THE SWAMP ANGEL - Prentice Mulford Mulford

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I liked, by believing in them and paying the doctor and druggist for them. I have seen Cape Horn, London, Paris, Vienna, a whale in a “flurry,” a ship’s crew in mutiny, and a woman who did not want a new bonnet. But she was dead. I lived two years in England, had a splendid time on a very small capital, saw the land from the Scottish border to the Straits of Dover, and lived with over thirty families, high, low, rich, poor, patrician, and plebian, I have an ex-mother-in-law. Before I started out in life, when a boy of fourteen, I had charge of a country hotel, which I ran ashore in four years; but it never cost the girls and boys of my youthful era a cent for horse-hire out of my stables. I had a good time keeping that hotel, which my poor father, on dying, left to my mother. She had necessarily to give it largely in charge of her eldest and only son. I was that son. My mother disliked the business being soberly inclined, and I got her out of it as soon as possible, by managing, or rather mismanaging, things in such a way that the expenditures went considerably beyond the income. So I did a good thing for her, as well as having a good time myself. We kept a bar, which the boys of my own size patronized to a considerable extent, so their refreshments cost them little or nothing, generally nothing; which fact, though conducive to the general hilarity, did not increase the profits. My native village was a place where for a boy to tell his mother all he had thought, felt, and experienced for the last twenty-four hours, would have brought him enough scolding, and bald, ungilded admonition, as to terrify him out of all goodness and candor for a month; where the girls went regularly to the evening prayer-meetings, there to wish that the boys might not fail to be on the outside of the church, to see them home; where the boys systematically and conscientiously, and without a pang, lied to their fathers, as their fathers had lied to grandpa; where at fifteen they called mother the “old woman,” and at heart ridiculed her ignorance of numerous things outside of her kingdom, because they had caught the habit and idea from “pa”; where one-half the town were total teetotalers, who hated whiskey drinkers worse than they did whiskey, and called all who differed with them in belief and practice hard names at intemperate temperance meetings, and where the speakers got as drunk on zeal, enthusiasm, prejudice, and excitement, as other drunkards do on gin. I managed to abolish our bar in a few years, on the principle of making the expenditures over-size the income, and so did another good thing, as the young men had then to go elsewhere for their stimulant, and pay for it, too; a condition of affairs always promotive of temperance, if not of morality. When I had accomplished all this, and that’s a good deal to accomplish before reaching the age of eighteen, I went forth into the world to seek my fortune, and have been seeking it ever since, with results, of course, some for and some against me. But I’ve had a good time, anyway, and I intend to have better.

      LAYING THE CORNER-STONE.

       Table of Contents

       I bought about fifty dollars’ worth of boards and joist, and had them carted and dumped under my oak. No hand save mine laid the foundations. I laid the floor first. I had no well-defined plan about building; I laid my floor boards first, because it came handiest so to do. It was so much of the house built, anyway. I let the structure grow naturally. I presume a professional carpenter would have put up the frame before laying the floor. But I felt that if I got the floor off my mind, the rest of the edifice would grow on it somehow, as it did. I know that I violated all the architectural proprieties in building as I did, and performed one hundred times the work necessary; yet the work to me was all play. For it was nothing but a big box of twelve-foot boards, and when completed, not near so ornate or regular in shape as those the manufacturers box up their horse-cars in, for shipping to distant places. But I was not building to suit propriety or other people. I was building to suit myself. I wanted entire liberty, for once in my life, to make blunders without being inspected, over-looked, criticised, and sermonized by other people. I had such liberty, and I made the blunders. Never during the two months that I was engaged in putting up this ramshackle shanty did a soul come near me to stare at me, and gape, and tell me I was doing things wrong; or even if such a pest did not say what he thought, to look as if he thought it all the same, and in so thinking make me feel that he thought it. Such people are pestiferous. I want to do things in my own way, and make my own mistakes, and learn as I go along; and when I get ready to ask how to do them better, of anyone that knows better, then, and not till then, do I want advice and suggestion. It is a luxury to go blundering on in this way; and I had it, and was willing to pay for it. My lot was at the end of a big corn-field, in sight of but one house; out of sight of all main roads, and nobody could get near me, unless they walked a mile to do so.

      So in the snow and the rain, as well as the mud, into which I managed to tramp a good deal of the semi-swampy soil about my house by hundreds of possibly unnecessary footsteps, did I build and blunder, during the months of January and February. I slept in a neighbor’s house at night, footed a mile to the railway-station in the morning, reached the city by half-past seven, did my two hours’ work in a newspaper office, made a summary of the same eternal round of events, such as murders, burglaries, suicides by pistol, razor, rope, or poison, embezzlements (high-toned), thefts (low-toned), smash ups, fires, bursted boilers, falling elevators, gas explosions, kerosene burnings, failures, and everything else, which are always happening in all civilized communities just the same one year after another, the only difference being that the victim or the villain has a different name this year from what he had at the same date last. I wonder why people are interested in reading such a monotonous and ghastly catalogue of horrors as I dished up for them daily. I wonder if they will so continue to read through all eternity, in case their lives are spared that somewhat incomputable period. I wonder what is the great necessity or profit of knowing, after you have eaten your breakfast cakes and sausage, that a tramp was found last night hanging to a tree in Central Park, or that an idiot killed himself with prussic acid and died on a park bench, where possibly you may sit tomorrow, because the girl he wanted to marry and make miserable preferred to marry and be made miserable by some other idiot. I wrote also editorials, and told the world how in certain matters, social, political, and otherwise, things were awfully mismanaged, and how they ought to be managed. I was then more interested in reforming the world than in reforming myself, and kept the electric light of my brain turned far more on other people’s sins or mistakes than on my own. I worked at this calling long enough to find out that there are three kinds of editors: editors who can write, and have business talent besides; and editors who can write all about it, not having practical gumption enough to drive a nail straight, or tell a ten-months’ chicken, when dressed, from a tough, ten-year-old hen; and lastly, editors who can scarcely write at all, but who know how to set others to writing, and tell them what to write about, and so work their writers’ brains to great profit to themselves, as they are justified in doing; for if you’ve got one talent, and don’t work your other business talent along with it, some one else will turn that crank, and turn what might be your profits from such talent, into their own pockets. I’ve sat in editorial rooms alongside of college-educated men, whose minds were storehouses of book-learning and little else, who were hacking away with their pens at any work the boss cut out for them, at ten dollars a week; who wrote and grumbled, and grumbled and wrote, poor fellows, because, as they said, their talent wasn’t better appreciated; who were always talking of what they would do, if they only had a better show; who railed at this mercenary age, and the mercenary management of the paper they wrote for, and who never dreamed that the only way for a man to get a fair show in this world to air his ideas is to take responsibilities and make the “show” for himself, just as the head man in the office down-stairs, who paid them their weekly pittance, had done, and who used them as literary grubbing hoes, because they dare not be anything else but grubbing hoes.

      However, I served up daily this intellectual stew, made from the ingredients of our barbaric civilization, with a tolerably clear conscience; first, because I was well paid for it; secondly, I liked the work; and thirdly, because the public wanted their daily horrors spiced as I spiced it; and then at half-past ten in the forenoon, I flew back by rail to my beloved swamp, where I labored till dusk, overlooked only by an occasional crow, perched on a neighboring tree, cross, tired, and hungry, because there was no young corn to pull up. 873

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