Part 15

It is because I like old things that I paid a visit to the old TRIBUNE Buildings. I have a passion for old buildings. The smell of antiquity about them is as refreshing in the modern combination of smells as the bouquet of good wine in a villainous beer cellar. I like to trace all the habits and peculiarities of the dead and gone men and women, which, in the process of time, have been ingrained into the building, and become part and parcel of it. I have no objection to a ghost or two--none of your mice in the wainscotting, or swaying beams in the attic, but the good old-fashioned ghost of some poor soul, with streaming black hair and pale face, who concealed her malady and carried her secret with her under the turf, and, discontented in Heaven, _must_ come back to the old place where _he_ used to be, and walk under the trees where they used to walk--the trees which know the secret as well as she, for they heard it; or the ghost of the boy who ran away and went to sea and never came home again, whose sad story most any wave crawling up the sand will tell you, if you will listen aright; or the ghost of that wrinkled old flint who hid his ingots under the tiles of the hearth, and comes back now and then to see if they are safe.

I did not see any spirits in the old building; quite the contrary. There was a great deal of life there. It was night when I went there, but by the moonlight I saw some strange sights. Our late co-tenants, the rats, mice, cockroaches and spiders, were holding a general mass-meeting in the various rooms, discussing the changed aspect of affairs. An antique rat, of venerable appearance and gray whiskers, covered with the scars of many a hard-fought fight, and with a tail sadly mutilated by the numerous inkstands and paper-weights which had followed him into his hole many a time and oft, occupied the Managing Editor's old desk, the empty pigeon-holes of which brought him into admirable perspective. He acted as Chairman of the meeting, and presided with dignity, holding a dusty document in his hand for a gavel, which had been laid away fifteen years ago as of immense value, and never thought of since--just as you and I, you know, who think we are of so much value, will be laid away shortly in a pigeon-hole, and never thought of again. Several rows of rats, who had come down from a former generation, occupied an old table, sitting erect, and manifesting a proper appreciation of the spirit of the meeting. The younger rats were compelled to shift for themselves, and were sprinkled about the floor. The gas pipe running up the wall was festooned with mice who looked down upon the assembly with interested countenances, while the three blind mice of song notoriety could be distinguished by their tails, that is, as much of their tails as escaped the carving knife, which protruded from a hole in the wall. Being bereft of the blessing of sight, it was but natural that they should make the mistake of turning their backs upon the Chairman, but they could hear all that was said. The rat who lived in a well, and who, when he died, went to a warmer climate, you may not be aware returned from that place some time since. He was present as an invited guest from the Museum. The cockroaches looked out of the cracks in every direction, and balanced themselves dexterously on shreds of wall paper. The spiders occupied the centres of their webs, apparently asleep, but in reality wide awake, as one unfortunate blue-bottle fly found, who got caught, and was immediately served up and sent to the spiders of the Local-Room as a present. Besides these, there were a few score of old fogy mosquitoes, left over from last year, and a handsome representation of those quiet little brown bugs addicted to bedsteads, and pronounced odor, whom I do not like to mention by name. The Chairman was listening to the complaints of the multitude, for famine was staring them in the face, and some means must be adopted for self-preservation. A motion to serve out an injunction on the TRIBUNE Company, and compel them to replace the goods they had carried away, was canvassed, but failed of rat-ification. One large, portly rat, with a very benevolent face, and getting gray, whom I at once recognized as an old friend I had seen on my old desk many a time, banqueting on paste, was complaining particularly of me. He characterized such conduct as despicable in the highest degree. It was a betrayal of friendship, a breach of confidence, and he would never again repose trust in a biped. All that he had found in my desk, during a visit that evening, was a dried up bouquet or two, rusty pens, one scissor blade, a photograph of a superannuated prima donna, a paper of pins, and a huge package of tickets to amateur concerts. There was a time when he was young and strong. In those days he could gnaw a file, and derive considerable culinary consolation from a paper-weight, but now he was obliged to conform his diet to a weakened digestion and disordered liver. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger, and regretted that Pickle should be fickle.

At this point, a young mouse, perched upon the top of the gas pipe, in a piping voice complained that he had just commenced going through Abbott's History of the War. It was slow work, but he had got through the covers, and part way through the introduction, and he didn't like to be interrupted in this manner. It was true he hadn't derived much sustenance from the thing, but it was a matter of principle when he commenced a piece of work, to keep at it if it killed him. Some fifteen or twenty old fossilized rats, with their wrinkled faces, scanty hairs and shrunk shanks, made the same complaint with reference to the Patent Office Reports and commercial statistics. To be sure they had not thriven well. One of them had devoured half the Georgian Bay Canal; another had swallowed two Board of Trade Reports, and had got as far as lard in the third, to which he was looking forward with great expectations, being then unprofitably engaged upon lumber; a third had almost exhausted himself with devouring a census table, and was just in sight of some quotations of cheese; a fourth had swallowed the Smithsonian Institution, and put the Covode Investigation on the top of it, and was just ready to attack the American Cyclopedia, in which he was sure to find something to agree with him and repay him for the time he had wasted. A sentimental little mouse complained that she had just got into Mrs. E. D. E. N. Alphabet Southworth's "How He Won Her," and was interrupted, at a critical moment, when "he" and "her" were about to say something nice. She was dying to know "how he won her," and she might go down to a premature grave without the knowledge of that interesting secret. A grave looking rat, with a streak of white fur around his neck, and troubled with a slight cough arising from an affection of the throat, announced that he had devoted several nights of hard labor, in getting through the back of a Biblical Cyclopedia, and had just reached the title page. All the world was before him. Vistas of Hebraic and other sorts of lore, opened before his longing eyes. He was about to enter, when the prize was snatched away. He consoled himself with the reflection that all earthly matters are illusions, but he could not help thinking now and then how pleasant that Cyclopedia would have been. There was one wretched old rat who had eaten up a volume of Swinburne, two duplicates of Walt Whitman, and was feasting upon a gorgeous picture of the spectacle of Undine. He had eaten up four blonde wigs, sixteen legs of ballet girls, and left eight coryphees with a leg apiece. He was very indignant over his disappointment, and even swore about it, for which he was called to account by the grave-looking rat with a slight cough. The wicked rodent growled out something in broken Rattish, and retired to his hole, out of which he shook his tail in defiance. Presently four or five good little mice, whom I had not observed before, with their faces very clean, and their fur smoothed down very sleekly, made their complaint in a weak kind of utterance. It was to the effect that they had discovered a little stock of Sunday School books in a paper box, which were very affecting, and narrated how "Little Freddie" and "Good Teddie" and others, committed forty feet of texts in one day, which disagreed with them so that they died very early, not being good enough for this world. They had just succeeded in getting into the box, and now the books were gone.

In this manner, complaint after complaint was made, and the meeting adjourned to another evening without taking action. You should have seen the assembly after adjournment. The whole mass of rats and mice rushed pell-mell through the dusty heaps of papers on the floor. One set danced a polka on fragments of editorials touching the finances and internal revenue, taxation and other topics. In the local room a rather spare rat, with long reddish hair, mounted the City Editor's desk, and read off, to the edification of the crowd, several mutilated fragments of a "Horrible Murder," "Atrocious Villainy in Bridgeport," "Destructive Fire in Holstein," "Scandal Case on Michigan Avenue," "Religious Announcements," etc. In the Commercial Room several casualties occurred. One unfortunate mouse was nearly choked to death with a column of figures which he found on the floor, and attempted to swallow. Another, of a sentimental turn of mind, went insane trying to understand some commercial quotations he found in an antique looking scrap-book, and three incautious little mice, venturing too hastily into Colbert's Astronomy, fell into the Dipper and couldn't get out, until an old rat helped them with the North Pole and a line dropped from the plane of the ecliptic, through the parallax of the sun, whatever that is. In another room, the cockroaches had a carnival in the Night Editor's coffee-pot. It was one of the most touching sights in the world to see them enter in festive procession at the top and come out through the nose. On my own old desk, twenty-three assorted cockroaches, of a beautiful bronze color, each one of whom I have killed twenty-three times in twenty-three various ways, were dancing a can-can. A few of the odoriferous, small brown bugs stood round in various attitudes, like supernumeraries, while an old rat, against whom I once swore eternal war, as Hannibal swore against the Romans, beat time with his stump of a tail. I forgave the rat, but I shall never forget the scene. I shall miss those cockroaches in the coming days, surrounded by the inanimate splendors of the new desk, upon which I write you to-day, looking no more upon the brick walls, but sitting in a flood of roseate light, which pours through the new window from the dying day. I could not bear to interfere with the sports of those poor creatures, and I left them there in the moonlight, engaged in their wild revels. I cannot say with any degree of veracity that I loved them while living with them, but still I know that I shall miss them, and their innocent little ways.

To rat, and mouse, and cockroach, and odoriferous bug, and spider; to the old desk, and the withered bouquets; to the old rooms, which have seen so many come and go, and one of tempered judgment, and calm speech, of dignified presence and upright life, a fast friend and sure adviser, who left us one morning to rejoin her who had gone to Heaven a little while before him; to many pleasant associations and happy scenes; to the familiar stairs worn deeply with the yearly tread of feet as the water weareth away the rock; to all but memory, hail and farewell! And welcome the new!

May 1, 1869.

_OLD BLOBBS' OPINIONS._

Old Blobbs came up to see me the other day. He breathed very hard when he came into the room, was very red in the face, and wiped his forehead vigorously with his yellow bandanna, for the stairs troubled him somewhat. Blobbs is not what he was forty years ago--a broad-breasted, strong-legged, deep-lunged young fellow. The bucket creaks now in the well, and the grasshopper begins to be a burden. We all hope the pitcher may not be broken for a long time to come, but we see many signs that he is on the sun-down side of the hill, and in his melancholy moods he talks about the shadows down in the valley whither he is going. I think, however, that he will never cease his hatred of shams; that he will always delight to strip off all the fine clothes from human pretence; that he will never admit that respectability is whatever keeps a gig, and that, under all the rubbish of the world, he will contend there is something real, and that it is his duty to find it out. He believes, as I do, that this great world is a type of the Godlike; that the history of man from the days when Adam dwelt in Eden, down to this blessed May morning, so full of spring's odorous promise, is a gospel in itself; that the morning stars sing together now as of old; and that our souls are kept in subservience to our bodies, running of errands for them, or concealed beneath aprons doing the work of the waiter, these starry strangers who should only be allowed to fulfil their own missions.

When Blobbs had recovered his breath, he signified his desire to say a few words from the new desk, and I left him in possession. When I returned, I found the following, written in a large, bold hand, and underscored to give emphasis, I suppose. I give you the document just as he wrote it, underscorings and all:

"The _Sin_ of the American nation, sir, is a holiday. The unpardonable folly is a LAUGH. Sport is unworthy a man born on American soil. Recreation is an exploded idea, sir, which has come down to us from a former generation, and if there is anything which an American looks upon with utter contempt, it is a former generation. There is no retrospect or prospect between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is now and always a simple _spect_. Every man has a likeness of Mammon set up on his mantel, and to spare one day from the worship of that small god, is to expose himself to the danger of not being an old man at thirty, and comfortably into his grave before fifty. Some unfortunate individuals manage to get beyond fifty, but they are like old parchments, faded, yellow, and wrinkled, with all the characters upon them effaced. American babies are begotten of _fret on one side, and hurry on the other_, and these two forces are forever propelling them toward a six-by-two patch of ground with a stone at each end, one of which is Ananias and the other Sapphira. American babies are _never children_, sir. They make one step from bibs to breeches, and from pinafores to _paniers_. An American man of fourteen has squeezed the orange of life dry, and an American woman of twelve is ready to receive proposals of marriage, and sink her identity in kettles and pans. There is no law against it, sir. Nature has kindly preordained that there shall be no bar in the intimate relations of humanity and asininity. If a man wants to go through life like a locomotive, I suppose there is nothing to prevent it, but I don't want him to ask me to ride on his train. I know the rails are laid on every kindly feeling and elegant grace, and that the smallest flower can't grow between them. I know that there are all sorts of obstructions on the track, bankruptcies, suicides, diseases, etc., which will prevent him from getting into the three score and ten station which God Almighty intended for him. People come into the world in a great hurry, and immediately commence their preparations to get out of it. They pile up a heap of treasures, and by the time they get it piled up, under the sod they go, where there is not room for a five cent shin-plaster.

"What made me think of all these things, sir, was the official announcement of the city authorities that when the grandest achievement of this or any other age is celebrated next week, business will be suspended _for one hour_![2] Actually for one hour, sir. SIXTY MINUTES, SIR!! And the wretched man who doesn't recommence his work and put on steam exactly when the hand reaches the _sixty-first minute_, is unworthy the inestimable privileges of an American citizen, sir. If I had been the Common Council of the city of Chicago, I would have passed a law that the merchant who did not hang out the banners on the outer wall from sunrise to sunset, who did not double the wages of his clerks for that day, and order them to celebrate, who did not eat double his usual amount, who did not execute a _can-can_ on the top of a flour barrel, who did not make Mrs. Merchant eternally his joyful debtor, by the item of a new hat, and allow the little Merchants to ruin at least one suit of clothes in a mud pie bakery, and who did not retire to bed at night feeling that he was all right at heart, however he might be in his head, should be liable to fine and imprisonment. _Business will be suspended for one hour!_ Bah!

"I tell you, sir, when Gabriel blows his horn, and summons us to square up our accounts, it will be extremely doubtful whether Chicago will suspend business more than one hour to accommodate him; and, as I am positive that it will take over an hour to settle up the accounts _of this city_, it seems to me there is going to be some confusion. It may be possible that Chicago will not be recognized at all on that occasion. If she is, I hope some arrangements may be made by which she can spare a day or two for Gabriel's business.

"I tell you, sir, we travel too fast. We don't take enough time for recreation. If we would only halt occasionally in this everlasting chase after the Almighty Dollar, there would be less occasion for hospitals, insane asylums, and penitentiaries. There would be fewer suicides, and general smash-ups and break-downs. There is no good reason why a man shouldn't be just as fresh at forty as at twenty, but, as we go now, there isn't one man in a thousand who is fit for anything but a calculating machine at forty. Physically, he isn't worth a pinch of snuff. Mentally and morally, he is dried up; and the women, sir, are just as bad as the men. It pains me, sir, to see our women fade so quickly. This fast pace is killing to them. Brought up in hothouses, and forced beyond nature in their growth, they mature when they should be in bud, and wither when they should be in maturity, and are not of much further use, except for running sewing-circles, and drinking weak tea. It pains me, sir, to see the young girls on our streets, with that callous sort of countenance, and knowing expression, which show that they have got out of illusion into reality, and to see so many pale, careworn, bent and faded women, out of whom all buoyant life has departed long since, and who can no more keep time than a watch with a broken spring.

"In the mean time, _business will be suspended for one hour_. Bah! Boy's play sir; all boy's play!!

* * * * * * * * *

"These are my opinions, sir, and it is quite immaterial to me who knows them. And, sir, if your new desk will give them any extra weight, I shall be glad of it. I do not know that Mrs. Blobbs will agree with all that I have written to you, but that also is quite immaterial. She is a remarkable woman sir, and _principally remarkable for not thinking as I do_.

"Allow me to subscribe myself, sir.

"Your very obedient servant,

"JOHN BLOBBS."

May 8, 1869.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The completion of the Pacific Railroad.

_TYPES._

At the breakfast table this morning, time hung rather heavily on our hands, for the breakfast was not altogether a success. Old Blobbs was a little sulky, as Mrs. Blobbs had not rested well during the night. When Mrs. Blobbs does not rest well, she either gets up and wanders about the house, in an aimless sort of way, or else she talks to Old Blobbs, which is just the last thing in the world Old Blobbs wants her to do, when he is trying to sleep. Aurelia's baby was troublesome also, and was at last sent away in disgrace, when it had emptied a brimming cup of milk into Mrs. Blobbs' lap, and down the folds of the black silk. Mignon was in a pet about something or other, and was moodily tearing a geranium leaf to pieces, which she had pulled out of the breakfast bouquet. Celeste was in a towering rage with Fitz-Herbert, and shot lightnings out of her pretty eyes at him, because he had spoken slightingly of her coiffure. F. H., however, was as impervious to lightning as a glass non-conductor, and in a chaotic sort of way caressed the promise of a side whisker just beginning to dawn on his cheek.

I was, as usual, serene and philosophical; and to dispel these little spring clouds which every moment threatened to rain torrents upon the breakfast table, told them I had something to say.

The announcement was magical, and had the same effect upon the company, that oil has when poured upon the troubled waters, or the show window of a millinery store on opening day upon the ruffled breast of lovely woman.

And what I said was this:

I think there is a direct line of ascent from the atom, the grain of sand upon the sea shore, for instance, up to God, and that the great principle of life, which emanates from God, finds its way down to the atom, although we cannot perceive it with our finite sight.