Part 8

When, therefore, you stroll about the delightful country in his neighborhood and mark the abodes of the rich and great, and say to him, "That is a charming place," Mr. Tibbins answers, "Yes, he has dogs; I never go there." Mr. Tibbins was naturally very much exhilarated by the hydrophobia excitement last summer, and hoped at one time that the public feeling might be carefully kindled to a general crusade against dogs. "I lately read in Mr. Warner's letter from the Nile," he said, "of an African king who had never seen a horse until Colonel Long came riding into his capital. Think, oh, my friend, of the happy island valley of Avillon, where never a dog barked loudly or was ever seen." Of course so severe a taste as Tibbins's in a world so largely canine produces inconvenience, as a dislike to butter in a society which holds to a natural and necessary relation between bread and butter will often expose the dissenter to difficulty. Such a man, in a crowded and elegant assembly, who at supper has incautiously bitten a heavily buttered sandwich, in the midst of a bout of badinage with youth and beauty, understands the emotion of those who, with Mr. Tibbins, dislike to have their ankles smelled at by dogs, yet who suddenly, within a neighbor's grounds and far from help, perceive that a dog is actually engaged in that office.

But Mr. Tibbins went out merrily upon New-Year's morning, resolved at least to pay one visit long neglected to a neighbor who had become his neighbor the summer before, who had given no signs of dogs, and who, as Tibbins assured himself, was much too sensible a man to allow them about the house and grounds. Our friend began the day prosperously, finding everybody cordial and gay, and doing, as he thought, his full share towards the enlivenment of each call. At last he came to the new neighbor's, and went humming gayly up the neat plank-walk from the gate, when, turning briskly around the house--putting it, as it were, between himself and retreat--he was advancing rapidly towards the front door when he suddenly stopped, with a sickening sense of betrayal, as it were, in the house of a friend, for directly before him, within easy spring, so to speak, lay a large dog upon the door-mat and directly under the bell. He was asleep, and upon perceiving him Mr. Tibbins, as if upon tiptoe for silence, reconnoitred the situation. To advance and ring the bell was simple madness, for the dog would of course awake the moment a foot struck the step, and in the confusion of sudden awakening and of close quarters with an intruder he would probably be very reckless and sanguinary, and not in the least amenable to the "good fellow" blandishment. Mr. Tibbins, therefore, without moving, looked at the windows, hoping to see somebody looking out whom he might with beaming pantomime summon to the door, and so save himself the contact which seemed to be inevitable. But there was no one looking out, and the closed windows seemed to him to stare with blank indifference, so that he says he had had before no idea how cruel windows can be. It then occurred to him that if he could open communication with the kitchen, and entice some maid or man to the door without ringing, the difficulty would disappear, because the maid or man would pacify the dog. But to reach the kitchen required a lateral movement which would leave the enemy directly across his line of retreat. Moreover, any movement whatever exposed Mr. Tibbins to the risk of making a noise, which would arouse the foe and precipitate the engagement. He therefore maintained his position, looking hopefully towards the kitchen, but, seeing no one, he reluctantly held a further counsel with himself.

The obvious heroic course was to step upon the piazza and ring the bell. But he saw again that it was impossible to touch the bell without bringing himself close to the dog, who would then, of course, awake and snap immediately at the nearest object, which would be Tibbins his leg. And what was the possible use of heroism under such circumstances? He might as well advance and kick the dog. But was the dog asleep? Was he not dead? Was he not--why shouldn't he be--a stuffed dog, an old family favorite, perhaps, now placed upon his familiar resting-place as his own monument? This thought cleared the prospect for a moment, but instant gloom shut down again, as Mr. Tibbins saw a slight breathing motion, and perceived that the beast still lived. One of the advantages, or misfortunes, of New-Year's Day in the country, according to the point of view, is the infrequency of visitors. To our friend this infrequency seemed to be, upon this occasion, a misfortune. Had there only been a merry group turning the corner at the moment, he would have joyously joined it, and so long as he could see other legs between himself and his enemy his soul would have been at rest.

But his position was peculiarly solitary, nor did any other visitor appear, and Mr. Tibbins remained for some time motionless regarding the situation. There was no sign of relief. No visitor came to go in, so none came out. No friendly face shone at the windows, no helping hand opened the door. At any moment the dog might open his eyes, and, in that case, he would certainly not be content with a survey of the situation. Mr. Tibbins, who is no mean classic, remembered Xenophon and various other great and renowned commanders who retired in good order and not in the least demoralized, and reflecting that the sage truly defined prudence as the crown of wisdom, he gently turned and, careful by no rude noise to disturb the peaceful slumbers of an innocent animal which, some poets have suggested, might properly share our heaven, he tiptoed quietly around the house, and rapidly descending the plank-walk, firmly closed the gate behind him, and felt his heart swelling with gratitude for a great mercy.

A few days afterwards he met his neighbor, and said to him that he had designed to call upon him on New-Year's Day, but that he had discovered a dog in the path, and as he never called where dogs were kept, he had been compelled to lose the pleasure of a visit. He then told the story of his attempt, in the midst of which the neighbor broke into the most prolonged and immoderate laughter, and when Mr. Tibbins had ended, said to him, "My dear sir, that dog is immemorially old and superannuated, and he is blind, deaf, and toothless."

"Indeed!" replied Mr. Tibbins. "But he might not have been."

"And yet I will confess," he said to the Easy Chair, later, "that the incident is a very pretty sermon upon the deceitfulness of appearances, which I respectfully offer to your acceptance."

THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH

There are still villages among the hills of New England--we cannot call them remote hills, because the locomotive darts up every valley and fills the woods upon the highest hill-side with the shrill, eager cry of hurrying life and bustling human society, but even where the steam is heard, softened and far away, there are yet villages nestling in the hills in which also the old New England Sabbath lingers and nestles. The village street, broad and arched with thick-foliaged sugar-maples, is always still. In the warm silence of a summer noon, as you sit reading upon the piazza or in the shade of a tree, the only moving object in the street is a load of hay slowly passing under the maples, drawn by oxen, or a group of loiterers in front of the village store pitching quoits. The creak of the wagon, the ring of the quoits, or the laugh and exclamation of the players are the only sounds, except, indeed, the musical clangor of the blacksmith's anvil, as his quick hammer moulds the sparkling horseshoe or beats out the bar.

These are drowsy summer sounds that only emphasize the stillness of the week-day. But the stillness of Sunday is startling. A faint tinkle of cows in the early morning filing to the pasture, the warning shout of the barefooted boy who drives them, are the only sounds that break the Sabbath silence, except, again, the chirp and song of birds in the trees, which are no respecters of days, and which sing as blithely, even in the deacon's maples, on "Sabbath morning" as in the tavern ash on the Fourth of July. The cows pass and all is still. The street is deserted, save by, at intervals, a solitary figure upon some small errand. The sun lies hot upon the pastures and hill-sides. There is no mail on Sunday, no newspaper, no barber to visit. Now and then men in their daily dress are seen at the barn door or in the shed or yard doing their chores. They are bringing wood, milking, feeding the cattle. But all is spectral. There is no sound. Even the wind in summer fears to be a Sabbath-breaker. It is an enchanted realm. Have the blue-laws such vitality? Are we still held by their grim spell?

It is nine o'clock, and the meeting-house bell, with a bold voice of authority, as if it had the sole right to disturb the silence and to speak out, warns the village and the outlying farms that it is the Sabbath, and everybody must prepare to come to meeting; and the little children hear the bell with awe as if it were a living voice, and sacred as a part of the Sabbath, and to be heeded under unknown penalties. Obey thy father and mother; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt go to meeting--seem to them all commandments of the first table. The sound of the bell lingers in their ears and hearts as a Thus saith the Lord. And, lo! at the second bell, the men, who have changed their daily dress and put on their Sabbath clothes, issue from the houses on the village street with their wives and children, and through the street, closely following each other and pounding along in a cloud of dust, comes the long line of wagons from the farms. The sun beats down remorselessly, and the man in heavy woollens, such as he wears in the sleigh in January, sits between two women in their Sabbath garments, the horses trot with a Sabbath jog, and all turn up to the stone platform by the meeting-house, upon which the women alight, and the man drives the horse under the shed, and then chats soberly with the others at the door.

But the minister passes in, not clad in gown and bands and cocked hat of the older day, but in plain black clothes. The chatting loiterers follow him in. The bell which has gathered the village into the sacred fold rests from its labors. There is no one in the street. There is no sound. But after a few moments the music of "Old Hundred" pours out of the open doors and windows of the meeting-house, sung by a well-balanced and well-trained choir. It is the opening hymn, and it has a full, vigorous, triumphant sound. Once more Thus saith the Lord. There is another interval of silence, but at a little distance you can hear the voice of reading and prayer. Hark! another hymn. It is "Federal Street," or "Coronation," or "Dundee," but whatever it is, it is a strain from other years, and voices and faces and scenes and days that are no more all blend in the familiar music, and a Sabbath benediction rests upon the listener's soul.

A longer silence follows, broken by fragmentary sounds of energetic speech. Is the preacher emphasizing and elucidating the five points? Is he denouncing and alarming that tough regiment in woollen, or winning the wondering and doubting mind? Is his sermon upon an official and perfunctory discourse by which little children are soothed to sleep and in which the elders like unqualified damnation and the hottest fire as a toper likes "power" in his dram? Or is his pure and manly life and conversation his true preaching, and the Sabbath sermon only a statement of the principles of such holy living, and a revival of the colors in the immortal portrait of the holy life of the Gospel?

Before we can answer there is a burst of music, then two strokes of the bell to announce that "meeting is out;" then an issue of the congregation, a procession homeward, a driving away of wagons, and soon once more the solitary street. In the afternoon there is the Sabbath-school, and the good pastor preaches at one of the school-houses in a farther part of the town. But it is always the Sabbath, in every sight and sound until the sun has set, and then from the neighboring house upon the hill above the village street comes a clear, resonant soprano voice singing hymns and prolonging the solemn spell of the holy day.

The tithing-men are gone, and the deacons do not sit severe and conspicuous in the meeting-house, and the minister has not the air of a lord spiritual of the village; and the genius of modern times and the spirit of the age are entertained with full consciousness of what they are. But it is still the sober and constrained and decorous New England Sabbath which recurs every seventh day; and the honest, industrious, intelligent, self-respecting, plain-living village recalls remotely the day of the severer dispensation, and illustrates the noble manhood that the severe dispensation fostered.

THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS. 1884

On a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public attention.

Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city, and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars. The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials, which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.

But the obstructing mob did not relax their purpose. They hastened to another hall where men of respected and even noted names harangued them violently, introducing resolutions decrying the purpose of the original meeting; and suddenly hearing that the projectors were assembled elsewhere, the crowd rushed wildly to the place, which was a small chapel, and, swarming in eager for crime, found the chapel deserted. The holders of the meeting had accomplished their object and retired from the rear of the building as the mob burst in through the front doors. The press of the city, with one or two notable exceptions, the next morning celebrated the intended suppression of a peaceful meeting by an angry mob as if it had been a national victory over piratical invaders. It denounced the leaders of the meeting with a malignant bitterness with which the familiars of the Inquisition might have anathematized Luther and his friends, and the few voices in the papers which protested against treating the holders of the meeting with violence, yet spoke of them in a strain of abhorrence which virtually branded them as public enemies.

Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm? They were a few persons who asserted the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and demanded that all Americans should enjoy the rights which the Declaration affirmed to belong to all men. The object of the meeting was the formation of a city antislavery society, and those who assembled in October of this year were the survivors of that meeting. Their object has been accomplished, and the views whose announcement fifty years ago convulsed the city are now common-places of universal acceptance. It would be incredible that the sentiment of the city within easy memory of men living was so hostile to the American principle and its fundamental guarantees if a still later experience had not illustrated the same hostility.

It seems almost cruel to recall the names of those who spoke of the purposes of men who proposed to appeal to public opinion against a monstrous public wrong, and of the men themselves, as "the folly, madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men," and as "persons who owe what notoriety they have to their love of meddling with agitating subjects." This was the way in which those who thought themselves to be in the van of freedom and of civilization spoke of the beginning of one of the great historic movements in the progress of the race, and of men who took up the work of the fathers of the country only to carry it further and logically forward. It was with this stupid and insolent contempt that the press, which prided itself upon its liberty, and in a country which guaranteed the right of free peaceful assembly and free speech, struck at both of them as fatal to the common welfare. Had Philip II. and the sanguinary Alva controlled a press in the Netherlands three centuries ago, they would have denounced the beginning of the great contest with the black despotism of the Inquisition in the same tone of vindictive hatred and disdain with which that little meeting at the Chatham Street chapel was assailed by the press of New York in 1833.

It is no wonder that the pioneers of that famous evening wished to come together upon its fiftieth anniversary to rejoice that they had entered into the promised land. The fact that their meeting excited no general interest, and was almost unobserved, was the evidence of the completeness of their triumph. Their "folly, madness, and mischief" have become patriotic wisdom. The "bold and dangerous men" have grown into a mighty nation. And for the brethren of the press that anniversary has some very significant suggestions. First and chief is the consideration that the spirit of the newspapers, and not of the meeting in Chatham Street chapel, was the dangerous spirit. There is no blacker traitor to popular institutions than the man who incites an angry mob against peaceful meetings and free speech. Free speech is precious not for popular but for unpopular opinions. It is to secure in the land of the Inquisition a voice against the inquisition; in the land of slavery, a voice for liberty. That freedom has overthrown those two tyrants by developing a public opinion which has made them impossible. The first duty of a free press is to defend the right of the free assertion of unpopular opinions, however dangerous they may seem to government or to society; and it is but just to record that the only paper in New York which, "when this old coat was new," stated clearly and conclusively the true principle upon this subject was the _Journal of Commerce_.

If, among the exulting crowd that welcomed King William of glorious and happy memory to England, a spectator had seen the flowing white locks of some old soldier of Cromwell's Ironsides, as the men of Hadley were fabled to have seen the venerable head of Goffe, the regicide, suddenly appearing as their deliverer, he would have felt his heart throbbing with gratitude at the vision of one of the heroes who founded the liberty which William came to complete. So some musing observer in the church where the reverend graybeards met to renew their friendship and to tell their story might well have gazed with gratitude, amid the peace and prosperity of the country, upon the thinned and thinning remnant of that old guard whose constancy and devotion made that peace and prosperity possible.

REFORM CHARITY

The State Board of Charities in New York would deal severely with Elia if it found him upon the street, stammering out his admiration of the fine histrionic powers of a beggar, and searching in his pocket for a penny. Lamb said that it was shameful to pay a crown for a seat in the theatre to enjoy the representation of woes that you knew to be fictitious, and to grudge a sixpence to the street performer who was so excellent that you could not tell whether his sufferings were real or affected. He is undoubtedly responsible for a great deal of easy and irresponsible alms-giving, which greatly increases human suffering and the expense of society. It is not possible to conceive anything more comical than Lamb's probable reception of a politico-economical or scientific view of charity. He would have felt his genius for humor to be hopelessly surpassed. His view would have been the ludicrous aspect of the idea which is more solemnly held by those who regard ordinary alms-giving as one of the cardinal virtues, and who have a vague conviction that a liberal disbursement of money to the poor in this world is a strong lien upon endless felicity in the next. There is, indeed, something very affecting in the old picture of conventional charity--the groups of disabled and destitute assembling at the great gate or in the courtyard, and the benign priests distributing food and clothing. And there is a similar picturesque interest in the ancient English bounties--a trust which secures to every wayfarer who may demand it a loaf of bread or a mug of beer.

That charity meant this, and nothing more, was long the conviction, as it was the tradition, of society. It was thought to have the highest Christian sanction. There were to be always poor among us. The poor were to be relieved, and relief, or charity, consists in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Yet out of that simple, unreflecting, seemingly innocent faith, have sprung enormous suffering, demoralization, and crime. The whole subject of charitable relief was as misunderstood as that of penal imprisonment before John Howard. There will be criminals, was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from crime, not the improvement of criminals. The result of this view was that society dismissed the subject, and regarded prisoners as mere outcasts, so that the inhumanity of their treatment was revolting. Happily the neglect revenged itself. The jails became sores. They were nurseries of loathsome disease. Judges and sheriffs were smitten by the pestilence that exhaled from prisons, and John Howard, like a purifying angel, in cleansing the prisons began also to cleanse society.