第71章

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner.Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications.Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it.As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality.We should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr.Knox and other more or less wise persons have maintained.It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue, - and though I took the other side, I liked his best, - that the American is the Englishman reinforced.

- Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?

- I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed, -as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house.On the contrary, she turned a little pale, - but smiled brightly and said, - Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.- She went for her bonnet.- The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow.Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way, - she said, as we came to a corner.-Then we won't take it, - said I.- The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr.Paddock's row of English elms.The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground.He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it.The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.-Oh, yes, DIED, - with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave, - said I.- His bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie, - which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators.Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal.I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight.I have never got over it.The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory.Shame! shame! shame! - that is all I can say.It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted.The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors.I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here LIES" never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin's dust.Love killed him, I think.Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July evening; - yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge.That was all her comment upon what I told her.- How women love Love! said I; - but she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street.- Look down there, - I said, - My friend the Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years.He died out of it, the other day.-Died? - said the schoolmistress.- Certainly, - said I.- We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies.A commercial smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants.Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities.The body has been called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body we live in.Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the other day? - Do! - said the schoolmistress.