Among the great gains of this memorable year,--among the devotions, the sacrifices, the heroisms,--all the mighty, noble, and ennobling deeds by which we stand enriched forevermore,--there broods the shadow of one irreparable loss,--the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age is squalid, not picturesque.
We stumble through the alleys that answer for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room, famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don't remember.
It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a thing, and we enter,--they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make observation of the surroundings. We take position in the passage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot stand.
Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O, you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy.
"I remember those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom.
You are a famous friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands!
Cry your pretty eyes out over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and Christmas slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in pounds, shillings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my harangue, so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this British institution, proceed to investigate another British institution,--the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort Wellington. A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a stile lets the world in,--over which stile we step and stand on the fort grounds. A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture,--perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to a great gate, but it refuses to turn. The walls are too high to scale, besides possible pickets on the other side. I have no doubt in the world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of dignity? Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance. Halicarnassus fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning.
"What about the fruit-knife?" inquires Halicarnassus as I pass in. The reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are electrified to find the victory already gained.
"See the good of having been through college," exults Halicarnassus.
"How did you do it?" asks Grande, admiringly.
"By genius and assiduity," answers Halicarnassus.
"And lifting the latch," I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch?
Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter about the place, and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime" upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another, but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will, heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before. O my country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your bloody sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.
