and
+after giving him a breath of fresh air, putting him back and letting
+the lid down on him again. It is often said that a thing is as free
+as air, but to a busy man the air is anything but free. Whiskey, cigars,
+newspapers, the church, the theatre are at hand and easy of access,
+but the long, lazy, untrammelled breathing of fresh air out of town
+is hard to get. I never see a cart-horse enjoying his dinner out of
+a nose-bag that I don't think this is the way business men get their
+fresh air. They sniff it from the streets on the run. They haven't
+time to unharness and drop the cart and take a long and satisfactory
+meal. I say I don't know who invented the two weeks system, but I
+strongly suspect the doctors had a hand in it. I never hear their
+flippant, devil-may-care (you must see by this time that I am in an
+awful humor) way in which they assure you that a week or two out will
+"set you up all right," that I don't feel that I am getting nearer and
+nearer to the inventor. But what will I do with him if I get him? It
+will be the old story, "You didn't improve at the pink sulphur springs;
+why, what did you do?" Well, I lay down under the trees and had a good
+rest. "That's it, my boy; didn't I tell you exercise was the thing;
+why, that's what you went there for." And then he is astonished that
+Smith didn't improve at the brown sulphur; "what could he have done?"
+Well, he went fishing and hunted some. "Great Scott, man, how did you
+expect to improve; why, you walked off every pound you gained. Why,
+you went there for rest, not to walk yourself to death." And so they
+go. As if fourteen days could hold enough of health in them to improve
+anybody. Fourteen days is of no account to anybody unless, perhaps,
+it might be a two-weeks respite to a man to be hung, and even that
+would be a very temporary sort of satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, that I am in a bad humor, let me touch on another grievance. I
+declare to you that something ought to be done about tomato cans--a
+law forbidding women to have or handle them. There now; don't fly off
+and say I am attacking the gentler sex. I am not; I am attacking the
+combination of the two. Take the gentler sex by themselves and they
+are just lovely, but when they go in partnership with tomato cans they
+are--well, I won't say anything rash. There is one thing, thank heaven;
+I can keep my temper under all circumstances. Sitting in the cars the
+other day, engaged wasting a whole day of my fourteen to go something
+over a hundred miles, the new Floral Transfer Express came in sight.
+It was a lady of middle age--I won't say how old, though I wouldn't
+have forgiven her if she had been sixteen. Her arms were full of tomato
+cans, containing slips of flowers, and it took the conductor and porter
+both to hoist her up the car steps--for like all women, she would
+rather be run over than let go her bundles. When she took her seat,
+the cans were distributed on all the seats around her, two-thirds of
+them exuding the water with which the flowers had been sprinkled while
+she was waiting at the station. I got two or three of them as a
+retribution, I presume, for my having kept her from falling over the
+stove, and for my duplicity in saying that they would not be in the
+way in the slightest. If I live I shall hereafter be a more truthful
+man. I was kept busy just four hours balancing them so as to keep them
+from being jarred from the seat by the motion of the car. But one ray
+illuminated the scene, and that was, when returning from the water
+cooler she sat down on a little nest of four of them. It looked like
+a judgment and I believe it was. I don't mind the deadly traps women
+set on window ledges, in the shape of tomato cans filled with flowers
+to slip down on man's head, but I do insist that railroad authorities
+should not allow them to bring canned flower gardens into the cars
+with them, and in that I have the support of every free born American
+citizen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While I was away I learned a secret that is worth a good deal of money
+to any young man intending marriage, and that would have been without
+price to me if I had known it thirty years ago--before I knew the
+estimable woman, who, in company, insists that I am her better-half,
+and in private treats me as if I were hardly a sixteenth. I learned
+it at sea. Just before we sailed out of a port one afternoon a couple
+came down to the wharf, which consisted of a very large and fine-looking
+young woman and very small young man, who carried himself with much
+meekness. Why will little men marry big women? They looked like they
+had not been long married. When they came on board she was the captain
+and he ranked about cook. When they got off, forty-eight hours after,
+he ranked as admiral and she ranked about a hand before the mast. When
+they got on board, she called him William, and he called her "Maria
+dear." When they got off she called him "Willie dear," and he called
+her plain "Maria." When they came to supper she was the man of the
+two--two hours after, she was laid out on the deck benches, vowing
+every minute that she would die. From that moment he commenced advancing
+in rank. He was not subject to seasickness, and walked the plunging
+deck like a bantam rooster. In a firm voice he ordered her to her
+state-room, where she remained till the evening of the next day. She
+came out a changed woman. She evidently viewed "Willie dear" as a
+superior being, whom the sea itself couldn't conquer, and whose
+attentions to her in her sickness--which I am bound to add were kind
+and unremitting--were such as such beings bestow in charity on mortals
+made of humbler stuff. She came out of her stateroom the next evening
+as limp as a rag, and clinging to the little bantam as if letting go
+would be sure death. Seasickness had completely changed the manner and
+carriage of the two people. I could not help wondering if the bantam
+saw his advantage as I saw it, and whether, now that he had her down,
+he would keep her down? It struck me, while looking at them, that every
+man, sure of his sea legs, should early in his married life, take his
+wife to sea. It may give him a lifetime of peaceful rest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Still speaking of the sea; for I am too far from shore now to turn
+back, we had one day of it in which was painfully illustrated the line,
+"Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink." The steward, having
+been changed from his own ship to ours without notice, had not laid
+in his wines and liquors for the voyage. It was awful news when it was
+announced after getting out to sea, and paled many a cheek. Much to
+our surprise, however, all the next morning one of the passengers
+appeared in a state of exhilaration not to be accounted for by anything
+we had seen on the table. Later, he appeared still worse, and as he
+did not appear at dinner, we concluded that he was drinking to excess
+in his room. A passenger said indignantly that "the man was killing
+himself," and volunteered to go in and see about him. About dark, that
+day, the volunteer made his appearance on deck. After some uncertain
+steps he managed to seat himself on a coil of rope. Looking at us with
+a look of solemn philanthropy in his face, he announced thickly, that
+"I got t'way from'm at last." It was very clear that he had.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Do you know that I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an
+antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against
+all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with
+neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress
+me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined,
+painful unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean.
+And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault
+lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless
+waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the
+doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God
+inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all
+of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own
+hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, at any
+hour or in any scene, we can find an instant answer to all our doubts.
+There is but one spot on the ocean that leads me to a sort of a fanciful
+realization of a future life. It is that red one made by the setting
+sun, especially if we be off shore, and the birds are flying landward.
+The roseate bridge thrown across the water, swinging with the waves,
+the intense and silver bright-ness of the centre of the arc framed in
+the evening clouds that roll around it, and the gleaming wings of the
+birds, as they flash across the disc and disappear in the shining
+centre on their way homeward, somehow bring to my mind the gates ajar
+and the souls flying from earth to their final rest. There may be
+beautiful pictures to come after this life; if there are, sunset at
+sea is as near as our mortal minds can yet come to them.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN VI
+
+
+Well, we have gotten you into a new year! Life and Fate and Time, all
+have managed to get you here. With many of you they had a hard pull
+to get you here. Some of you have been near to death; some of you so
+miserable you hardly wanted to try another year here, and the majority
+of you have shown the least interest about getting here. I don't
+reproach you; you are only following the perverse example of Human
+Nature. Did it ever strike you that the globe and the people who live
+on its surface, are always marching different ways? While all the
+restless tide of humanity moves to the West, the globe turns itself
+to the East. On its surface, Man is much like the acrobat we see at
+the theatres, who, mounted on his parti-colored ball, faces one way
+while it moves the other. It must be a queer spectacle to those who,
+from the planetary dress circle of the universe, are watching us through
+their opera glasses. It must be still queerer to them when they hear
+us chanting a Miserere at the approach of an invincible line across
+the face of Time, as imaginary as the Equator, and when it is passed,
+filling the air with a Jubilate--the songs of the dying and the coming
+year. It is rather a comfort to us that we don't believe in the dress
+circle of gazers; that we have the comfortable belief that we are the
+only people in the Universe, and that beyond the questionable discovery
+of a canal across one of the planets, the wisest of astronomers have
+found no evidence of human life elsewhere. And so, with a Crusoe-like
+sense of solitude, we live on our traditions, on our religions, and
+on our ideas of Man to the exclusion of the rest of the Universe.
+
+With an impartial judgment, therefore, and not influenced by the
+approval or disapproval of this vast dress circle, in whose existence
+we have no faith, let us take up these imaginary lines for a moment.
+It is unquestionable that, whether for good or evil, they have descended
+to us by tradition and custom as a legacy. They are sufficiently real
+to be of practical use, and they are used. It is by them that we set
+a time--alas, that we should have the necessity of doing it--to discard
+some vice, some sin, some weakness. We use them in the interest of
+procrastination--that we may put off the parting day with something
+our conscience, or our taste, or both, disapprove. By them we appoint
+a time when we shall say to the divine spark within our breasts, you
+may flame out into our daily life. By them we give a respite which
+alas, often ends in a commutation of sentence and oftener still in a
+full pardon and restoration to peace.
+
+So, you see, I do not think a great deal of old year remorse or New
+Year resolutions. I think they are just that much better than none at
+all, and this has to be qualified by the damage they do in having us
+put off reformation. That a man should fix a day to reform in this or
+that particular, is at least an evidence that he is aware of his need
+of it--a great point gained. These years are but little stepping-stones
+across the narrow brook of Time that pours into the vast ocean of
+Eternity, and it is a good sign when a man approaches the next, and
+the next, and the next with increasing reverence and sense of the
+responsibility of his progress. It is a good sign when a man begins
+to discover in the impediments of life, what is necessary and what is
+absolutely hurtful to him in the journey of life, and when, with the
+discovery, he summons up enough resolution to fix a day to throw away
+the bad. It is hard for the best of us to get our load rightly picked
+over. When we have failed to start right in youth, it is unspeakably
+hard after getting out into the dust and glare of the world to assort
+our burden over, and drop what ill elements we have gathered on the
+road. That a man should fix a time to do this is itself a good thing
+and just that far these imaginary lines are good.
+
+But something far better, far manlier, is to have the firmness to draw
+our own lines at our own times. It is so peculiarly a personal matter
+that we can well afford to let the World have its lines and we have
+our own. If you agree with me, then your own line is drawn at To-day
+and Every Day. If a man cannot enter on a new life every day, he can
+unquestionably enter on at least a newer life every day. It must be
+a barren and unfruitful mind to which something--good or evil--is not
+added every day, to make it that much newer. You know this yourself.
+You have seen healthy, pure-minded boys start out in life and you have
+met them later with minds so darned with vice here, and patched with
+sin there, that you hardly recognized them. That transformation was
+not done in a day. You have seen boys that you knew at school without
+a bad habit, and when you met them again they had added to their lives
+drinking, gambling, everything this side of a police court. That was
+not done in a day. We do nothing in a day--not even reform in a day.
+All good and evil is a matter of ascent and descent-the latter only
+the faster because the grade is easier. It is not an easy experiment
+in the world to be a good man. No man ever fixed a day to become a
+good one. It is an uphill road, a long road, and one who proposes to
+walk it must fix no later hour than now lest night-fall find him far
+from the end of it.
+
+But the young man who determines to walk it in this day, has a far
+easier road than he would have had thirty years ago. It is the fashion
+to say that the road grows no better. It is not true; the world's
+opinion grows better every day. There were many things respectable
+thirty years ago that are absolutely disreputable now. Then, a
+middle-aged man might drink at a bar with a boy of twenty. If he did
+it to-day he would be marked at once. Then, drinking and gambling were
+looked upon as the wild oats a young man might sow, without losing
+caste. To-day, the young man who drinks and gambles is looked upon as
+of doubtful social position, by both men and women. To-day, in making
+their lists of invitations, leaders in society cross out the names of
+dissipated young men as promptly as they do those of fast young women.
+Whereas thirty years ago there was rather a mantle of sentimental
+charity fitted on the shoulders of a disreputable young fellow, to-day
+he is roughly talked of as a "drunkard" or a "common fellow"; terms
+that no one dreamed of applying to him then. There has been nothing
+that public opinion, especially that section of it that may be called
+social opinion, has changed in more than in the standard it fixes for,
+and demands from, all men, and particularly young men. The result is
+that when a man wants to be superior to vice now, he has the moral
+weight of a sounder public opinion and finds the road easier than he
+would have had thirty years ago.
+
+I have said nothing to you about any higher inducement to commence a
+better life every day, than those you can find in the world. They are
+quite sufficient, or ought to be. A healthy body, a clear mind, success
+in the world--these are the rewards which a good life offers here.
+There is just one other word about what it offers elsewhere. I am not
+a preacher, you need not be afraid of a sermon. I am just one of
+yourselves; only I have come over a longer road than you have, and
+have seen more of its pitfalls as well as more of its sign-boards. Nor
+do I pretend to know more than you of what it offers elsewhere. But
+I just wish to say one word to recall what you already know; what you
+must know. There is nothing that we all know better--nothing that is
+more surely planted in the human mind than that this is only a part
+of our life; that when we shall reach a future existence, we shall
+there find a life awaiting us which will match with the piece we carry
+from this one. It is a very grave thought--graver than any which we
+shall consider on earth, if we are intelligent men--which the match
+will be--whether it will be found in one of infinite misery or one of
+infinite betterment. Here we have the power to say which it shall be.
+It is a priceless power. Let us use it, not in fixing days for
+reformation, not in lamenting over promises of reforms broken, and
+fixing other days to come; but in living a newer life every day--As
+we can make no bargain nor compromise about the time and place where
+our life shall end, let us take the matter into our own hands and so
+live that it will matter little when or where the end comes. So live
+that when the summons come,
+
+    "Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night
+    Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
+    By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
+    Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
+    About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN VII
+
+
+I sometimes come to the conclusion that it is in Winter that a
+Philosopher has his several trials. That is, of course, a married
+Philosopher. For of the other sort I take no account, seeing that with
+their mode of life they have little need of Philosophy, unless, indeed,
+it be esteemed so lowly a remedy as to be put at the beck and call of
+men for evils they invite to themselves. Philosophy I hold to be a
+Patent Medicine of the higher sort, which is to be taken only for those
+afflictions brought us by others, and by which we are enabled to assuage
+our own misery through inspecting from an elevated plane the folly, or
+extravagance, or weakness of those who have afflicted us. It is a
+mental jack-screw by which we wind ourselves up to a height from which
+we can look down on lacks in others. To lose sight of our own pain
+after shooting down a flight of steps, in grave pitying contemplation
+of the stupidity of the chambermaid who left the bar of soap on the
+first step--that is your true Philosophy. And the man who forgets to
+rub his back, through pitying her ignorance, is the true philosopher.
+It is a quality from the gods, and whether exhibited over the minor
+calamity of soap, or the graver distress to which the married
+Philosopher too often falls heir, shows its origin in a heavenly calm.
+To him, I think I have said, this calm has its severe trial in the
+winter; but now that I think of it again, if I were writing this in
+the summer, I should say that season was the severest. Indeed, thinking
+of it still further, I am puzzled to decide on any season that does
+not bring to him the severest trials of his heavenly serenity. The
+other night Mrs. Boyzy, as she slipped one of the little stockings off
+the wooden ball, which has served our children for so many years and
+so many purposes--from filling out a croquet set, to the braining of
+their parents--her kindly, and to me still beautiful face, lighting
+up with a smile, said: "We are having a real gay winter in Staunton,
+dear." Alas, I knew it well, Between High Teas and Blue Teas, and
+Ladies' Lunches and Bands of Twenties, I knew it well. I knew it from
+the number of times that I have had to steal in like a thief in the
+night, at my own side gate and make my way into a cold set-out in the
+nursery, while a High Tea was progressing down stairs accompanied by
+the hum of feminine voices. I knew it from the cold nights I have had
+to carry our eldest daughter to her club, with the dreary reflection
+that it was to be still colder later, when young Jones or young Tompkins
+would have to bring her home; and when Mrs. Boyzy would wake me from
+my slumber and in dressing gown and slippers I would shiver behind the
+front door till young Jones and she, after much low murmuring, would
+separate, and the light of the family would consent to come inside.
+I knew it. I always know it, 'being a victim of dyspepsia--from the
+bonbons and other gim-cracks which are served out at my family table
+after these lunches and teas, and which are persistently served out
+until, as my wife calls it, they are "finished." Had I not that very
+evening had served to me a piece of fruit-cake made, I believe, when
+our eldest girl was in short dresses! I knew it from the short party
+calls which have rattled like bird-shot against the Boyzy mansion, to
+the utter wreck of my quiet evenings with Mrs. Boyzy--a woman that I
+had much rather talk to than all the callers in the world. And all
+this that I knew so well, was put by that estimable woman under the
+head of a "real gay winter." Before I could apply the elevating mental
+jack-screw that raises me above all earthly troubles, I could not help
+feeling that the inquiry was pretty much like asking a scrambling
+lobster boiling in the pot, if he was not having a real gay evening?
+I am afraid I mentioned--some such impression to my wife, for I was
+soon astonished by finding that I was instrumental in the whole
+business. "But, my dear," she replied, "we have to do it. Every one
+does it." We! I was astonished to find that instead of being a victim
+I had been an accessory, perhaps the chief criminal, in bringing it
+about. A few questions from the ever-ready partner of my joys soon
+convinced me that if I had not been a great criminal, it was only
+through lack of time and opportunity. Did I have any idea of what was
+due to the position of my family in society? What would become of our
+children's "prospects"? What sort of life would my family lead--and
+here the severe inflection of her voice convinced my crime-stricken
+conscience that nothing but a miracle--and Mrs. Boyzy--could have saved
+my family from utter social destruction if I had been allowed to have
+my way. Happily, by this time, Philosophy had come to my aid, and
+looking through its beautifying and mellowing mist, all was changed.
+The teas and the lunches and the clubs appeared in the brightest tints;
+the shivering waits behind the front door changed into evening strolls
+into tropical gardens; the gray sprinkled hair of my wife changed into
+the sunny auburn of her youth, and she once more stood in the little
+church of our old home listening to the words, "For better or for
+worse." Happy the married Philosopher who wears around his neck with
+an even temper and an understanding mind, this talisman of happiness
+devised by far-seeing men of other days--"For better or for worse."
+Man cannot harm him nor Womankind disappoint him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been sitting up by the bedside of a dying Adjective. It was not
+through pity that I sat there, but through hate. For I detest an
+Adjective. It is the father of lies, the author of affectation and the
+progenitor of all exaggeration. They should be remitted to limbo with
+all the other crudities of youth. I have listened to the point of
+exasperation, through an evening, to the absurd use of adjectives by
+young girls of education and with some claims to good taste. Somehow
+it sometimes comes to me, that this use of adjectives is the besetting
+sin of the female conversationalists of this day. Some young fellows
+unsex themselves so far as to follow the bad example, but the majority
+of that sex substitute oaths for adjectives, which is a social habit
+on too low a plane for criticism here. But on all sides in the social
+conversation of the young people of this day, it seems to be agreed
+to give good, plain, strong English the go-by and to indulge in the
+embroidery of adjectives. Tawdry adjectives such as 'beautiful',
+'lovely,' 'horrid', 'awful', and the like worn tinsel. I suppose I
+might venture the assertion without fear of contradiction, that this
+is the stock in trade in most young girls in qualifying their
+conversation. The use of that tinsel gives a wholly unreal tone to
+what is being said and is so pregnant with affectation as to be
+tiresome. Between slang and adjectives, it is hard to choose, both are
+so detestable from a woman's lips. The difference is that the adjective
+insidiously captures the refined mind, while slang only holds captive
+the coarse mind. In a plain and intended to be truthful statement of
+any occurrence, the injection of three or four adjectives will change
+the whole tenor of narration, and give it a vraisemblance of untruth
+which it is hard for the hearer's mind to erase. As a matter of fact,
+an adjective ought to be a thought, not a word. A fact should be stated
+without embroidery, and we should think whether it is beautiful, lovely,
+and the like. There are many thoughts in the human mind that are not
+translatable into words. They may have been in some other language
+long gone, but they are not so in ours. As those words have gone into
+oblivion, so should the majority of our English adjectives follow them.
+I have forgotten to tell the patient I have been sitting up with. It
+is the adjective 'tasty.' Years ago Mrs. Boyzy set her foot down on
+this word, and as in duty bound, I also set my foot down. Whether our
+two feet have stamped the unhappy adjective out, or from some other
+cause that I know not of, its end has certainly come. As in all fierce
+popular outbreaks against long existing oppression, the weakest and
+most insignificant of the oppressors are often the first to fall, so
+this unexaggerative, unaggressive, ill-sounding little adjective is
+the first to die. Let us hope that an early day be appointed unto the
+others to follow it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have you ever watched a man going down? It is an interesting study,
+and a unique one, for the reason that no other animal has language by
+which to express the various stages at which he arrives before dropping
+out of the Procession of Life. Nor has any animal so many contrivances
+with which to dodge and play at hide and seek with Death. The earthly
+affection which abides in man, seems to overmaster all the other
+emotions--faith, hope, everything,--and he who firmly believes in a
+future existence is found as frantic in his efforts to delay its coming,
+as the veriest agnostic. Then faith seems to be a theological treasure
+of this earth, rather than a treasure of the future. The man with no
+tie to bind his soul to this planet is as reluctant to leave it as he
+who has the strongest ties of friendship, love and fatherhood. All
+mankind seem to have that dread of it which their children have of
+being put in a dark closet. But I am not going to investigate the
+mysterious dread of death, or the even more mysterious attachment to
+life. I am merely recalling to my memory men whom I have seen stagger
+awhile and then fall out of the line of life. There is no more pathetic
+sight to me, than a man when he first finds that he is failing. Like
+a child, he cannot understand it. This strange feeling that he has
+never had before; that pain that must come from this or that--they are
+all so new to him. He cannot realize that he is failing, and least of
+all can he realize the dread truth that it is time for him to fail.
+To a man's own mind he is always at that mythical stage, his "prime,"
+as long as health lasts. It is piteous to hear his excuses for his
+failing body--it was this imprudence, it was that cold, it was too
+much or too little exercise--he cannot understand that it is the herald
+of the Messenger, and that a little way off through the mist he might
+see the Messenger himself holding the Lotus flower in his hand. It is
+more piteous still to see him, like a captured animal, seeking some
+way of escape through the bars. He must get a horse--it is only exercise
+he wants; he must have a longer vacation--it is only rest he wants;
+he must have more society--it is only recreation he needs; he must
+have less society--it is only quiet he requires. His blindness is
+inexplicable. He will walk in a garden and point out to you a tree
+that cannot last longer than such a time; he will point to a worn-out
+beast of burden that must die at such a time; he knows the death date
+of everything that springs from earth except himself. In his blind
+hope he grasps at the worst of straws. No new universal panacea comes
+out that he does not seize on it, and that he is not sure, for a little
+while is doing him good. At last he weakens in the struggle and is
+taken to the rear. The procession of Life moves on; he never joins it
+again. If all this had happened to only one man, the World would be
+in tears. As it happens to all men, the World hardly gives it a thought.
+But to him, that One Man is all the world, and it is hard to get his
+thoughts away from himself. As the Procession of Life passes on, and
+the hum of its marching columns grows fainter on his ears, let us hope
+that there may come to him that unworldly quiet that Death pityingly
+sends in advance, and amid which Hope steals noiselessly away from the
+bedside to make room for Faith. And in which he may take the pale
+flower from the hand of the Messenger, and following him through the
+dawn of a new birth, see another Hand, holding out to him the purple
+amaranth of Eternal Life.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF RETIRED VETERAN VIII
+
+
+Rest! Ah, what a delicious word to the sick and wearied man. Rest in
+mind and body! How unsatisfactory appear the gaudy pictures of the
+dreamer of Patmos compared with the simple words of the Master, "I
+will give you rest." I can hardly say why I selected Hampton for rest.
+I knew nobody here, and had never been here. But somehow I had taken
+up the impression that it was one of those old East Virginia towns
+that had been blown ashore by the tempest of civil war and lay stranded
+on the beach of the briny ocean of life. And that was the sort of place
+that quiet was to be found in. My first night was a happy confirmation
+of my choice. Standing on the wharf at which lay a little steamer, the
+scene was beautiful. The new moon hung in the west and cast its
+glittering line over the water for miles and miles away. Thick in the
+little harbor lay the slender masts of vessels with steady lights
+glowing in their rigging. Across the narrow bay stood the Normal School
+with its three stories brightly lighted, and further away was the
+gigantic Soldiers' Home with a thousand lights burning. To the east
+was the long bridge across Hampton creek, with every few minutes a
+lighted omnibus or a pair of carnage lamps going leisurely across.
+Further yet was a railroad train lighted and flying across the trestle
+bridge. At the opening of the little bay were fisher boats, coming in
+with all sail spread, the loud laughter and chaffing of the men easily
+heard at this distance. Turning inland, you see a broad street, with
+shade trees on each side casting dark shadows. The lights twinkle its
+whole length and at one point there is a bright spot--a pretty, white
+hotel with a treble deck of verandahs. That is my home for many days
+to come and there I am to be at rest. The call of the bugle sounds on
+the night air; it is the "taps" at the Soldiers' Home; the salt water
+is beating with lazy monotone against the shore; the fisherman have
+tied up their boats; the last omnibus has crossed the bridge; the young
+moon is getting to her bed and I turn my face toward the long street
+and the bright hotel. A man of high-toned and poetic mind would here
+insert something about his thoughts turning to his mountain home. Alas!
+mine are turned with eager curiosity to what my breakfast tomorrow
+would be, reflecting as I do that I am now in the land, or rather
+water, of oysters, soft crabs and fish. After all, of what common clay
+we are made!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The redeeming feature of ill-health, to me, has been that for the last
+few months I have been thrown with many invalids and enjoyed their
+confidence to the fullest, (and sometimes the most, to some extent).
+There seems to be a sort of free-masonry among sick people by which
+they at once become friendly and familiar. There is, also, if you only
+knew it, an aristocracy of ill-health; that is, a man with two
+complaints stands much higher with his fellow invalids than a man with
+one; and a man who has been sick for five years stands immeasurably
+higher than a mere cadet who has not been sick six months. Having only
+a two years' standing, I was forced to bear the contempt which I
+received from chronic cases, but I repaid it with interest on some
+evidently shoddy invalids, who were trying to work their way into
+society on an attack of only a few weeks duration. I remember one case,
+however, in which our whole aristocratic circle was swept into
+insignificance by a little lady, whom I saw after I left Hampton, and
+who didn't weigh ninety pounds. She had been an invalid, she said, for
+fifteen years, and while I do not recollect precisely her afflictions,
+it appears to me that she had had chronic trichnia spiralis for that
+length of time, with intermittent cerebro spinal meningitis tending
+towards hydrophobia. This imposing patient cowed the whole invalid
+circle. But one man showed the slightest resistance, and that was old
+man Smith, who had been very proud of his chronic liver complaint. He
+told me in confidence the next day that he believed "the whole story
+was a ---- ----." It is due to the company, however, to say that the
+narration was received with polite expressions of sympathy and wonder,
+while there was at the same time a silent conviction that it was of
+this complication of diseases that Ananias died. If a lady could rout
+us, however, it was not permitted to a man. When another of these
+aristocratic invalids, one of those "four giant shows under one canvas,"
+came along, varying in sex from the first mentioned, he was speedily
+brought to grief. At supper, the first evening of his arrival, one of
+our circle having asked him with incautious politeness "how he was?"
+the new arrival opened on us with a sonorous discourse filled with
+chronic afflictions mixed up with pious reflections. I think he would
+have established his claims to high rank had not a consumptive-looking
+boarder with a haggard face taken advantage of a pause in the speech,
+and without looking up from his plate, remarked in a squeaky voice,
+"The remainder of the service will be concluded at the grave." The
+interruption was a bombshell. I have said that there is a free-masonry
+among invalids; I might add that it almost amounts to the old
+co-operation plan. I have been offered advice without limit and even
+medicine from my fellow sufferers. I have also been furnished with a
+list of their own attending physicians, all of whom have performed
+remarkable cures. It is a full and complete list of fifty-eight
+physicians in good professional standing, and I will dispose of it at
+a moderate compensation to any apothecary or undertaker who desires
+to purchase.
+
+Where was I? Oh, speaking of invalids! Sickness is to be dreaded with
+many because of death, but from the high moral plane from which I
+regard it, it is chiefly objectionable on account of the lying it gives
+rise to. Directly a man gets well on the way down hill, the good natured
+world gets this lie photographed, and each man presents him a
+copy--"Why, I never saw you looking better in my life!" For the first
+few copies that are presented him the poor devil is grateful; of the
+next few he is suspicious, and thereafter he is worried, vexed and
+profane. If you remonstrate against the truth of the assurance and
+call attention to the prominent skeleton which you are presenting to
+the public eye, the good natured liar looks you unflinchingly in the
+eye while he presents you with another lithograph bearing this
+inscription: "Oh, I didn't mean that you were fatter, I meant that
+your skin is clearer and your eyes are brighter." Not having a sample
+of your former skin, nor another pair of eyes handy to confute him
+with, this well-meaning liar walks off triumphantly. I, myself, however,
+am no better than the rest of them, though my presenting the lithograph
+cost me dearly one day. In one of the towns where I stopped, a young
+girl came to the hotel the shadow of what she had been. I suppose one
+evening I must have felt unusually chipper and kindly myself, for,
+coming up on the porch where she was sitting, I dashed off the old
+lithograph, "Why you are looking so much better." Her eyes--I never
+saw eyes that had so much of the other world and so little of this in
+them--turned on me with a half kind, half reproachful look, and at
+once filled with tears. She merely said gently, "Thank you," and got
+up and walked away. God forgive me, that I should have interrupted a
+soul so near to setting sail, to pay a lithographed and lying
+compliment. Three weeks later, in another town, I was told that she
+had gone on the last long voyage. I have burned my lithographs.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN IX
+
+
+At Afton in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There now, sit still, I am not
+going to commence about "lifting their eternal heads;" indeed I am
+not. Did it ever strike you, though, how different a man talks when
+he gets a pen in his hand; how impossible it is for a man to keep his
+feet on the ground and use a reasonably plain English without absurd
+adjectives, when he is writing descriptions of scenery. It is a
+miserable piece of affectation, you know; and they know you know, but
+they do it all the same. It comes, I presume, from a desire to assert
+the possession of imagination. The vulgar name for it is "flowery" and
+I am not certain that it is not a good name, for the chief business
+of flowers is to please the senses. You will find it popular with three
+classes of orators--commencement orators, political orators, and pulpit
+orators. The first use it because they know no better; the second,
+from the belief that it will catch those who know no better; and third
+because they find that a bright coat of paint to a religious sign post
+is particularly attractive to the female members of the congregation.
+With the first class, it is ignorance; with the second, business, and
+with the third, a mild, but well defined form of insincerity. You will
+find, too, that, with few exceptions, flowery ministers are--little
+else. I do not mean a forcibly drawn picture; that is a wholly different
+thing; I mean gaudy, flowery word painting. I remember at Trinity
+church in Staunton once, a description by a minister named Tucker, of
+a sacrifice made by the Jews at Jerusalem. Do you know, though that
+was years ago, I can see to-day the scene the man drew standing out
+in memory. It was powerful, but there was not a particle of prismatic
+coloring about it. It was a bas-relief cut on granite--full of power,
+enduring, and with a touch of eternity about it. Such picture-drawing
+is not flowery and does not wither.
+
+I know that the popular subjects of interest in the mountains are
+sunrise and sunset, but for something really worth writing about, and
+much more rare, give me a fog spread out at the feet like a white
+carpet. Ah! that is something worth seeing. The valley, a mile below,
+is hidden in the gauzy sea, and the tops of mountain spurs here and
+there peep out like little islands. The white, silent sea is spread
+for miles and miles. Underneath it is life, an invisible wagon rumbles,
+a horse neighs, a man calls to his neighbor, but the surface is calm,
+still, level. You would not be surprised to see a steamer come puffing
+from behind one of the islands. The wind presses the sea into billows
+which shift to and fro as water would. Away down on a wagon road you
+hear the tinkling of bells and a Hock of sheep emerge from a rift in
+the mist and turning disappear in another cloud of it. The fog parts
+again and a white top wagon, with four horses, is seen toiling slowly
+along. The driver cracks his whip and the sea of mist slowly rolls
+over him again. Another shifting, and a little farmhouse appears, with
+a man riding from under the trees. He rides into the mist and the
+farmhouse disappears. A railroad train rushes out of a bank of white
+wool and into another, in complete silence. The white sea gets uneasy
+under the wind, and the sun begins to brighten up the clouds above.
+Then the woolen surface begins to move. A mountain spur makes its
+appearance clear against the sky; the farm houses silently glide from
+under the sea; a flock of sheep, whose shepherd dog's bark you have
+heard from under the mist, is revealed. The sea is fast being blown
+away. The sun comes out. The whole landscape is changed and the great
+billows of mist that have covered it are now thin strips of white cloud
+driven across the blue sky. Once more you see spread out at your feet
+the valley, checkered with farms and orchards, and dotted with
+farmhouses shining in the sun. The miracle of nature is over. Let the
+enthusiasts have their sunrise and sunset; lovers their moonlight; but
+as for me, give me a mountain fog.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I suppose you don't know Maria? You ought to. She was a great comfort
+to me while I was at Hampton. Did I love her? Ah, most truly! I have
+sat on the hotel porch and watched Maria in her front yard by the hour.
+I suppose if I were to meet her to-day she would hardly recollect my
+name, so inconsistent is her sex, but I left my heart with her. It is
+true that she was not conventional, that her skirts hardly came to her
+knees; that she could not write, and that her general air was not that
+of a society woman, but to a sick man she was an inexpressible comfort.
+I have written her name Maria, but she was also called Mar-i-a,
+Mari-a-a-a, Mari-uh, and oh-h-h, M-a-r-i-a. These names she was called
+from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. I don't think
+I have ever known a more versatile genius than Maria. At times she was
+a steamboat, with loud blowing of the whistle; at other times she was
+a bear and devoured other children with grunts and growls of great
+ferocity; at other times, she was a horse of such high mettle and
+spirit as could only find vent in chewing up the front gate and pawing
+her mother's geraniums into the earth. But it was in her great and
+realistic combat with dogs that I admired Maria most. Every day about
+noon two setter dogs would come lounging about the yard with the most
+innocent air in the world. It was Maria's lunch time and the little
+thing would toddle in and bring out her lunch. No sooner would she
+appear than the dogs would rush on her and roll her in the dirt. There
+was a brief scuffle, an agonizing scream, the dirt flew, the dogs
+rushed off, and Maria sat up in tears, dirt and hunger. The lunch was
+gone. By the time quiet was restored, the dogs would come to see if
+they had left any in their hurry, and the forgiving little one would
+start in to play with them as if nothing had happened. I was there two
+months, and if Maria got a whole lunch in that time, I didn't see it.
+Sometimes the dogs had forgotten to look at their watches and would
+be a couple of minutes behind time, but all the same they rushed on
+her and took what there was. Often the screams would bring her mother
+out, and Maria would go into a little explanation which, as she couldn't
+talk, didn't make things very clear, consisting chiefly of "a-h-s" and
+"o-h-s." Little as she was, she had a spice of shrewdness which
+unfortunately didn't work well. She would commence her scream directly
+she brought her lunch out, but as soon as she found it only served to
+make the dogs more promptly on time, she gave it up. I have had a good
+deal of amusement, one way or another, but Maria stands at the head
+of the list in my memory.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I made the acquaintance of a married couple at Afton. I do not often
+hold up the private life of my acquaintances to illustrate moral reason,
+but I must make this an exception. I believe the gentleman was brought
+to Afton for the protection of sheep, and to test the statement that
+a goat with a flock of sheep would keep off the dogs. When I saw him
+he was a moral wreck. He had become a professional lounger around the
+depot where he chewed up old paper, straw, and such odd crumbs of lunch
+as the passengers would throw out of the car windows. His hair was
+full of burrs and he had gotten one of his legs broken by the cars.
+His occupation was to wrestle with all the trifling fellows, white and
+black, around the depot, butt them when he could, and be ridden by
+them when he couldn't. He had long since lost his situation at the
+sheep fold, having proved rather an attraction to dogs, who are fond
+of low company, than a protection to sheep. Untidy, thriftless, a
+loafer, kicked and cuffed about by the public and half starved, he
+presented a pitiable contrast to his wife, neat little lady, who, after
+her husband had lost his situation, left him and joined a respectable
+circle of cows and spent her time with them, fat, sleek, eminently
+respectable, and as regular as clockwork in taking them out to pasture
+and bringing them home. The moral point that I wish to make is this--if
+you give a woman half a chance she will be a lady; if you give a man
+half a chance he will go to the dogs. It is in the sex of the animal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I often hear it said of a man that he has "the manners of the old
+school," by which is meant courteous, deferential manners. I don't
+know that any particular "school," old or new, will give a man good
+manners, but it is certainly true that age does ripen and mellow those
+of both men and women. As we grow older we become aware that there are
+a great many other people besides ourselves in the world, and that if
+we want to go through it smoothly we must keep to the right and not
+insist on keeping our elbows akimbo in a crowd. A rude young man may
+reform, but a rude old man may be regarded as having been illy bred
+early in life, and hopeless. Good manners are very like the catechism
+lessons our mothers teach us when children. They don't count for a
+great deal at the time, but the result comes up in life a long, long
+time afterwards. I think I can tell you of the "old school" where
+really good manners originated. The Teacher has long since gone, and
+sometimes I have fear the old school itself has changed, but He left
+the rule with us when He departed, and here it is: "Thou shalt love
+thy neighbor as thyself." After the Teacher left, many new doctrines
+were brought about, and much chop-logic was put into the text-books
+by those who succeeded Him, but with all their human invention they
+have never approached the perfection of the motto that He left behind
+for the corner-stone of good manners. It is that, I think, that makes
+old men have better manners; they have learned that there is a good
+deal more in the people of the world to appeal to their affection and
+kindly toleration than they thought for at the beginning of their
+lives; that there is a great deal of good in every man and woman, and
+that it won't do to pick out their faults to the exclusion of their
+virtues; that a touch of kindly courtesy will often reveal to you a
+wholly different man from the surly one who stood before you a minute
+before; in short, our old man has learned more and more the lesson to
+love his neighbor as himself. That is the true "old school" founded
+eighteen hundred years ago.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN X
+
+
+The procession of two regiments of veterans through our streets a few
+days ago must have set a good many of us retired veterans who were not
+in the line, to thinking. It did me. It set me to thinking, not of
+war, not of peace, not of reunions, but of how time has changed us all
+in twenty years. In a neighboring city where I volunteered, the old
+company, with the old name and the old uniform, is still kept up by
+our young successors. I saw it lately on parade, and as I saw the trim
+looking young fellows of from nineteen to twenty-five, clad in the
+same bright uniform of twenty years ago, and stepping out with all the
+brisk and cheery step of youth, it looked as if there had been a
+resurrection of the old days. Could we old gray heads ever have looked
+like these! Could that gay young spark mounted on the leading caisson
+horse and furtively chaffing No. 13 be Hilleary and Hutchins come to
+life again? Could that serious, slender boy, all attention to the word
+of command, be the grave and clerical Hale Houston of this day gone
+back to youth again. Can that sturdy No. 4 at the gun, be old Boss
+Lumpkin? Could we all have looked as fresh and full of youth, and as
+full of engaging humor and good temper as these young fellows? I suppose
+we did, though it is hard to be believed, even by ourselves. I can
+tell you of a reunion that, if promised, would bring more of the old
+boys together than all the patriotism than can ever fill the American
+heart. Just promise them that for that day they shall be young again!
+Bless my heart, what a crowd you could have! Young again, mark you,
+both in mind and body. I don't know one of the old fellows who, if he
+had the option, wouldn't take back the youth he had twenty-three years
+ago with the war, famine and hardships that followed. What a deal of
+difference it does make to a man whether the world is behind or in
+front of him.
+
+Do you know--of course this is confidential--that I am glad the schools
+have gone for the summer. Education has been a thorn in our family for
+some time past, indeed since the younger member got into the higher
+branches. Until lately it has been the impression of Mrs. Boyzy and
+myself that we spoke the English language with facility and much
+correctness, and as for facility I will put Mrs. B. against any picked
+nine that may be brought. But recently we have been greatly humiliated
+by our eldest girl, who comes back daily from school with a new
+pronunciation. Incredulity on our part is met by lugging the dictionary
+into the conflict and we are defeated at once. So victorious has the
+little one become that we tremble when we hear, "Mamma, how do you
+pronounce so and so," and prepare for another humiliation. My wife's
+plaintive, "It was pronounced so when I was a girl," is very touching
+to me, but when did the young ever have mercy on the old? The last
+conflict had--I hope it will be the last--was over the word "Squalor."
+The young one, after setting the usual trap of demanding how we
+pronounced it, announced that it was spoken "squaylor." At this my
+wife, astonished into resistance, made her last flight, and said with
+much dignity, that that pronunciation was silly and there must be a
+mistake. In a moment more she was prostrated by the well directed
+dictionary. In the evening after the children had gone upstairs, Mrs.
+B. locked up her sewing and remarked that a good deal of what is taught
+children in these days is nonsense. I did not reply. Had I, I should
+have been forced to remind her that she and I put our parents through
+the same mill in which the educational gods are now grinding us so
+sharply. I take it that pronunciation, I mean that of ordinary
+refinement and education, varies pretty much as bonnets do in style
+and, like them, is a matter that taste has a good deal to do with; and
+locality as well. Forty years ago in the jungles of East Virginia I
+spoke glahss, fahst, ahnser; I never heard of papa and mamma, but of
+father and mother, and I find they are teaching the children of this
+day to say that, too. I was taught to say g-yarden, c-yar, s-yuit,
+and, I suppose, that will also be resurrected after a while.
+Pronunciation, I take it, is a matter of provincial taste. Reading
+Chaucer, I have often wondered what standard of that sparsely educated
+day fixed the standard by which he could be read aloud. And by the bye
+who, of this more cultivated day, is authority for fixing the standard?
+Not the Dictionaries, for they differ. I dare say that after all we
+must fall back on taste. In the national metropolis of America, I have
+noticed a half-dozen different pronunciations among educated people,
+so distinct as to be readily noticed. But the best opportunity to be
+had is in an army gathered from all quarters of the country, or even
+from all quarters of a section, as the Confederate army was. I noticed
+a dozen different pronunciations, the two from North Carolina and
+Georgia being the most distinctly marked. I have heard it said hastily,
+that all educated people pronounce alike, but I think, with more
+deliberation and more opportunity for judging, it would be safer to
+say that all uneducated people pronounce alike.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am not one of the old men who take delight in "lecturing" the young.
+I hate the very word, for I shall never travel far enough from my youth
+to forget how I disliked both the lecture and the lecturer. But
+sometimes I have an indescribable yearning to go and say a word to
+them. I feel pretty much like one who, having found a circus to be of
+no account and leaving the performance, finds another man at the
+ticket-wagon eagerly putting down his money for a ticket. It looks
+like a pity and I want to tell him so. I saw a lot of nice-looking
+young fellows the other day--I was told they were boys from one of the
+Universities,--standing on a corner badly flushed with liquor and
+swearing at a high rate. They were evidently out for "a time." I should
+have liked to say something like this: "Now, boys, just let this thing
+drop there. Really, there is nothing in it. No young man with a sound
+body can need liquor, and no one with a sound reason can need the
+excitement of cards. We old fellows have been all along there, and
+there is nothing in it. I am the chief secretary of the Ancient Order
+of Old Boys, and my opportunities of acquiring knowledge have been
+exceptional. I don't wish to hold up any raw head and bloody bones of
+premature death and disgrace, and all that sort of thing, but I would
+like to say this much to you: If you want to take a drink, take it and
+go about your business, but don't associate together for the purpose
+of drinking, whether for a night or for an hour. You will read, before
+the long life that is before you ends, a hundred ways of accounting
+for drunkards--heredity, inclination, regular drinking, grief,
+disappointed love, and all that sort of thing, but all put together
+they do not begin to approximate the cause I tell you of,--"associating
+together." It is the associating together of boys, the late nights,
+the early morning drinks, taken more frequently later on, and lastly
+the appetite. It is the associating together for the purpose of drinking
+that causes that selvage of bad company to adhere to the good company
+you started out with earlier in the evening, and it is the selvage of
+low company that will give every self-respecting man a good deal of
+disagreeable reflection when he comes to look back at it. Don't buy
+that sort of a ticket, my boy; the show won't pay you."
+
+Speaking of veterans reminds me of something I would like to say right
+here. Do you know there is nothing more awkward to a man--that is
+nothing more awkward to me, and like all egotists I judge all by
+myself--than meeting a familiar friend whom I have not seen for twenty
+years. We expect each other to be the old heart-to-heart friends of
+long ago, but how to go about re-establishing the relation is the
+puzzle. We have all had new friends, new histories, new lives since
+twenty years ago, and while we make an unsatisfactory attempt to be
+the same "old boys" to each other, each feels the dismal failure.
+Memory is faithful, but while we remember with affection that we were
+Tom and Dick to each other then (twenty years ago) we cannot, out of
+that slender material, build up a hearty fraternal conversation of
+to-day. And with advancing years we find that the old subjects that
+we spent hours of mirth over, a life-time ago, are not amusing to-day,
+if indeed our defective memories can recall them. Ah! how little it
+took to furnish youth with mirth, that common standing ground upon
+which all so easily form acquaintance and friendship. I trust I may
+be forgiven, seeing that I meant well, but I declare to you that I
+have practiced outrageous deceit in affecting to remember incidents
+that some of these old boys recall, and in trying to be agreeable by
+so doing. But doubtless you have also. Perhaps we all have. After all
+I take it that separation, like time, tries everything--love,
+friendship, even acquaintance, and those of the three which survive
+the test are like the ruins of ancient cities, of great value as
+curiosities, but worth little for aught else. Mrs. Boyzy remarks that
+this is a heartless view of it. But I silence that estimable woman by
+the observation that philosophers do not take the heart into account;
+the heart is the field of young lovers, physicians' fees and patent
+medicines. This observation which she does not understand, and, I may
+admit to you I am not so clear about myself, convinces her that I am
+not only a philosopher, but a profound one. Ah! to a man of profound
+observation, how many better ways of securing the respect of the female
+sex there are than the primitive one of clubbing them.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XI
+
+
+I do not reverence ministers of the gospel simply because they hold
+that office, any more than I esteem a man as a gentleman simply because
+he has the manners and dress of one. The bare fact that at some period
+in his life, oftenest the period of youth, when the mind teems with
+odd fancies and ambitions, a man has concluded that he is called to
+the ministry, has successfully gotten through theology and been
+ordained, forms too uncertain a foundation on which to base reverence,
+which is one of the most solemn emotions of the mind. But I do respect
+and reverence the credentials of an earnest, God-fearing and
+self-sacrificing life which are found with these men, and I am obliged
+in excusing this weakness, to say that in a long and varied experience
+with them, these traits have been characteristic of those I have met.
+But it is not my lack of reverence that I intended to write about, it
+is the contradictory way in which those who are under their charge
+view this matter. The practical, effective and active irreverence of
+professing Christians astonishes as much as it puzzles me. They believe,
+or assume to believe, in the sacredness of the ministry and in the
+reverence due ministers as such; how do they show it? It seems to me
+that the architectural custom of elevating the pulpit above the heads
+of the people arose out of the congregational custom of shooting at
+the preacher. You may tell me what you please about the world's people,
+but it is the well-directed volley from the communicants' pews,
+generally fired from ambush, that does the business for the preacher's
+influence. Did you ever think of the marked absurdity in the contrast?
+The subject of calling a preacher is prefaced by prayer; the Almighty
+is invoked to send a man of His choice; the man is installed with
+impressive ceremony and much prayer; he is introduced by other ministers
+at the installation with allusions to him as the under shepherd to
+whom is to be rendered obedience and reverence. The new man then goes
+heartily to work for God, and the congregation goes heartily to work
+on him. They criticise his style, peck at every imperfection,
+intellectual and social, and soon put him in a state of siege. If the
+Almighty, who it was at first claimed sent him, delivers him, he is
+in luck; but the usual end is that the congregation itself effects his
+deliverance by giving him the same warm experience that the terrapin
+undergoes when it is desired to see him walk. After a persistent
+ham-stringing of the ministerial horse, the congregation are astonished
+that he cannot pull his load. I am a business man, and in many years
+have had many men in my employment, but nothing would have more
+astonished me at any time in my business life than to be told that I
+was systematically impairing and obstructing the usefulness of the men
+that I was paying to work for me and from whose labor I expected some
+profit. It is the most inexplicable inconsistency to me in
+congregations, which generally include a large percentage of business
+men. I have used the word systematically, because it seems to me that
+it is a system which pervades to a greater or less extent all
+congregations of all denominations, and is confined exclusively to no
+one. Nor is it the worst element in a congregation that is guilty of
+it; I am sorry to say that it is prevalent among even the best members.
+Even that excellent woman, Mrs. Boyzy, whose mind is often tortured
+by the apprehension that absence from church service will seriously
+affect my future prospers, often regales me after church with keen
+criticism of the sermon and the weak points of our preacher. And yet
+that estimable woman, on hearing our eldest daughter indulge last
+Sunday in a similar strain, warned her against the wickedness of her
+irreverence. I beg you to understand that I am not taking the part of
+pastors against congregations any more than I would take the part of
+our little girl against her pious mother, but what I write is merely
+to blaze the way, as it were, to a settlement of the question: Whether
+a pastor is a shepherd set over a congregation by the Almighty, or
+whether he is a man whom an angry God has delivered into their hands
+that he may suffer for his sins.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have I said anywhere in this paper that Spring has come? Well, I say
+it now. It is a sad, gloomy time to man, however woman may look at it.
+It is now that the family man sees looming ahead the Easter bonnet
+trimmed with deadly $ marks, and the Spring outfits embroidered with
+the same costly material. Why is this? Now, I have known X., my next
+door neighbor, for eleven years, and in that time I have never known
+him to have an Easter hat or an Easter coat or an Easter pair of pants.
+I saw him at the Opera lately and his wife had on a seal skin sacque,
+and plain X. himself had on no gloves. Why should X. be compelled to
+carry through life a bird of paradise, while he appears in the sombre
+and often shiny costume of the more humble crow? And now that I have
+asked that audacious question, let me ask another: Why is it that as
+soon as the frost of age touches a man he commences to tone down his
+dress, and as soon as it touches a woman she commences to tone hers
+up with all the hot house appliances to imitate the spring time of
+life. I don't ask this in a snarly spirit; but as a psychological
+riddle. Why is it that in November, with all her brown foliage and
+scarlet leaves and wind reddened sky, cannot be content with being
+handsome and natural, but should resort to the buds and flowers and
+bird-like airs of beautiful June to make her pretty. Ah, there are no
+flowers, no feathers, no ribbons, no latest fashions that can hold
+their own against Youth. Before it the milliner, the tailor and the
+mantua-maker are helpless to render effective assistance to Age. Ah,
+Youth, careless, painless, peerless, I drink to you--and put a drop
+of peppermint in it. Tom, I was up a little late with the boys last
+evening.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XII
+
+
+Somehow the town presents to me a bereaved appearance. Since the action
+of the authorities clearing the sidewalks, I seem to miss some of my
+best friends. The tenants of the pavement had become my companions,
+after a fashion, so familiar were they to me. The extravagant gentleman
+who stood in front of the clothing store, with his change of clothes
+every day and the fixed stare out of his rain-washed eyes, was one of
+my warmest friends. He was no fair weather friend. The dusts of March,
+the showers of April, made no difference with him. He was there, always
+there, with his waterproof for the rain, his duster for the summer
+heat, and his sou-wester perched on his head when the Equinox set in.
+He had one of the most even dispositions I ever knew and always regarded
+me with the same mild, far-off look, whatever uniform or decoration
+he wore. He was the same with a blue jumper and overalls as he was
+with a diagonal suit with "This style $25" flying from the button-hole.
+There was a great gap the morning he disappeared. The deserted street
+looked like a Sunday or a funeral or some other occasion of unusual
+sadness. I went in one day to inquire about him. I didn't have far to
+go; he had been tumbled into a corner with empty collar boxes, a broken
+coal scuttle, and some fire kindling. He appeared deeply mortified.
+"This is a strange fix you find me in, Mr. Boyzy," he said as he
+struggled to sit endwise on the bottom of the coal scuttle, "and it
+is a strange world we find both of ourselves in, sir. Great crimes are
+committed in the name of progress, sir, very great, and this is one
+of them. I have been a public man in this city for ten years, sir. I
+have guided the tastes of the public--few knew how to clothe themselves
+until I showed them, and few would buy their clothing until they had
+seen me. I have had men stand and discuss my clothes for hours, making
+up their minds about the spring fashions. These city authorities little
+know what they are doing. But what do they care? Look at their clothes
+and tell me how many of them fit. What is it to them that a public man
+and benefactor lies here in a pile of collar boxes? They say that the
+old ideas that admitted of my standing on the sidewalk are done away
+with, and that this is an age of progress. What sort of progress is
+this, that takes a man who has been prominent before the people for
+years and dumps him into a dust pile? Look at me! I have never lacked
+backbone. Why, I am all backbone. [He had a backbone of iron]. No man
+ever knew me to get out of the way of a crowd or go with it. I have
+been a consistent public man with a backbone for ten years and here
+I am in a dust-pile!" Here the coal scuttle slipped and my old friend
+tumbled into the collar boxes with a groan. As I left him I could not
+help thinking how many public men all consistency and backbone have
+made similar reputations with my dummy friend by never going with or
+getting out of the way of the crowd, and ended by being tumbled into
+the dust-bin just for the lack of a little wisdom. Alas, how like my
+dethroned friend we all are, in the respect of clamoring about our
+opinions and wrongs long after the public has forgotten both them and
+us.
+
+       *        *        *        *        *
+
+"This is a pretty condition for me to be in now, isn't it?" asked
+another old friend of mine that I went to look after. "Why, don't you
+remember me? I'm the fish that always used to be at the door as you
+went by." It was true, I could hardly remember him. He used to lie in
+state on a board on the sidewalk on hot days, half covered with ice,
+and his scales looking as bright as silver. Some mornings, I am afraid
+I used to catch a faint whiff of his breath, but of course this was
+not to be remembered against him in his great trouble now. His troubles
+had greatly changed him. From the aristocratic exclusiveness of the
+ice-board he had been reduced to being strung up by a string through
+his gills to a nail in the wall. The brightness of his scales was gone,
+and as far as rank went, he looked as ordinary as the bunch of humble
+hickory shad that hung near him. "What do you think of this way of
+treating a fish that has come three hundred miles from the coast to
+help you out in Lent? What sort of infidel authorities has this city
+got, to string up the friend of repentance and reform in this sort of
+way? Why, such a town as this ought to have nothing but herrings to
+keep Lent with, and they ought to be salt." It was no use trying to
+comfort my noble friend, but I could not help thinking that, fish that
+he was, he was human in finding his great trouble not so much in being
+strung up now, as in having seen better days and more distinction. And
+very human he was, too, in taking the ill-treatment of himself as an
+offence against Lent. We are so prone to take a grievance directed
+against ourselves as an affront to our politics, our church, or
+something else to which we bear about the same relation that a fish
+does to Lent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mature young woman who stood in front of the millinery store, and
+whom I have seen wear six different overcoats of various styles in one
+day, was among the victims of the new law. Her figure was one of the
+few that may correctly be termed wiry, but it was perfect. I may say
+that I have never seen a waist so slender, or a bust more perfect. But
+all of us have our defects; she had hers. In a fearful wind one day
+I made the discovery by her being blown over. She had no feet! I don't
+think she was the same woman after that terrible day, nor do I remember
+that the nose, that was turned awry by the fall, was ever straightened.
+When I spoke to her of the new law and her removal to a stand near the
+counter, she said it was a good thing. "No woman of proper feeling,"
+she said with some asperity, "would have borne it as long as I did.
+I never wanted to stand there and be gazed at by men, it looked so
+bold. As for those women of brass that like it, it is all very well,
+but I couldn't stand it. Admiration can never compensate a right-minded
+woman for the staring of men. A woman must be very bold indeed to enjoy
+it. I like this retired corner much better than out on the walk. It
+has a home feeling about it, and the domestic sphere is always a true
+woman's choice." It was borne in upon me somehow, as I listened to
+her, that a woman with a broken nose and no feet will always think the
+woman with a pretty nose and two feet bold. There is a good deal in
+this saying if you will only ponder over it. Ponder it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ignominiously stowed away in a back yard I saw an old friend that
+always brought many reflections to my mind when exhibited on the
+sidewalk--a coop of chickens. The most humiliated of all my old
+acquaintances--a dominiquer rooster--had his head up through the slats
+to explain the situation. "Here's a pretty howdy do!" he remarked.
+"What sort of treatment is this? I can't see anything here except old
+whiskey barrels and clothes lines and dry goods boxes. I can hardly
+tell when it is daybreak in this miserable old yard. Why, this morning
+I commenced crowing two hours too soon, and a Chinaman over there
+raised the window and fired a tin can at my head. I can't attend to
+my business in a place like this; there is another rooster around the
+corner been crowing all day and I can't get at him. Look you, I'm no
+common rooster; I'm no chicken just raised for the Town Authorities
+to eat; I'm a warrior. Just look at these legs and these spurs--." And
+just as my friend was struggling to get his foot up through the slats,
+a washwoman in the second story emptied her soapsuds over the coop.
+He disappeared under the shower, amid the wild screaming of the hens.
+A moment later a bedraggled head, with one eye closed by suds, looked
+out through the side bars and remarked in a saddened voice--"I suppose
+the city authorities would be satisfied now--if they could see this."
+The sudden change in my old friend from a warrior to a bundle of wet
+feathers shocked me into graver thoughts.
+
+Somehow, I have never seen a coop of chickens in all its glory on the
+sidewalk, that I did not think of the French Revolution and the Bastile.
+You have seen the picture--I cannot think of the painter's name now--of
+the members of the old regime in the prison amusing themselves, not
+knowing whose name was to be called next for the guillotine? To me
+there is a miniature human world in a chicken coop. All under sentence
+of death, and all eating and drinking, and clucking and crowing as if
+they were going to last forever. All scrambling and fighting over the
+grains of daily corn, even though the hand of the fatal purchaser is
+already descending into the mouth of the coop. Like their human brethren
+who do not wear feathers, the tallest and the strongest gets his head
+up through the slats and gets wider views of the world. He often
+mistakes the single street he can see for the Universe and crows out
+his discovery until he is picked out of the coop and hurried off to
+lose his head, an operation which teaches him that in fact he has
+discovered nothing. How like his brother, man!
+
+All his speculations, all his telescopic philosophies, all his
+discoveries, find plausible support until he stumbles on an open grave.
+There, man and chickens are dumb. Somehow, those who write and talk
+about the future never impress me so much with how much they know, as
+with how little. How absolutely nothing they can tell. How echoless
+is the Awful Silence into which they toss their petty pebbles of
+theories and hopes and speculations. It seems to me that if it were
+not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the
+'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty
+theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable.
+It is unbroken even by the second great event of Life--Death. It must
+be a strange sight viewed from elsewhere--this terrestrial chicken
+coop of ours, so small that if each of its inhabitants were to touch
+hands they would make a ring around it, sailing through the unbroken
+silence of Space. A thin crust over a molten centre whirling at a
+thousand miles an hour. A collision, a jar, just enough to move it out
+of its orbit would wreck it--its surface covered with ignorant human
+chickens, knowing neither where they came from nor where they are going
+to, scratching, fighting, crowing, clucking, smoothing their feathers
+in vanity, and cocking their telescopes at the firmament in hungry
+curiosity! It is a sight that must make the Angels weep.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XIII
+
+
+Ah, here you are again! What; you don't remember me? Why, I remember
+you. It was last Christmas, don't you know, in this store? You were
+buying a mustache-cup--there now, don't blush; perhaps it was slippers,
+or a smoking-cap. Anyhow, it was for him. Ah; so you do remember me.
+But why do you call him Mr. Smith, now? It was Jack, then. You never
+regarded him as anything but a friend? Of course not; but, my dear,
+when young people begin to look upon each other as friends--you see
+I accent it right--it is very apt to be the overture to a very
+difficult opera which is as likely to end with the curtain descending
+to the strains of slow music as any other way. I like to see the young
+interchanging gifts at holiday times, but I might be allowed to suggest,
+as the result of the observation of an old man, be careful of what you
+write in sending them. You have seen pictures of Cupid--so healthful,
+so chubby and rosy, and such promise of long life. It is a mistake;
+I know of no greater invalid--none of the gods whose health is so
+frail. I have known a cold word to give him a fatal chill. I have seen
+him fly, never to return, from a mere scent--a cigarette breath. I
+have known him taken incurably ill at the bad fit of a Jersey or the
+set of an overcoat. And I have seen him lie down and die without a
+word and nobody ever knew the reason why; even if he knew it himself,
+which I very much doubt. So, you see, it will be a very wise precaution
+in dealing with such an uncertain god to be prepared for everything.
+And one preparation is to be careful of what you put on paper. Many
+a young girl and many a young man, in an effort to write their little
+notes, sending or receiving holiday presents, often overstep the mark
+in trying to strike the proper elevated key. Don't abound in literary
+gush, no matter what are your sentiments in giving or receiving; if
+you write at all, write a plain, brief, dignified note which you can
+read five years after with perfect satisfaction. Notes are often
+misunderstood, sometimes we don't exactly understand ourselves when
+we write them, and so it is always safer to be on the conservative
+side. It will often save a good deal of vain regret and many wishes
+to goodness that you had taken this advice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And you here too! Going to surprise your husband with a present again?
+A copy of the Revised Version this time? Ah, that will give him a
+chance to give you a surprise next Christmas--by reading it. Ah, you
+should know Mrs. Boyzy, if you wish to know how to please your husband
+at Christmas. For now thirty years that estimable woman has opened her
+annual Christmas campaign on me as early as the month of October. With
+affectionate strategy I am lured into book stores, and variety stores,
+and china stores--last year she tolled me into a drug store--to discover
+by artful references to this thing and that, what I fancy. Now, as a
+matter of fact, having her, I fancy nothing else (I take it that the
+newest married man could get off nothing prettier than that), but I
+have become so used to the campaign, and also so unprincipled in my
+advices to shorten it, that I profess the liveliest admiration over
+about the second thing we come to. The result is that I often get
+presents of a novel character. Last year I got a hand-painted coal
+scuttle, and but a couple of Christmases before that, I had gotten a
+gaudily framed picture of some retired saint, who had been martyred
+and for all I know deservedly so. But the fashion of drug stores keeping
+holiday presents, once came near exposing my whole plan of self defence.
+My intense admiration of a handsomely ornamented cut glass bottle of
+Unfailing Lotion for Neuralgia, which I thought she was pointing
+out--when in fact she was trying to make me see a gorgeous dressing
+case--excited a suspicion even in her unsuspecting mind. But if I
+jest about this matter, it is not that I underestimate the sweetness
+of the practice of married people remembering each other at Christmas.
+I am not so sure that of all other gifts--not even excepting those to
+children--these are not the most disinterested and spring from the
+truest affection. It is no easy feat to have lived with a man for ten,
+fifteen, twenty years; to know his weakness thoroughly; to measure the
+wide distance from the heroic stature for which we took him, and the
+size into which thorough knowledge shrinks him; to have borne with all
+his eccentricities, his fault finding, his natural selfishness; to
+have discovered and to have known for years that he is after all like
+the rest of us only human, and yet at every recurring Christmas to
+send our affections back to the beginning and with a fresh and
+unimpaired love give him the mystic password of our hearts in a gift.
+If I sometimes laugh at the devices of my wife to find out what it is
+I want, I do not have the faintest smile at the patient and loving
+heart that inspires them. I do not know that I ever saw an angel, but,
+though her hair is tinged with gray, and youth has long since left her
+face, I never hear my wife, with her bright smile on Christmas morning,
+asking the old, girlish question, "What do you think I've got for you,"
+that I don't see in it that sort of absolution for the past and
+benediction for the future which it is said only angels bring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, I expected to see you here! I knew you would come! Why? Ah, my
+boy, every veteran knows well what comes after picket firing. Let me
+see: at church with her, concerts, soirees--where else could you be
+to-day but in here buying a present? Why, you bought her that last
+Christmas! Oh, I see, this Christmas it is for another girl! Come now,
+don't look conscious over it. The girls can't help it; they will change
+now and then, It is not their fault, but still it will happen. My boy,
+the business you are now in has by no means been reduced to a fixed
+science. No calculation yet made has reduced to a certainty any way
+of holding a girl after you think you have her. There is a good deal
+of money in store for the man that makes it--when he does. But she
+seemed--. There now, I know all about it; but you musn't hold a girl
+rigidly to what you think she seems. When you get to be as old as I
+am, you will know that girls have a hard, hard time of it. Custom won't
+allow them to do anything but seem. It doesn't allow them to tell a
+man that they like him, and, still worse, it doesn't allow them to
+tell him that they don't like him. You did go there, you know, pretty
+nearly all last year, didn't you? What could she do? Set the dogs on
+you? That would have been unmistakable, but in her set that isn't
+allowable. Be rude to you? She is a lady, how could she be rude? She
+shouldn't have accepted--. There now, be fair about this thing. How
+could she help accepting your attentions, your bonbons, your sleigh
+rides, your--well, your boring generally, if you will have it--without
+being rude? There isn't, under our social rules, a more defenceless
+creature on earth than an attractive girl in society, from attentions
+that are wearisome and unwelcome. Nor, if she maintains the
+self-respecting rules that society has laid down for her, is there a
+more helpless creature in obtaining what she wants. You often hear it
+flippantly said, that if a girl loves a man she can always let him
+know it. There never was a greater mistake. On the contrary, the poor
+young things, when they find it out, so far from being able to let the
+young fellow know it, commence a fearful struggle to keep him from
+knowing it. I suppose it is, so to speak, constitutional with them,
+and they can't help it. I have seen a gentle, well-bred young girl in
+such agonized fear of discovery that she rudely repulsed the common
+advances of politeness on the part of the object. Women lose their
+heads on the subject of love, as often, I sometimes think, as their
+hearts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why, you are only buying one little wagon this year; I thought I saw
+you buying two last Christmas; one of the little ones has outgrown it,
+I reckon? What, dead! I beg your pardon. It was thoughtless of me.
+Dead! Then he has outgrown it. Outgrown it all--sickness, pain,
+disappointments, a long, weary life--all at a single leap. But this
+does not comfort you. Ah, no; nothing comforts us for those we have
+seen slip into the dark. It will be but human in you to miss him this
+Christmas, and to think of the hundred ways in which he would have had
+pleasure if he had only lived. I think that in the death of children
+there is an added grief to that we feel when men and women die. They
+are so little, so helpless, one cannot help feeling anxious about how
+they will get along in the new world they have gone to; who will take
+care of them, and whether they will be neglected. When the time comes
+for putting the children to bed in the evening, we cannot help thinking
+about the little one who has gone from life, and wondering as we sit
+by the firelight whether there is any one taking care of it. We can't
+help feeling sure that it wants to be with its mother; it always used
+to when night came on. It always climbed into her lap when dark came
+and it surely wants to be back to-night. It cannot be happy, for it
+is among strangers, and if it is unhappy, there is but one place for
+it, its home, and but one bosom on which to lay its head, its mother's.
+And so our human heart talks on in its hot grief. It is a great comfort
+to remember, after awhile, that there is a Father who watches over it
+as tenderly as he has watched over all his children, and who will guide
+the little one into a new and higher life, as He will us older children
+who come to Him later in life, like tired and weary children seeking
+a mother's breast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so you didn't know what a castle in Spain was? Why, you have lived
+in one. In one! you have lived in a hundred, and if you were older you
+would have lived in a thousand. Why, everybody lives in castles in
+Spain sometimes. Let me see how to tell you about it. You know your
+elder sister that young Pettengill comes to see so often, and whom you
+hate so because you have to go to bed early? Well, your sister lives
+in a castle in Spain. She has had it papered and painted, and moved
+to another street to be near her dearest girl friend so as to make
+visiting convenient, and she has had the front yard fixed with flowers,
+particularly those he likes, and has had a door-plate put on the castle
+door with a name on it, CLARENCE PETTENGILL, in large letters. I
+remember when your father married your mother forty years ago, that
+she lived in a castle in Spain, and to her eyes your father was clad
+in shining armor and wore long plumes in his hat, and to those same
+eyes was a Hero of high degree. Why, even the old gentleman who is
+writing this to you, has lived in those castles, and as he looks back
+at them now with their bare walls and broken windows and tumbled down
+appearance generally, he often wonders how he came to build them. Some
+times, more especially at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now
+uncertain steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles he
+has lived in. So beautiful when he built them, so brightly painted by
+Hope and Pride and Ambition and all the other celebrated artists of
+that day; now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know them,
+and some clear faded out of sight. The castle, little one, that you
+are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS,
+and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have,
+such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of
+imagining that you will never see realized. After this week is over,
+you will take down the big sign over the door, close the blinds, and
+stand watching with grieved heart while your castle fades into the
+air. There is nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old, that
+is not something like these castles in Spain, and but One Thing, that
+is not tainted with their evanescent life. God grant, little one, that
+at the end of our lives, you and I may have clung to that one thing,
+and that we may have so lived that the many mansions of our Father in
+a fairer world may not be for us--castles in Spain.
+
+FINIS.
+
+
+
+
+(Envoy)
+
+FOR A SOLDIER
+
+(Henry C. Tinsley, Died August 21, 1902)
+
+
+    Not 'mid the din of battle long ago,
+      But in the lingering clutch of later pain
+      Death found him, whom we shall not see again
+    Lifting a fearless front to every foe.
+    Yet shall suns somewhere shine for him, and blow
+      The lilies and the roses without stain,
+      Who through the lengthened years in heart and brain
+    Knew most of storm and winter with its snow.
+
+    For it is written in the starry sky,--
+      In the vast spaces and the silences,--
+      That God's eternal universe is his
+    Who fears not, though he live or if he die.
+      --A soldier to the dauntless end was he,
+      As riding with his red artillery.
+
+                                    ARMISTEAD C. GORDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Observations of a Retired Veteran
+by Henry C. Tinsley
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN ***
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