Canal Town

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  A large, ungainly dog got to his feet, whined once in protest, mounted the treadmill and set himself to his duties with a pathetic air of boredom. The treads clacked, the bellows filled and poo-ooffed, the forge-cinders glowed redly, and Silas applied himself to the feet of the oxen.

  Desultory conversation followed in which there was no effort to include the alien from Oneida County. It touched on politics, the price of wheat, the personal animosity of the weather toward the farmer, the progress of the canal, last Sunday’s sermon—Elder Strang had preached four hours without pause, to the general admiration—the snakebite which had prostrated Miller Bundy’s daughter, and the pro and con of the theory that a witch could ride best on a stolen broom. This was apropos of a charge that Quaila Crego of Poverty’s Pinch had stolen Mam Cumming’s hearth whisk. Someone observed that all the folks in the Pinch were thieves. Someone else said that there was sickness there again.

  “We all got our griefs,” said Mr. Sneed philosophically. He addressed Billy Dorch. “How’s your gatherin’s?”

  “Bad again,” answered Billy. “Both rumps.”

  “Why don’t you quit your silly doctorin’ and get Witch Crego to fix you up a mess of herbs?”

  Jim Cronkhite, who was sitting next to Amlie, said in explanation, “Carly Sneed is inveterate against doctors.”

  “They tell me you’re a medico, young man,” said the humorist, slanting the good eye at him.

  “I have that pretension.”

  Mr. Sneed delivered with unction a popular couplet of the day.

  Doctor, doctor! Fetch out your simples.

  My old woman’s covered with pimples.

  This gem, though familiar to all his hearers, was received with unrestrained glee. Horace regarded him gravely, waiting for the mirth to subside.

  “Why not?” he said. “She lives with you, doesn’t she?”

  The grossness of the implication hit the public taste. The laugh was now against the humorist. Cassius Moore jogged him in the ribs.

  “One for you, Carly, my lad,” he sniggered.

  “Aw, sandpaper your nose,” growled Mr. Sneed. “Talk’s cheap, but what do the pillslingers know? What do they do to the poor ninnyhammers that pay ’em good money? Bleed, bleed, bleed; purge, purge, purge. If they ain’t opening you at one end, they are at the other. Man is a leaky vessel, but do they plug the leaks? Not them! Why, after your family M.D. is done with you, a moskeeter could drill into the juiciest steak on your behind and come away thirstier than a teetotaller in a taproom. Ain’t that so, folks? Ain’t it?”

  The bent form and shriveled countenance of O. Daggett appeared at the entrance. He addressed Amlie.

  “So here you are. Hear tell you’re thinkin’ of settlin’.”

  “News flies fast on a windy day,” observed the young man cheerfully.

  “You’ll need a signboard. Come to my shop.”

  Mr. Sneed leaned forward. “That green stuff under your feet—that ain’t grass, is it, Ollie?”

  Horace laughed with the others. He saw no occasion for handicapping himself with enmities at the outset of his career. The humorist, appeased, said patronizingly as Horace departed with the gilder,

  “Not a bad young spark. Maybe I’ll give him my custom. Got more gumption than old Murch, I’ll warrant.”

  “A likely blade for the woman trade,” hummed Daw, the hunchback.

  The smith delivered his opinion. “Steel,” said he. “Slender and hard of temper. Thee will get no change of a false shilling out of him.”

  “The town could do with another doctor,” contributed Woodcock. “Murchison birth-charged me two dollars for my woman’s seventh.”

  “Sell him a town lot, Woody,” suggested Sneed.

  “I got the very spot for him. If he could go to twenty dollars an acre on four acres.” He set out upon the trail.

  Passing up the street, the physician and his companion were hailed by Decker Jessup, who appeared in his doorway waving the new boots. Horace went in to try them on. They were serviceable rather than beautiful, but the young man, feeling the supple fit and judging the firm, well-cured leather, was content with his dollar bargain.

  “Have you been bidden to the seats of the mighty for supper yet?” queried the cobbler.

  “The mighty?” repeated Horace. “Who would that be?”

  “It might be Genter Latham. Or it might be Squire Jerrold. Even it might be Dominie Strang if you were so minded to sit under him. Either way, you’d best mind your p’s and q’s.”

  “They’ll put you on the block and estimate your price,” added O. Daggett.

  The young man smiled. “I thought the Act of 1817 abolished slavery in this state.”

  “Tell that to old Latham,” cackled the sign man. “He’s got half the township under his thumb with his twelve percent loans and his fifteen percent indentures. He and a few with him can make or mar a young man with his pockets to line.”

  The young man with his pockets to line did not appear unduly impressed. “I see. A non-political junto. So I am to curry favor with these gentlemen as the price of their forbearance or approval.”

  “Will it hurt you to be mannerly to them?” argued the cobbler. “You, a younger man, for all that you’re a scholar?”

  Horace perceived that they meant to be helpful. “Thank you both,” said he. “But suppose these gentlemen do not favor me?”

  “Then you’d better move elsewhere,” replied the gilder bluntly.

  A slow color rose in the keen, young face. He was about to say something, thought better of it. Decker Jessup proposed a drink and brought out a wooden flagon of wild-grape wine. The door swung to admit the spare form of George Washington Woodcock, who was invited to “set and share.” As he drank, he eyed the stranger with a benevolence so flagrant that it would have stirred suspicion in the most innocent soul. He began with a beaming smile.

  “Have you become acquainted with any of our young folks yet?”

  “On the trail,” said O. Daggett to the cobbler in an audible aside.

  “No,” answered Horace.

  “You should meet them. There are no fairer and more modest maids between Albany and Ontario water than ours,” pursued the other poetically.

  “I am sure of it,” was the polite response.

  “I shall make it my interest to make you known to some of them.”

  “That is very kind of you,” said Horace.

  “Dan Cupid Woodcock, here,” explained the cobbler, “buys timberland, clears it, and sells town lots. If so be he can get you married off, he hopes to sell you one.”

  “One hundred dollars for four of the finest acres in the township,” said the unabashed exploiter, venturing an outrageous price on the offchance of having found a sheep to shear. “I’ll take you to the spot now, where you may judge for yourself.”

  “You will not,” interposed O. Daggett, his dyspepsia snarling in his tone. “The young man is coming to my shop to command a dandy signboard.”

  Horace ordered the signboard. He suffered a financial qualm at the thought of three dollars expended for this official display. But the pattern which O. Daggett sketched was a fine and tempting sight: gilt lettering against a sober, sepia background, with a beaded rim.

  It committed him, for better or for worse, to the new venture.

  If the social junto of the village turned thumbs against him, so be it. He was a free American citizen, and where he set his foot, there would he build his life. Independence forever! Cock-a-doodle-do!

  – 3 –

  When I grow up I shall be a Star in the Furmament of the Dramma.

  (DIARY OF MISS ARAMINTA JERROLD)

  “What are we going to do about Dinty?” asked Archibald Jerrold.

  “Araminta,” sighed Mrs. Jerrold, “is an enigma.”

  “She’s got the devil in her,” said the father, and chuckled.

  “I have taught her all that I am able at home.”

  Squire Jerrold, fingering his elegant
neckcloth, privately reflected that this would not be very much, but was too gentlemanly to say so. He was three times the age of his third wife when he married her, thirteen years before, and the advent of Dinty, after a varied brood of half-brothers and half-sisters had wedded and scattered, was a surprise to him and a shock to his eighteen-year-old consort, who, pale, willowy and torpid of mind and body, had had her stubbornly maintained sentiments and preferences of virginity rudely dislocated by the event.

  “These Larrabees are said to be both genteel and pious,” observed the Squire, consulting a neatly printed singlesheet before him.

  It set forth that Prof. & Mrs. Larrabee had opened a Polite Academy for the Young of Both Sexes, who could there find skilled instruction in Spelling, Ciphering, Parsing, Geography, the Single and Double Rule of Three, Gain and Loss, and the Square and Cube Root with exercises from the English Reader and the Columbian Orator. Latin and Greek would be afforded the advanced pupils; French and Musical Instruction involved an extra fee. Piety would be inculcated as well as Elegant Deportment, and there was specific promise that “the manners and morals of pupils will receive careful attention and discipline.” Also there was Special Medical Attention.

  “Discipline,” commented Mr. Jerrold, arching his delicate brows. “Our domestic efforts have not been crowned with invariable success.”

  A troubled silence followed. Both minds were uncomfortably reviewing an episode of the previous week. Dinty had observed at table, apropos of nothing in particular, that she did not see why there had to be a Hell. Worse, she undertook to argue the point with her mother. Upon Mrs. Jerrold’s tearful insistence, the father had ear-led his child to the woodshed and undertaken to correct her heresy with the family strap. Under this force majeure Dinty recanted, but in bitterness of spirit. Imprisoned in her room on the bread and water of repentance, she brooded all day and departed through the window and down the trellised wall at fall of dark. After a night of anguished and futile search, the Jerrolds were choking over their breakfast when a diminutive and travel-worn figure appeared in the doorway.

  “I should like my porridge,” said Dinty.

  There was dust in her hair and her hands were blistered. First caught to the family bosom, and subsequently threatened with further and direr penalties, she enunciated her declaration of independence in terms of the improving literature upon which girlhood was reared.

  “I am your loving and obedient daughter and I owe you all duty and respect in which I trust you shall never find me wanting” (thus far, from The Pious Child, by a Minister of the Gospel: Dinty was blessed with a retentive memory), “but if you whip me again I shall run away and this time I’ll stay. And I don’t want to believe in Hell, but if you want me to, I’ll try, and I hope a lot of people I know will go there.”

  Mrs. Jerrold shrieked in horror. Squire Jerrold, after a struggle, broke down and laughed with indecent abandon. Thus was Dinty’s sore spirit saved from further humiliation, and her sore person from added stripes.

  In due time she was informed of the plan to send her to the Polite Academy where she would learn the deportment of a little lady. She considered this mistrustfully.

  “I’m not sure I want to be a little lady,” she decided.

  “What a child!” cried the despairing mother.

  “What would you prefer to be?” inquired the Squire. In spite of misgivings and incomprehensions, there existed between the two a mutual sympathy unshared by the mother.

  “A treasure-seeker,” Dinty announced.

  Her father took one of the little paws in his grasp, turned it over and examined the tender palm, where remnants of nocturnal blisters were still discernible.

  “Oho!” he said, and Dinty blushed.

  “Is Wealthy going to the new school?” she inquired.

  “So I understand,” replied her father. “In point of fact it was Mr. Genter Latham’s suggestion that first turned my attention to it.”

  “If Wealthy goes, I’ll go.”

  She was self-appointed maid-in-waiting to her local Majesty of the Court of Girlhood, Wealthia Latham. Two years older than Dinty, the motherless heiress to the Latham fortune accepted this worshipful fealty as of royal prerogative. In her early teens, she was already an object of warm speculation to the enterprising youth of the village. She was dark and lithely made, with lustrous eyes, bold curvature of mouth, and a proud little head, full of golden opinions of herself and of the world which afforded her everything that she demanded of it. Her austere father adored her and pampered her to an extent that would have spoiled a less naturally amiable disposition.

  Wealthia’s patronage of her admiring little henchwoman was tempered by a sensible recognition that Dinty was cleverer and more spirited than herself. She did not mind this. In her sunny self-satisfaction there was little room for envy.

  On her part, Dinty was supremely unself-conscious, having far too lively an interest and enjoyment in the exterior world to bother about herself introspectively. This extended even to her personal appearance. When her father teasingly called her “Snubnose” she accepted it unresentingly as one of the prevalent disabilities of her years, like not being permitted a cushion in church and having to perform the lesser household chores. The overheard remark of a visiting half-sister, that those blue eyes were going to make trouble for somebody one of these days, left her incurious. She thought that the reference was to her exploratory habits of looking into whatever specially interested her, which included most matters within her ken.

  The two children were deposited at the door of the academy by their respective fathers, who went on to the Eagle for a morning dram. Dinty hailed her friend.

  “ ’lo, Wealthy.”

  “ ’lo, Dinty.”

  “You going to like coming here to school?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “If I don’t, I’ll run away.”

  “Oo—oo! You’d get whipped.”

  “Then I’ll run away again. I’ll keep running away and running away and running away till they get tired of chasing me. Wealthy, did you ever dig for buried treasure?”

  “No.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “It must be. I saw a play about it once.”

  Dinty’s voice dropped. “Do you mean a real play on a stage with actors and actresses?”

  “Yes. In Albany.”

  Dinty sighed with envy. “My ma says actresses are wicked Delilahs. She cried when she saw Pa talking to one once.”

  “I don’t care. I’d like to be one.”

  “I went to a popet show once. It was called Punch and Judy.”

  “That isn’t a drama,” said the elder disparagingly. “There’s one here tonight, though.”

  “Oh-h-h-h-h! Where?”

  “In the Eagle ballroom. A moral tragedy. I don’t like moral tragedies specially,” went on the hardened playgoer. “I like laughable farces. There’s a laughable farce to follow.”

  Dinty’s breath quickened. “How I’d admire to go!”

  “It’s twenty-five cents.”

  “I haven’t got twenty-five cents,” said Dinty, despondent. She brightened. “I’ve got eighteen cents, though, in my missionary fund box.”

  Wealthia’s dark eyes rounded. “You’d go straight to hell.”

  “I s’pose I would.” Dinty weighed the chances, pro and con, and decided that it was not worth the risk.

  “Why don’t you get your pa to take you?” asked her friend.

  “Pa might say yes. But Ma’d pout, and then he wouldn’t.”

  The other girl had an inspiration of generosity. “I’ll ask my pa to take us both.”

  Her friend’s raptures were cut short by the peremptory summons of the bell.

  Fourteen children trooped in and divided themselves by sex on the wooden benches, six boys and eight girls. They represented the aristocracy of the township: the prosperous agriculturists, the millers, distillers, factory owners and professional men. As the school had been open a
week, there were no initiatory exercises, but Prof. Larrabee made an effusive little speech, welcoming the two new pupils.

  He was a brisk little wisp of a man with a straggling chin whisker, a loose, benevolent mouth and sore eyes; a competent pedagogue of the standard branches. His wife, large, placid and slow, had charge of the elegancies and accomplishments. Their joint instruction was well worth the eight dollars per term with extras which they charged.

  Besides the new pupils, the early enrollment was made up of the Fairlie twins, Grace and Freegrace; Bathsheba Eddy; Mary Vandowzer, whose father, the maltster, though wealthy and well-considered, still spoke both the high and the low German better than he did English; Jane Eliza Evernghim; and “Happy” (christened Happalonia) Vallance, these on the distaff side; while across the aisle sat Marcus Dillard, scion of the big peppermint still, exuding a pervasive bouquet of the trade; the two Evernghim lads, George W. and De Witt C.; Jared Upcraft, son of the Honest Lawyer; little Arlo Barnes of the ropewalk, a hardy stripling who paddled to town in summer and skated or walked in winter; and the handsome Philip Macy, youngest of the brood of Col. Gerald Macy, whose scientific cultivation of hemp along Red Creek had made him a comfortable fortune.

  The morning procedure comprised an announcement from Prof. Larrabee, delivered with pardonable pride, that his was the only school in the Americas which included medical supervision as part of the curriculum, and he had the privilege and honor of introducing Dr. Gail Murchison, a certificated licensee of physical and chirurgical science.

  Dr. Murchison beamed benevolently upon his “little friends” as he called them in his purring, professional accents, while he smoothed his patriarchal beard with fingers none too clean. Medical practice, he imparted to his hearers, was a high calling to be pursued in a spirit of helpfulness and sacrifice and not in expectation of earthly gain. He, himself, strove to be a friend to the poor and helpless without reward. (This would, indeed, have been news to that element of the populace.) He hoped that each of his little hearers would regard himself or herself as a little angel of mercy, seeking out the needy, sustaining the sick and weak, and reporting to him such cases as they found.