CHAPTER X.

A FINAL TRIUMPH.

Arrived safely at Buffalo, I did not look much like the urchin who had left there several months before. Although I had conscientiously washed my solitary piece of linen every week, and tried to keep myself as neatly as I could, my clothes were greasy and ragged and my boots nearly off my feet.

I wandered about the wharves without any purpose that I can now remember, and might have been very disconsolate if it were not for the joy I felt at escaping from the danger which I considered so imminent at Detroit. This latter city, indeed, I came to look upon as a peculiarly unlucky place for me,--an opinion which I continued to entertain up to the time of a signal triumph I had there afterward as the juvenile prodigy of jig-dancing and negro-minstrelsy.

I was just on the point of turning away from the docks for a stroll up some of the neighboring squalid by-streets of Buffalo when I suddenly heard myself called by name. It would be hard to say when I was worse terrified. I was really afraid of my own name. No good could come to me, I felt sure, from any one’s knowing it. Gazing around toward the wharf, in the direction from which the sound had seemed to come, I saw nobody but some laborers unloading a sailing vessel, close at hand, and they took no notice of me.

Again I heard my name, which sounded this time as if it came mysteriously from somewhere up in the air. Sweeping the dingy heights of the masts and smoke-stacks and office-windows with my astonished eyes, I beheld, at last, a boy coming briskly toward me down a flight of steps that led from a commission-house.

It was my school-fellow, who had harbored me in the stable the first night of my run-away; and it was from the window of his father’s office, he told me, that he had first seen and called me. “How you look! but I am glad to see you!” and many other frank, kind things the generous little fellow said.

He prefaced his eager questions as to where I had been and how I came to spoil my clothes so, with the remark that he guessed it wasn’t so funny, after all, to go out in the world seeking a fellow’s fortune. My own plight at the time was better calculated, I think, than any moral observations I may have made, to fortify him in this opinion. If I did indulge in a few gravely eloquent words of warning, I have so far forgotten them that I cannot repeat them here for the benefit of thoughtless, adventure-loving boys of to-day.

As soon as I had briefly satisfied my friend’s curiosity as to the dangers myself and clothes had passed, he insisted on my going right along home with him. I refused, of course, being ashamed of my toilet, and still afraid of capture by the people from whom I had fled. Whereupon my old school-mate assured me that his mother had scolded him for not before bringing me into the house instead of the stable. He gave me furthermore to understand that she had heard all about my domestic quarrel, and upheld me in what I had done.

This information had its effect, and I turned with him toward his home. The well-dressed boy did not seem at all abashed to walk through the most crowded streets with me, although the striking contrast of our attire and social positions must have been highly suggestive to any passing philosopher. Boys of the short-jacket age may, by the way, have many imperfect and even cruel traits, but we must confess, as men, that caste begins on our side of long-tailed coats.

* * * * *

At my friend’s home I received a kindly greeting from his mother, who immediately insisted--as good women in their hospitable souls often do, for almost any ill that can befall a person--on producing something to eat. Now it happened, for a wonder, that I was not hungry, having scarcely an hour before taken a very hearty meal, on general principles of prevention (though in the middle of the forenoon), just previous to my parting with the fourth porter of the steamer May Flower.

But that did not satisfy the sympathy of my friend’s mother. The hospitable longing just hinted at, which not unfrequently seeks to administer consolation through the stomach for wounds and sprains of the limbs as well as for wounds and sprains of the heart and head,--the spirit which underlies, I suppose, the custom of funeral baked-meats,--was aroused in the kind-hearted lady. She saw, no doubt, in my stained and tattered garments an illuminated chronicle of present distress, and all manner of past misfortunes. And I had to eat again.

Then she sent me up stairs, and had me bathed and thrust into a suit of her son’s clothes and a pair of his boots; all of which fitted me admirably. Having changed my five pennies from the pocket of the old to that of the new pantaloons, I descended to meet her criticism. She seemed well pleased with the result, and, telling me I must take good care of the clothes and boots, for they were now mine, she made me sit down and give her an account of my wanderings. This ended, she dismissed me to play with her own boy, first making me promise I would come back to her house to eat and sleep.

My young friend, who had been an interested witness of my metamorphosis in all its stages, delighted, I need hardly add, as much as I did in his mother’s benevolence, or as much as she did in our mutual joy. Indeed, the expression of the kind lady’s face, calmly pleased at her own act, but brightly exultant in the reflection of our rejoicing, was then something beautiful to see, and has been grateful to think upon since. It was Saturday, and, there being no school, we two boys made a merry day of it, keeping, however, well out of the neighborhood of my former home.

I could not make my friend understand, any more than I can now myself, why I had not long before spent the five coppers he had given me. When I had plenty to eat they were, I remember, a kind of sword and shield to me, adding greatly to my independence, which almost always, at such moments of bodily fulness, was of the happy and triumphant sort. It was only in the seasons of my direst need that I had a vague expectancy of worse times; and against these worse times, I suppose, I held my coppers.

And the reader may explain, if he can, what is really the fact, that this apprehension of greater misfortunes than ever came--and which my pennies were sometimes powerless to dispel--and my fear of the heartless captain of the steamer Pacific were the only sources of unhappiness during my worst privations. If I could have been free of these, I am convinced, I might have been very hungry, but never very unhappy.

* * * * *

Over the supper-table that Saturday evening, my case and person having been made known to my friend’s father, a consultation was had about my future. I was strongly in favor of going on a first-class steamboat, and rather forward, peradventure, in advocating my views. My friend’s father, thinking of no better place for me to work for myself, or entertaining secret doubts as to my staying in any better place, if put there, promised his wife to see what he could do for me in the direction taken by my own inclinations.

Accordingly, on the next Monday, by his influence, and by the kindness of the late Captain Pheatt, a position was secured for me on the steamer Northern Indiana.

I received ten dollars a month for acting as what was called key-boy, whose light duties were to take care of the state-room keys and attend the steward’s office. I had also the exclusive privilege of selling books and papers to the passengers. By favor I received a share of my wages in advance, and, adding my five coppers to the sum, I made my first investment in yellow-covered literature.

The steamer, which was a veritable floating palace, carried hundreds of passengers every trip, and I prospered. It was the custom of many people, in compliment to my diminutive size, or in disgust at their contents, to make me presents of their books, when they had read them, or tried to read them. Thus I had the good fortune to sell the same book two, three, and even four times over. I made ten and sometimes fifteen dollars a week in this way and in the legitimate merchandise of my books and papers.

Scarce seven moons from the time of my first flight from Buffalo, and my five coppers had increased to I know not how many dollars. When the steamer was laid up in the late autumn, I had money enough to keep me handsomely and send me to school all the next winter,--if, as shall be seen, fate, in the guise of disappointed affection, and a banjo, had not ordered otherwise.

* * * * *

It is just both to my natural and legal guardians to say here, that, when they saw me not only determined but able to support myself, they left me ever afterward quietly to my own devices. My necessities, therefore, and the prosperous result of my first adventures with five coppers, led me to adopt--a little too romantically, perhaps, in the latter and more thoughtful period of my youth--a principle to which I long had a kindly leaning, notwithstanding the hard knocks it dealt me. Indeed, it is still doubtful in my mind whether it is not better to devote half of one’s energies in learning to live on a very small income than to devote all of one’s energies in struggling and waiting miserably for a very large income.

That, at least, was my principle; and, if it trammelled the head with false doctrine, it left the soul remarkably free. Thus, it will be seen, my entire subsequent wanderings, my course at an American college, and at a German university--the former on nothing to speak of, and the latter on eighty dollars--all sprang more or less directly from the extraordinary qualities of expansion, both spiritual and financial, which, at the early age of eleven, I discovered in those five copper cents.