 Vagabond Adventures by Ralph Keeler. To my old friend Edward P. Bassett Esquire, this book is affectionately inscribed with the wish, which is hardly a hope, that the public may take my life half as easily and good-naturedly as he takes his own. R.K. It is an odd sort of fortune to have lived an out-of-the-way or adventurous life. There is always a temptation to tell of it, and not always a reasonable surety that others share the interest in it of the conteur himself. It would, indeed, be a nice problem in the descriptive geometry of narrative to determine the exact point where the lines of the two interests meet—that of the narrator and that of the people who have to endure the narration. I cannot say that I ever hope to solve this problem, and, in the present instance especially, I would, with due respect, submit its solution to the acuter intellects of others. This little book is intended to contain a plain sketch of my personal history up to the close of my twenty-second year. The autobiographical form is used, not because of any supposed interest of the public in the writer himself, but because there does not seem to be any other way in which a connected account of the adventures can well be given. No one, I think, can be more sensible than I am, that my story is nothing if not true. Hume has wisely said, a man cannot speak long of himself without vanity. I should like to be allowed to add that I have never known or conceived of a person except probably the reader and writer of these pages, who could talk five minutes about himself without lying—that is, to be sure, reducing the thing to mathematical exactness, an overestimating smile, or an underestimating shrug of the shoulders, or a tone of the voice even, will always, though sometimes inadvertently, leave it still unsaid in part, or say it in too great excess. While this is not so applicable to written history, still in the face of hyperbolic and pathetic possibilities, I owe it to myself to premise that I am going to be more than ordinarily truthful in this autobiography. And there is certainly some merit in telling the truth, for it is hard work when one is his own hero and not what is sometimes termed a moral hero at that. I can, too, I may add, claim this single merit from the start, with a meekness almost bordering on honesty, since it happens that I am forced to be voracious by the fact that there are scores of people yet in the prime of life who are cognizant of the main events of the ensuing narrative. CHAPTER II FAMILY MATTERS It may be laid down as a general principle, to start with, that a boy had better not run away from home. Good and pious reasons are not wanting, and might be here adduced, in substantiation of this general principle. Some trite moralizing might be done just now, in a grave statement that an urchin needs not run away into the world after its troubles, since they will come running to him soon enough, and that a home is the last fortress weary men build, and oftentimes place in their wives' names, against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. Why therefore it may be asked, with overwhelming conviction to the adult, who, by the way, is not supposed to be one of the congregation of the present preaching, why therefore should the juvenile fugitive hasten unduly to leave what all the effort of his afterlife will be to regain? As having done my duty by any boy of a restless disposition who may chance to read these memoirs and be influenced by my vagrant example, I proceed to state that I ran away from home at the mature age of eleven, and have not been back to stay overnight from that remote period to this present writing. It is due, however, to both of us, the home and myself, to observe that it was not a very attractive hearth that I ran from. My father and mother were dead, and no brothers or sisters of mine were there. Nothing at all, indeed, like affection, but something very much like its opposite. On the whole, I think, under exactly the same circumstances, I would run away again. But I hope this remark will not lead the thoughtless reader to assume that I am not of a respectable family. No well-regulated memoir could be written without one. A respectable family has long since become the acknowledged starting point, and not unfrequently the scapegoat of your conventional autobiography. Apostoriari, therefore, our respectability is established from the very fact that there is an autobiographer in the family. Then however a great truth has once been discovered, it is always easy to find many paths of proof converging toward it, when Kepler, for instance, by some strange guess or inspiration, hid upon the colossal fact that the planets move in elliptical orbits, it was comparatively an easy thing, or should have been, to make this scientific parallel correct, to comment half a dozen proofs of it in the simple properties of the conic sections. Thus too, fortunately for us, the respectability of our family can be proved in many ways, and even, like Kepler's laws, by mathematics itself. Nay, our proofs can be, and indeed are, established by common arithmetical notation and numeration, because the members of our family are generally rich. This is manifestly an unusual advantage for an autobiographer, since, as is well known, he almost invariably comes of poor but honest parents, and there is no little pride mixed with the candor with which I boast that I am to this day, pecuniarily, the poorest of my race. The devious course of my wanderings, as a youthful Negro minstrel, and as the European tourist of one hundred and eighty-one paper-dollars, left me in the early part of my life no time or inclination to look into such common places as the matters of my inheritance. It was but a week ago that I rode over the broad Ohio prairie where I was born, and passed by the pleasant farms which, with the broad prairie, were the patrimony left to me, or I should say to the kind gentlemen who administered them for me. That property has never been any care to me. It was so thoroughly administered during my minority that I have never since had the trouble even of collecting rents. Now, there may be people of a recklessly imaginative type who suppose it would excite a pleasurable thrill to ride thus over a great prairie which bears one's own name, but no more tangible a monument for the quantum air, and there may be people of so aspiring mental constitutions as to think it a grateful, rollicking piece of vanity to pass unrecognized through a town which was once sold by one's own administrator for fifty-two dollars. But I am free to confess that I have endured these honors within the past week, and have carried nothing away with me in the matter of gratification or sentiment, but a dash of them sadness which has settled about the wreck and ruin of the old homestead. Nothing seems to thrive there but the cold spring at the foot of the sand-ridge and the poplar and weeping willow which grow above it. These trees had and have for me a plaintive undertone to the rhythm of their rustling leaves which I do not hope to make others hear. The willow was the whip with which a friend rode twenty miles from the county seat to visit my father in the early times, and it was stuck in the ground there on the margin of the spring by my little sister. The poplar was planted beside it by my mother. They are both tall trees now, and a sprig from one of them has been growing a long time over the graves of father, mother, and sister. At an early stage of my existence, and of my orphanage, I was introduced to a species of intransitue life, being passed from one natural guardian to another very much as wood is loaded upon Mississippi steamboats. It was indeed rather a rough passage of short stages, each, however, more remote from my Ohio birthplace, and I have always thought there would not have been so many figurative slivers left behind in the hands through which I passed if the passage had not been so rough and headlong. Finally at the age of eight or nine years I was shipped away to Buffalo, New York, to be placed at school. I was sent thither down Lake Erie from Toledo on board the old steamer Indiana, Captain Applebee commanding. Many are yet living, I suppose, who will remember this craft, the first of the kind upon which I ever embarked. For my part, at least, I think I shall forget everything else before I forget the noble sheet-iron Indian who stood astride of her solitary smokestack and bent his bow and pointed his arrow at the lake breezes. Here brass band, too, as was the generous custom of those days, was attached to the steamer and discoursed thin gratuitous music during the voyage. To a more sophisticated gaze the attenuated besmoked brave of my juvenile rapture would, alas, have looked more like an indifferent silhouette plastered belligerently against the sky. But it was the first piece of statuary I ever saw, as that execrable brass band made the first concert I ever heard, and the Apollo Belvedere at Rome, or Strauss's own orchestra, led by himself at Vienna, has never since excited in me such honest thrills of admiration. It was many and many a month before that swarthy sheet-iron Indian ceased occasionally to sail at night through a mingled cloud of coal-smoke and brass music in my boyish dreams. The lake was remarkably calm, and the entire passage to Buffalo was for years one of my pleasantest memories. On that first voyage, undoubtedly, was engendered the early love of steamboats, the fruit of which ripened soon afterward into the adventures I am about to relate. Nothing I am convinced, but this boundless affection for the species of craft in question enables me to remember, as shall be seen directly, the names of all the old lake steamers I had to do with in my boyhood. And this, by the way, is no small internal evidence of the truth of what follows. But I should not have called your attention to the fact, and I should not have been forced to parade my conscientiousness here again, if I had not come already to the most embarrassing period in all my history. Without seeming to manifest a feeling which I am sure I do not now entertain, I cannot write about the two or three miserable years I passed in Buffalo, and if I omit to write about them, a great share of the dramatic flavor of my story is lost. I cannot therefore convey to you even the regret with which I am compelled to pass over this period of my life, because you cannot know, as I think I do, that exactly such a childish experience of unlovely restraint has never yet got into literature. Every time I pass the old public school-house number seven in Buffalo I stop and gaze at it with a queer sort of interest. Yet I cannot confess to any sentimental regard for it, since it was, in a manner, the innocent cause of my enduring at least the last six months of my unpleasant life in its neighborhood. If I had not been so interested by day in the principle and duties of that school, I am sure I should have fled much sooner than I did from the roof which sheltered me of nights. Finally however, one domestic misunderstanding, greater than many others, brought me to a conclusion which was certainly as comprehensive in its wrath as it may have been lacking in a premise or two of its logic. At this temperate remove from that exciting period I am led, at least, to doubt, in the interest of certain kin of mine who could hardly have been responsible for facts they knew not of, whether I was not guilty of that poetic fallacy placed in its first utterance, I believe, in the mouth of an illustrious Trojan, and worn very threadbare ever since in the mouth and practice of almost every one, whether I did not, that is, learn a great deal too much from one to judge very unjustly of all. At any rate, in the domestic crisis just alluded to, I rebelled against authority whose insignia were facies of disagreeable beach whips, and, at the mature age of eleven years, took a solemn vow that I would have nothing more to do with the people of my home circle in Buffalo, or with any whatsoever of my relatives, some of whom had placed me there, and I ran away. CHAPTER III ESCAPING FROM THE HOUSE AT NIGHT I DID NOT HAVE TIME OR PRESENCE OF MINE TO TAKE ANYTHING WITH ME BUT WHAT I CARRIED ON MY BACK. One of my school fellows who had been forewarned of my design met me by appointment on the neighbouring corner and smuggled me into his father's stable. Here it had been agreed I was to lodge on the hay. My friend was a doubty, reassuring sort of hero who was a great comfort to me at that nervous moment when I entered the darkness of the haymow. I would not for the world have betrayed any fraction of the fear which his swaggering manner may have failed to dispel. He would assuredly have laughed at me, and I believe now, moreover, he would have taken that, or any shadow of an excuse, for joining me in my flight. So strong indeed was the romantic instinct upon that young gentleman that he lingered long about the spot where I had crawled into the hay and covered up my head before he could prevail upon himself to go back to the house and to his regular bed. He had assured me before we came into the stable out of the pleasant moonlight of that late spring evening that he envied me very much as I was going to have lots of fun. He only wished he had a good reason to run away from home too, but then he added thoughtfully as he looked up at the lights in the window of the family sitting-room. His mother was so Dern kind, and his father so blamed good, that he didn't see how he could leave them just now. The next morning my friend found me sleeping very comfortably with my head and one arm protruding limply out of the hay. Awakening me, he proceeded to draw from his trousers pocket several pieces of bread and butter for my breakfast, which was nonetheless toothsome from its somewhat dishevelled state, consequent upon the manner of its previous stowage. While munching that surreptitious meal, my thoughts very naturally wandered to the breakfast-table, where I should that morning probably be missed for the first time by the people from whom I had fled, and I amused myself as well as my romantic caterer, with what we both of us, no doubt, considered a highly humorous account of the grievous commotion which would ensue at that ordinarily so solemn victualing. Emboldened by the lively appreciation of my school-fellow and by the reviving influence of the bread and butter, I grew imaginative and grotesque in my daring pleasantry. I went so far as to describe the scene at that breakfast-table when Bridget came to the dining-room door with wild eyes, an announcement that my room had not been occupied on the night before. How the peter familias, at that dramatic moment, had dropped a surprised spoon into the splattering gravy of the stewed meat, and how his wife opposite, then in the act of pouring chicory, had, whether in dismay at the overwhelming news or at the sudden soiling of her tablecloth, upset the coffee-pot. These and many more very brilliant and mirth-provoking feats of boyish humor, very brilliant and mirth-provoking, of course, I mean, to my friend and myself, did I perform that morning in the hay-mo, all bearing upon the assumed utter discomforture of the bereaved people about that breakfast-table. But alas, even a precocious autobiographer with his mouth full of bread and butter may make the mistake so common to the adult of his species of overestimating his own importance. I have since learned that there was no sensation of any consequence at the breakfast-table in question, and that my subsequent permanent loss was taken with remarkable equanimity and designation. It was an expressive, nay eloquent look of envy and admiration that my friend gave me when it came time for him to leave me to my own devices for the forenoon while he went reluctantly to school. Even to this moment I cannot say that I covet the amount of knowledge he carried away from his books that day, or indeed the succeeding three days. I sallied stealthily forth to amuse myself in the by-streets till he came back at noon to bring my dinner, which consisted of a repetition of the breakfast with the added dessert of an apple. This latter he carried carefully in his hand, but the bread and butter he invariably bore stowed away in his trousers' pocket. I say invariably, for I lived two or three days, thus on his secret bounty. About dusk of the second evening he came to me with, in addition to the bread and butter for my supper, the startling news that he was going to take me to the theatre. I do not remember how we got in. It was not, certainly, by paying our way. I inclined to the opinion that my friend had some secret understanding with the door-tender. I know merely that, by some means, we achieved our entrance to the pit of the old Eagle Street Theatre. I have heard good citizens of Buffalo complain that, since Lola Montes burned down that seat of the histrionic muse, the drama has languished in their city. Of course I am not competent to decide in such matters, but that being the first playhouse of any kind I ever entered, I am glad to be able to say that I have never since seen anything in the theatrical line so absorbingly thrilling, or so gorgeously magnificent as the old Eagle Street Theatre was to me that night. The name and plot of the play I have forgotten, but the dark frown of that smooth villain in the third act, where his villainy first began to show itself to my unpractised comprehension, will never fade from my remembrance. I do not know how it was, but up to that time I recollect I was under the juvenile impression that virtue and correct grammar always went together. I can therefore convey no idea of the shock with which I learned so late in the play that the splendidly dressed man who could talk such eloquent persuasive language, and with all in such scrupulous conformity to that most difficult of rules which keeps the verb under the regimental discipline of its subject nomative, that the man whose plaintive period sometimes rose to the iambic majesty of blank verse, and who never got a case or tense wrong, howsoever wild, ecstatic, or dythorambic, his utterances of devotion to that innocent, long-suffering angel, the walking lady, that this man, I say, should nevertheless turn out to be a monster, whom, to borrow a little from his style of phraseology, it were mild flattery to call the greatest and vilest of rogues. My memory of the whole evening is swallowed up in the overwhelming shock of that sad surprise. The grammatical Arcadia of my boyish belief was laid waste as with an earthquake. The next morning, after I had eaten my usual bread and butter with more than usual appetite, I received a few choice friends at my lodgings in the Hamo, and we had a consultation. It was suggested that I was too near my former haunts to be safe. Indeed, rumors of an actual search for me had reached the ears of one boy of whom, oddly enough, I can recall nothing more now than that those ears of his were remarkably large ones, and stood out prominently from each side of his head, that the best and most picturesque view of those ears was, in my opinion, to be had from my desk just behind him at school, and that I was especially attracted and edified by my observations upon them immediately after he had had his hair clipped short. Those are grotesque pranks, by the way, which the memory sometimes plays us when we attempt to grope back too far. Another one of those daring spirits, for instance, who was loudest, and therefore I fear most influential, with his counsels that morning in the Hamo, has faded as to body, name, and station, wholly from my mind, and exists to me now literally as a cherub, with a mammoth straw hat for wings. From anything that I can positively remember, I would not be prepared to take my oath that he ever had any arms, legs, or trunk at all. I can recall only his big, round, staring eyes, which stood out at the tops of his puffy cheeks like a couple of glass knobs, and his red hair, whose decisive, precipitant ending all around his head, left a queer impression that rats, or some larger and more ferocious animal, had been his barber. I forget now whether it was in sport or earnest that I used to say to myself, that boy's hair had been charred off. It must have been that his facial aspect, heightened, of course, by his winged straw hat, aided him materially in the expression of his fears with regard to my safety. For this cherubic agamemnon carried every point in that council of war, and it was unanimously resolved that I should change my quarters. Accordingly the next night I was entertained in the stable of another of my school fellows, residing at the remotest corner of the district. Now I do not want to be considered fastidious or luxurious in my tastes, but I must own to a very loud complaint, entered the morning afterward, against the comparative discomforts of this new lodging. There was very little hay in the stable to which I had been transferred, and the boards, moreover, were very hard indeed. It may have been an improper spirit in which I made the remark, but I went back again to the first school fellow who has figured in this narrative, and told him, if a boy hadn't a respectable barn to invite a friend to, he needn't think I was going to be his guest. That's all. After watching, for a moment, the impression of my words upon my friend, I said furthermore that I was going to strike out for myself as I was growing tired of the monotony of haymows and bread and butter, anyways. I wanted a change. Then came one of the most impressive moments that I shall have to chronicle in these memoirs. For as soon as I had finished speaking, my friend slapped me vigorously on the back, making at the same time, with excited shrillness, this observation. Hey! Which, being a common juvenile exclamation, had, of course, no jokous allusion to the principal subject of my discourse. Hey! bully for you! continued my enthusiastic friend and school fellow, as soon as he could get his breath, which the suddenness of his lucky thought had evidently taken away. Hey! that's just what I'd do. I'd go out into the world and seek my fortune, like the boys in the story books. And, said he suddenly changing his tone and manner to those of the most excessive gravity and deliberation, and that you needn't be without means to help you along. Take these. When upon he drew forth from his capacious trousers pocket and placed in my hand five large copper scents, which at first had the appearance of so many oysters fried in batter, so girt about and covered where they with fragments of bread and butter deposited, I suppose, in the course of my friend's entire catering, it was indeed as he assured me his whole cash capital, but he would not hear to my scruples at taking it more earnest or impressive about it or under the circumstances more self-denying and truly generous he could not have been if he had been giving the world away. So that morning we parted. He wending his way, by no means conamore, to school, and I, with a queer, uncertain feeling in the region of my small Westcott, going forth, my five coppers in my pocket, to seek my fortune. CHAPTER IV A STORMY TIME Desserting entirely the haunts of my play-fellows, I stole down to the wharves. Here the sight of the crowded shipping brought back, more strongly than ever, the memory of that exhilarating trip on the old Indiana with her sublime brass band and war-like sheet iron Indian, and I tried to hire out on a steamboat. The people to whom I made application eyed me suspiciously, for I was very small of my age. They also asked me a great many disagreeable questions, and generally ended by advising me to go home to my friends, if I had any. My size was manifestly against me. Vainly I assured them I was eleven years old and my own master. They shook their heads and told me brusquely to go ashore. At last I went on board of a steamer called The Diamond, and after a little inquiry found a steward, a man with a face like the old steamer itself, with just seams enough in it, from long battling with the lake breezes, to give hints of sturdy timbers, or, I should say, of hidden strength. His determined mouth ran across his face like one of the bolted arches across the hurricane deck, large, strong, firm. His hair may be thin and gray now, and his back bent with the years, if they had not beached him as they have the old steamer, and carried him away altogether. But so great was the impression this man made on me then, that I think I should still recognize him whenever or wherever we might chance to meet. Having, I remember, gone through the usual colloquy with him as a steward, I assured him, as a man, that I did not know where to go, if I did go ashore, that I had no home and no friends, and, in a word, so played upon his good nature that he told me to go into the pantry and go to work. I obeyed. That is, I went into the pantry and went to work, upon the heartiest meal that I had ever partaken of up to that date. The steward meant that I should help a greasy-looking fellow whom I found washing dishes there when I entered. Overcome, however, by the savory smell of meats and other remains of dinner, which had not yet gone down again to the kitchen, the first words I said to the succulent pantry man were framed into a demand for something to eat. As soon as he recovered his equanimity and his dishcloth, which latter he had dropped in sheer surprise at what he evidently considered my stupendous impudence, the pantry man wanted to know, bluntly, what I was doing there. The while he gave his foot such a preliminary flourish as plainly indicated his intention to accelerate my motion fence, I informed him, in considerable haste, that I came by the steward's order. This straight way altered the case in the opinion of the obsequious menial. He now pointed at a row of chafing-dishes and said, There it is! Pitch in! A few moments afterward the steward found me so absorbed in my work that I did not notice his entrance into the pantry. Bread and butter in small quantities and at irregular intervals had been, it must be owned, rather poor satisfaction to the appetite of a growing boy. The steward must have watched me some time in silence, for my eyes, happening to float away at random in an ecstasy of pleased and vigorous mastication, encountered him, standing not far from my side, gazing at me earnestly. I dropped my knife and fork in fear, as he had talked to me like a rough, surly fellow. His voice was wholly changed now when he spoke, and I noticed it. Why, he asked, Didn't you tell me you were as hungry? My only answer was to let my eyes fall from his face to the roast beef and potatoes yet undervalued before me. There, eat as much as you want, said the steward, in a softer voice still. Come to think, he added, You needn't wash dishes, I'll use you in a cabin. For some reason I had gained a friend in that gruff fellow. Three days later he knocked that same greasy pantryman down for abusing me. Indeed, he fought for me many times afterward, as I would gladly fight for him now, if I knew where to find him, and if I were sure of the success which always attended him as my champion. On this craft I must have been working for general results, or for the amateur delight of forming one of a steamboat's crew. I do not remember that anything was ever said about wages, either by myself or the steward. If, in fact, I were called upon tomorrow to make out such a bill for my services, I should claim conscientiously just what I earned, I think I should be very much embarrassed. And it would, too, I fancy be a fine piece of mental balancing, to decide whether the amateur delight alluded to above was at all equal to the utter seasick misery I was called upon to endure. My duties in the cabin were bounded only by my capacity. I had to help set the table, wait on it, and clear it away. Sweep, dust, and make myself generally useful. I did well enough, I suppose, so long as we were in port. But out on the lake, if the waves were at all turbulent, I was much worse than useless. It took me longer to get my sea legs on than almost any one I have ever known. Some allowance was made for me the first trip I was permitted, that is, to be as miserable as I could be, and take to my birth as often as I liked. In the course of time, and it seemed a very long time, we arrived at Cleveland, where part of our freight and passengers were landed. No sooner had the steamer touched the wharf than I sprang ashore as the best means of curing my nausea. By the time I had reached what I take now to have been Superior Street, I was congratulating myself on my sudden restoration to a better understanding with my rebellious stomach. And for the next hour I was at liberty, in the language of an admired poet of our day, to lean and loaf at my ease, flattening my nose against shop windows. In connection with my sanitary stroll through the pretty city of Cleveland, I may mention a phenomenon, both physical and metaphysical, which occurred to me with some of the surprise, if not the delight, of a discovery. I look upon it still as a striking instance of the power, not only of association, but of the mind over the body, happening in a short, narrow street on my return toward the wharves, to pass a sort of junk shop and second-hand clothing store combined. My nose became cognizant of a stale, tarry, water-logged smell, at the same moment that my eyes lighted upon a sailor hat, shirt, and pantaloons dangling from a hoop at the door. And, be it believed or not, I am telling the truth when I say that I became instantly as seasick as ever. Whether the relapse came from the kelpy scent of the shop and neighborhood, or from the sight of the suit of clothes, relict of the mariner, or from the mental and the stomachic association of both with scenes I had just passed through on the lake, I cannot, of course, at this distance of time presume to determine. I recollect, however, I had a droll, boyish impression, for a long while afterward, in connection with those second-hand sailcloth trousers. There was indeed, as I recall them even now, something strangely suggestive of hopeless infirmity about them. As they flapped and bulged wearily in the tar-laden zephyrs, the knees would become full, and in some inexplicable way would give ghostly hints of the knock-kneed idiosyncrasies of the late wearer. Then the whole garment would become mysteriously distended, as if some poor mariner were being hanged by the neck, and the choking and plethora had reached even to the very ends of his pantaloons, reminding me quite vividly the while of a pair of piratical legs, which a sailor in the foc-sel of our steamer, the diamond, had shown me in the frontispiece of a very greasy book dangling pictorially from the gibbet of the lamented Captain Kidd. Well, what I set out to say is that for a long time afterward I held the juvenile opinion that those same second-hand sailor trousers, big at the bottom and little at the top, like the churn in the venerable riddle, were alone what made me then so suddenly and so mysteriously seasick. I did not, however, think much about it at the time, or of anything else, but getting back with all possible expedition to the steamer and to bed. Seasickness, you may have observed, is very much like first love. While it lasts you rarely get any sympathy from those not affected like yourself, and when it is over you are the first to laugh at it, and there is always likely to be something ludicrous about it, in the memory, but, durante bello, it is serious enough in all conscience. Now the second voyage of our steamer diamond was a remarkably calm one, and I, true to the instincts of your convalescent, whether of nausea or erotomania, ridiculed my previous troubles. But on the third voyage the lake was rougher than ever. I fought my weakness valiantly, yet it seemed a battle against all visible nature, the water, the sky, and the crazy old steamboat to say nothing of my own recalcitrant little body. I was forced to yield. I had, however, been a sailor too long for any faint show of sympathy. The steward, too, was short of help, and there was no escape for me. I was, accordingly, called out to do duty at the dinner table, where I staggered about under plates and platters to the terror of all immediate beholders. I had little or no control of my legs and hands, and my head, if I remember correctly now, was engaged in framing and passing silent resolution of want of confidence in my stomach. Having emptied a dish of stewed chicken into the lap of an uncomplaining lady-passenger, who was nearly as sick as I was, but who was ashamed to own it, I planted my back violently against the side of the cabin, in the inane endeavor to steady the rolling ship or my rolling head. I did not know or care exactly which. While thus employed, I heard the grating voice of the captain, who was, if possible, always as ill-natured as he looked. Here, boy! he called. I went to him, staggering and trembling and apprehending all manner of vengeance. What are you staring at, you lubber? Why don't you turn me a glass of water? From which comparatively amiable speech of my commander, I was left in doubt whether he was aware of my late exploit with the stewed chicken. I seized an unwieldily water-pitcher, and just as I had it well elevated, the boat gave a perverse lunge, and I proceeded, desirer than ever, to pour the entire contents of the jug into the captain's ear and down his neck. Everything for a yard or so around, excepting only his goblet, received some share of the water. I did not tarry long to observe the rage of the captain, but what I did see, and more especially hear of it, was certainly as intense and loud and blasphemous as anything of the kind that has since come within the range of my perception. The pitcher broke on the floor where I dropped it, and I fled back to my berth, and covered up my head. My commander did not pursue me, but about an hour afterward the steward came to me with a very long face, as I observed with the one eye which I uncovered long enough to ask him if the captain had seen me deposit the stewed chicken in the lap of that lady. No, I was told, the captain had not heard of that, but was sufficiently wroth about the wetting he had received at my hands, and the steward ended by saying that I would have to go ashore at the next landing. He was very sorry, he assured me, but the captain was inexorable. I hastened to inform my friend and protector that I would be glad to set my foot on any dry land whatsoever, and that I never wanted to go on a steamboat any more, for the vessel now in the trough of the sea was rolling and creaking more violently every minute, and my nausea had increased in proportion. The next landing the steward gave me to understand was Coneyott Ohio, which was his own home. He comforted me furthermore with the assurance that his wife would be down at the wharf to get the linen which she washed for the steamer, and that she should take me home with her. The pier of Coneyott, where we finally arrived, was now invested with absorbing interest to me. I wondered which of the tanned faces that looked up from the dock belonged to my future mistress, and I wondered, too, which of the weather-beaten fishermen's huts along the shore, about the only habitations in sight, was to be my future home. I hoped it was the one with the little boats before it on the beach, and the long fish-nets spread out to dry, where the white gulls seemed to make their headquarters wheeling about the little roof, or sliding up against the sky, or swooping the surf, and skimming along the billows of the lake. I was thus musing in grateful convalescence on the upper deck when the steward approached, and pointed me out to his wife. She was, as I remember her, a chubby black-eyed little person with a pleasant voice. At her woman's question as to whether I had my things all packed and ready, I became embarrassed, but the steward helped me out by answering for me, yes, he has them on his back! The knowledge of my forlorn condition, and a sudden choking sensation in the throat, came upon the good little woman at one and the same time, as I was made aware by an attempt to speak, which she abandoned, substituting, very much to the lowering of my boyish pride, a fearless and vigorous hugging, together with a hearty, loud-sounding kiss, right before the passengers, the greasy pantry-man, and others of the crew. Then the steward's wife, without another word, hurried me ashore into a one-horse wagon with the soiled linen, and drove away up to the village, which was a mile or two from the lake. End of Chapter 4 A Stormy Time Section 5 Of Vagabond Adventures Chapter 5 A Boy's Paradise Near the end of a quiet street we alighted at a little frame-house all emboured in peach and plum trees. This was the steward's home, and soon was as much mine as if I held the title deed. They had no children, and the steward's wife was not long and growing wonderfully fond of me. So fond, indeed, that she humoured me in everything. When tired of the house and little yard, I amused myself in strolling alone to the lake and taking amateur voyages in the fisherman's boats without their permission, and in swimming and fishing and hunting clams in Caniott Creek, or River, whichever it is called. My favourite bathing-place was beneath the high bridge, which the curious reader can cross any day on the lakeshore railroad. When the steamer arrived the steward's wife and I went down to the pier in the one-horse wagon with the clean clothes of the last washing, and brought away the money for it, together with a new load of soiled linen. This one-horse echipage, by the way, must have belonged to some neighbour, for I do not remember that we ever brought it into requisition, except for laundry purposes, nor do I remember that I ever imperiled my neck, or the horses, with it alone, as would surely have been the case if it had been our property. Our practice was, invariably, to spend the money for the last washing before the next one was begun, and this was the routine to which we scrupulously adhered. The steward's wife, namely, would use the first day after the steamer had gone in baking all manner of bread, pies and cakes, enough in fact to last us until the good ship diamond should come round again. Then, on the second day, we would go to the village livery stable and get a horse and buggy, with which we would ride five miles out in the country and visit at the farmhouse of her father and mother. Having thus exhausted all her earnings, we would return home on the third day and the steward's wife would go very contentedly about her washing. This may not have been the best sort of economy for a poor washerwoman, but it was certainly a most delightful way for a thoughtless boy to pass his time. Counting out an occasional tendency to biliousness, consequent upon overdoses of the good things of her regular first days baking, I must say the weeks I spent with that good, simple-hearted creature were very happy ones indeed. Her kindness extended even to the tattered places of my scanty wardrobe. Everything was made whole and clean. She bought me, I remember, a shirt for fifty cents, and made over a pair of her husband's summer pantaloons to fit me, so that I was not, as formally, confined to the house while my solitary piece of linen was in laundry. There was only one grievous alloy thereafter in my complete happiness, and that was in the shape of some much larger boys than myself who diverted their minds by whipping me whenever and wherever they could lay hands on me. I fought them at first, but I always came off beaten, and so I gave it up, and it is due to the nimbleness of my legs, or to the exceeding elasticity inherent in terror, to add that they rarely or never caught me after that. Still, the grievance was all the same. On one occasion, however, the Stuart stopped over at home a trip, and, being informed of the persecutions to which I had been subjected, he gave a sound drubbing to every one of my enemies, and threatened them with the repetition of the same as often as I should complain. I had the satisfaction of witnessing this castigation, which, though somewhat informal, being administered when each of my foes was down, as I may say, across my champion's knee in a species of chancery not yet introduced, I believe, into the prize-ring, had nevertheless the desired effect. The peace was preserved, and I was happy. But perfect happiness is short-lived, after all. It was not many weeks later when we were startled in our little home by a call in the interest of my relatives, conveying the intelligence that my whereabout was known, and that I should be sent for soon. Now it happened that the steamered diamond was due at the pier, the afternoon succeeding the one on which we had heard this appalling piece of news. I said nothing to my benefactress of my design, formed almost instantaneously, for I knew she would not consent to its carrying out. But when the steamer had left, I was not to be found in any of the fisherman's boats on the lake, or throwing stones at the gulls along the shore, or afterward, beneath the high bridge, or in any of my usual haunts in the village. I had, in fact, stowed myself away in the old diamond's folk-soul, where I was not discovered till Kaniot was well out of sight. Unfortunately my new shirt and pantaloons were both in the wash at the time, and I have never seen them since. Thus I came away with the same well-worn clothes and solitary piece of linen in which I had first fled from Buffalo. The five coppers I still had in my pocket kept, I know not by what queer inspiration against future needs. I never heard from her lips how much the steward's wife grieved at my sudden disappearance, for I never saw the good soul afterward, but, from what I have since learned, I scarcely hope ever again, by anything that I may do, or that may happen to me, to produce such a void in the heart of any living being. I had taken the place, I suppose, in her childless bosom of that strongest and purest of all affections, the mothers for her offspring. Several years afterward she nearly killed with kindness a friend of mine, to use the language of the friend herself, who gave her news from me. I should hardly mention this now, were it not for the sequel, which further illustrates, I think, though in a sad way, the real goodness and constancy of the poor creature's heart, while going to show, at the same time, what a warm place was won in it by a graceless vagabond. Later in her life some great sorrow, the exact nature of which I never learned, unhinged her intellect, and her insanity took the mild form of always expecting me back, the same homeless urchin, unchanged by the years. It was, as I have intimated, in the afternoon when I left her, and until she was moved from that part of the country to an asylum, where she was cared for in comfort till she died, she used to go regularly every afternoon to the friend above mentioned, and ask about her lost boy, as she called me. CHAPTER VI The captain of the steamer diamond, never in the habit of looking pleased at anything, did not depart from his habit, but rather carried it to an unwanted degree of frowning and darkling excess, when he saw me at work again about the table, at the next meal after leaving Cagnat. He said nothing to me, however, but, calling up the steward, had a long, stormy talk with him. The steward in self-defense was, of course, obliged to tell how I had stowed myself away in the folksal, which, I need not say, did not enhance the commander's opinion of me. What that irate gentleman would have done with me, whether he would not have thrown me bodily into the lake, if it had not been for the earnest deprecation of the steward, is even yet, in quiet, reflective moments, an interesting problem to my mind. At last the captain's unwilling consent was obtained to take me back to Buffalo, where, as my intercessor said, I had friends. It happened that the steamer was bound up the lake to Toledo, where also I had relatives—a fact which I did not make known to the steward. I was now compassed about, it will be seen, by prospects of capture on every hand. I had my reasons nevertheless for wishing to be left at Buffalo instead of Toledo. The latter city was so small that my relatives would easily lay hold of me there, and the former, being not only a larger city, but so much farther away, I should stand a much better chance of concealment. And, what was of almost equal importance, I should be sure of an additional week's board before the steamer reached there. At Toledo, therefore, I scarcely went ashore at all. During the return trip to Buffalo my mind was exceeding busy with daring and mighty schemes of escape from the steward, whom circumstances had now metamorphosed into a walking terror to me. That honest fellow had confided to me that he considered it his duty, and for my interests, to have an interview with the people from whom I had fled, and to do, I know not what, other appalling things toward providing me with an suitable, permanent home. I did not, however, think it prudent to express my demirer at his prospective proceedings, choosing secretly to trust the hope of sustaining it rather to my legs than to my eloquence. Accordingly, when we had arrived at Buffalo, I watched my opportunities, and, seizing the right moment, fled precipitately up the docks, unobserved by my well-meaning self-imposed guardian. Two hours subsequently, deeming myself safe, I walked boldly on board of the old steamer Baltic, here by a wonderful freak of fortune. It was not ten minutes till I had shipped his cabin-boy at the marvellous salary of ten dollars a month. Surely I have never felt so rich or independent since. I went to work with a will inspired to undertake anything, in any weather, by a calm sense of security, and by the princely girdon which loomed high in my imagination at the end of the month. In the course of time, too, I am happy to say here incidentally, I overcame completely my remarkable tendency to see sickness. The Baltic, then having seen her best days, did not belong to any regular line, but went rolling and creaking about on roaming commissions for freight and passengers all over the lakes. Up to the time of the inglorious denouement in which my life as one of her crew ended, I can remember nothing of moment which happened, except that the sense of my own importance and of my accumulating wealth grew daily in strict proportion, and that her captain was a perpetual mountain to me, bearing down very hard on my expansive spirit, but never quite crushing it. With a few exceptions indeed my experiences with captains were strikingly disagreeable, but not, I think, peculiar, from actual brutality or a mistaken sense of duty, applying especially to boys and common sailors. Your ordinary captain, on lake or ocean, has often seen to me, in some respects, less human than the ship over which he tyrannizes. With regard to this cold autocrat of the venerable steamer Baltic, I recollect a queer, boyish fancy I entertained. I forget whether in earnest or in sportive retribution. Namely that the Norwesters had not only piled up the breakers which threatened continually in the hard, wrinkled folds and lines of his face, but had also blown the warmth, and, in a word, all the heart out of his voice and manner. As the month drew near its clothes, however, and the ten dollars earned by my own hands were soon to be mine, the contumely of my commander had little weight against the buoyancy and growing independence of my spirit. I had been in the Baltic just three weeks and four days on the eventful morning when she was to leave Toledo. It had been my habit, once a week, to wash my only shirt in the pantry, and to wait about the kitchen till it dried, with my coat buttoned up to my chin. Now, on this same morning, I had just issued from the latter place with my clean shirt in my hand, when the Captain told me to do something. I forget what. I assured him I would as soon as I could put on my shirt. He told me to do it right away, at the same time coupling me and my garment blasphemously together, and consigning us, figuratively, to a port where, for all I know, there may be many collectors but no custom houses. I gave the Captain to understand, still more bluntly, that I should do nothing till I had made my toilet. And inspired by a memory of former wrongs as well as a consciousness of prospective opulence, I used to my superior officer other language of a saucy and independent kind, whereupon the Captain, in sailor phrase, tacked for me, and I tacked for the shore. Here, then, I demanded my pay. But the enraged commander solemnly averred that he would see me first in that tropical port just alluded to, and then I should never have a scent. Shortly after, the boat pushed off into the stream. A sympathizing friend threw me a paper of crackers from the pantry on the upper deck, and as the Baltic got under way, there I stood on the wharf with my paper of crackers in one hand, and my only shirt in the other, clamouring for my wages. I stood leaning against the splintered pile, which had been one of her hitching-posts, and watched the Baltic as she faded slowly out of sight. My courage seemed to fade with her. It was not the loss of my place and probably of my dinner that crushed me, but, after so many wealthy dreams, this utter financial ruin, what were my five coppers still jingling loosely in my pocket to the dollars I had lost, or to the combined capital of my relatives in that very city. The contest was plainly hopeless. For as much as a half-hour I considered myself delivered bound into the hands of my pursuers. Indeed, the dock on which I was making this mental soliloquy happened to be but a short distance from the warehouse of an uncle of mine, then a commissioned merchant and ship-owner in Toledo. At last I betook myself despondently to a neighbouring shed, and donned my shirt, and then, as under some desperate spell, walked straight toward my uncle's office. I crossed the threshold and saw him in conversation with some gentleman. While waiting till he should notice me, I beheld through the office window the little steamer arrow almost ready to depart for Detroit. I knew that the Baltic was also going to Detroit, and thought that I might possibly get my money if I followed her thither. Only those unfortunate persons who have been suddenly prevented from committing suicide when in the very act will thoroughly understand, I think, the feeling with which I hailed this thought. Instantly my comprehensive vow to have nothing more to do with relatives flashed across my mind. Seeing that my uncle had not yet observed me, I turned quickly on my heel, and made hastily for the dock of the steamer arrow. I concealed myself on board of her till she was under way, when, making my case known to the steward, I was allowed to work my passage in the cabin to Detroit. It was that season when, as many dwellers by the western lakes will remember, the arrow was the fastest boat on those waters. We passed the other steamer somewhere off Monroe Lighthouse, and on the same afternoon, therefore, as the old Baltic came up to the wharf at Detroit, there I stood before the astonished eyes of her captain, again clamouring for my wages. With this difference only, that my shirt was now on my back, and my crackers carefully stowed away in my pocket with my five coppers. End of Chapter 6 The Contumely of Captains Section 7 of Vagabond Adventures As soon as the Baltic was made fast, and the captain had sufficiently recovered from his astonishment, he stalked toward me, denouncing vengeance. I took to my heels as soon as he reached the wharf. Finding that he could not catch me, he stopped, shook his fist, and swore he would arrest me if he saw or heard anything more of me. I, of course, knew nothing of the law but its terrors, and though I really had the better side in the case, gave the matter up. It may have been that the joy to be in a strange city out of the way of capture helped me materially, but it seems a little remarkable now how soon this mighty disappointment and defeat vanished wholly from my thoughts. I cannot remember that the circumstance ever crossed my mind again till I was called upon, months subsequently, to recount my adventures to admiring school-fellows. It could not, I am sure, have been twenty minutes after my Parthian contest with the irate captain, for if the truth must be told I shot him a scathing epithet or so in my flight, when I was amusing myself after the manner of the light and heavy balancer rolling myself about upon the tops of some white fish barrels at a neighbouring dock, as contented and happy as a thoughtless boy only can be. Tied to this dock was a little sloop-rigged scow used in bringing sand from Hog Island in the Detroit River. There was a small boat, with a solitary oar and skull-hole belonging to this sand-scow, tugging lazily at a rope by which it was attached, as it floated dreamily astern in the current. A youngish fellow with a good-natured face was engaged in unloading the larger craft when I aspired the smaller one. Now, if there was any one thing in which much practice and a boundless love had lent me any degree of skill, it was risking my life in amateur navigation. I need scarcely tell you, therefore, how I ceased my acrobatics with the white fish-barrels and came engaged wistfully at that little boat. How I varied this employment by staring inquiringly into the mild face of that enviable young man who had control of its destinies. How, when he paused in his work to regard me in turn, I thrust my hands unconcernedly into my pockets, and looked studiously away from him and the little boat at the far windings of the Broad River. How, when he had resumed his work, my eyes also resumed their longing pilgrimage from the little boat to his face, and how, having repeated this process several times, my mind tugging fitfully and dreamily at its purpose as the little boat at its rope, I finally turned and asked, in an abrupt voice, for the loan of the one-word craft. The young man was startled into a smile, perhaps of sheer good-nature and perhaps of pleased surprise, at so brief a petition over toppled by so lengthy an enacted preamble. Certainly, he said, I might take his little boat and I embarked. Pushing boldly into the stream which runs there three or four miles an hour, I sculled vigorously for the Canadian shore. Even at this early period, I may remark, I had an overpowering desire to visit foreign lands, and I resolved to take that opportun occasion to go abroad. Those most familiar with the swift deep river will best understand that the probability of my reaching the British shore was only less than the possibility of my ever getting back again, and that the project, under these circumstances, was utterly mad and perilous. I sculled out well toward the middle of the stream, exulting, boylike in the wild freedom of the voyage, heading diagonally against the current, but otherwise taking very little heed whether the prow of my boat was pointing. Suddenly I noticed a commotion on the shore I had left, and looked curiously among the people there for the cause. Everyone seemed now pointing and hallowing at me. It must be, I concluded, they were applauding my skill and daring, and thus encouraged, I sculled more lustily than ever, with my back still toward the bow of my boat. Not many moments afterward I heard, rising above the other noises of the busy life around and on the river, a queer rumbling sound in the water ahead of me. I turned to find a large steamboat making directly toward me under full speed, and not more than two or three rods away. I dropped my oar and stood paralyzed with a sudden danger and the utter hopelessness of escape. The people on the steamer seemed nearly as terrified as myself, for they shouted and waved their hands and arms in the wildest manner. The bow of the large vessel just grazed that of my little one when the great paddle-wheels were stopped. That swell caused by the motion of the steamer struck the small craft and threw it clear of the wheel, and the Niagara, for that was her name, passed by on her voyage. If the wheel had been stopped twenty seconds later, my boat and myself would most certainly have been drawn into it, and circumstances over which I could have had no control would, in all probability, have prevented me from writing out this faithful account of my adventures. I now put my boat about, and sculled for sure, abandoning my scheme of foreign travel and exploration. The long and difficult struggle with the current, which ensued, should have been enough, without the terrible fright I had experienced, to bring me, I think, to a realising sense of the wildness and madness of my undertaking. Finally, reaching the dock and making the yaw fast to the sand-scow, I exchanged a very sheepish sort of smile for the good-humoured or sympathetic one of the young man, her captain, and strolled off leisurely over the wharf, out of the way of the curious people who had been the witnesses of my exploit. In a remarkably short time thereafter, I was engaged again in rolling myself about on the top of the whitefish barrels, thinking no more of my hair-breath escape, or of what was to become of me in the immediate future. Twenty minutes, as nearly as I can recollect, were about as long as any direct misfortune at that period could cloud the brightness of my young hope. This utter recklessness I can scarcely understand now. It requires, I suppose, more years and experience than I had then to learn the knack of despairing. At least I know I was in the full delight of my first freedom, and, in all these boyish wanderings, the fact that I was in need of a meal or a night's lodging would occur to me, almost always, as a sudden inspiration and only at the usual hour for the meal or for going to bed. The joy of my solitary Robinson Crusoe life on the wharves and among the whitefish barrels was so strong upon me that I suffered much less than would at first be imagined from the hunger which sometimes filled long intervals between one meal and the next. I have just used the words solitary life, and I have used them advisedly, for I can remember only one juvenile friend whom I ever picked up as a companion in my vagrancy, and that was an urchin of Irish descent. We met on the wharf at Detroit, if my memory does not fail me, some days after the events just chronicled. He was the first and last whom I took into my boyish confidence, for the companionship was not harmonious, and ended in the disaster of a bloody nose which he inflicted on me at parting. This, with the black eye which I bestowed in turn upon him, was, I believe, the only ceremony observed on the occasion of our mutual leave-taking. Toward the evening of the day of my narrow escape in the yaw of the sand-scow, I drew from my pocket the crackers thrown to me that morning at Toledo, from the pantry of the Baltic, and seated myself on the wharf overlooking the clear river to eat them, feeding the minnows with the crumbs. When it began to be dark, it suddenly occurred to me that I had no place to sleep. I am sure that, up to that moment, the subject of my prospective lodgings had not crossed my mind. I rose and brushing the last fragments of my crackers down to my fellow vagabonds, the minnows, I walked toward the place where the sand-scow was moored. I remembered now the good-natured face of the young fellow who had so willingly loaned me his small boat, and never scolded me for the peril to which I had exposed it as well as myself. Arrived in the little cabin of the scow, I found him already retired. I had conscientious scruples about begging and imagined I was doing nothing of the kind when I made the simple affirmative statement of my case. Indeed, I would not have had time to append any request to my first sentence for the young man in his prompt kindness told me as soon as he had heard I had no lodging of my own that I was welcome to share his, making for me while he spoke, a place on the loose hay which formed his bed. A solitary pillow-case of coarse sheeting, stuffed with hay, was the only thing like bedding discoverable. Here I threw myself without undressing and tried to sleep. But there were more lodgers with us, bred, I suppose, by the sand than even the good-hearted fellow would have willingly accommodated, that is, if he felt them as I did. Before morning, however, youth and fatigue got the better of them, and I slept soundly. CHAPTER VIII A rising, refreshed, I sallied forth early on the wharf to amuse myself. In the course of an hour it occurred to me suddenly, out of no more previous thought or care about the matter than I had had the night before on the subject of a lodging, that I had had no breakfast, and could not say exactly where I was going to get any. The good-natured face of my late bed-fellow again suggested itself to my mind, and I returned to the sand-scow. There he was in the little coop of a cabin, just partaking of his morning meal, which consisted of a small baker's loaf and a teacup of molasses. Still humoring my scruples as to direct begging, I gave him to understand affirmatively that I did not know where to get my breakfast. Without uttering a word, the good-fellow broke his loaf in two and gave me half. In fact, I cannot recollect that he ever asked me any questions. If he did, they were of such a kindly nature as not in any way to suggest the ignominious clothes of my free career by capture, and that is why I suppose I have forgotten them. We dipped our bread by turns into the teacup of molasses very amicably, and took alternate draughts of the pure river water from the same tin dipper. Even now, as I write, I can see again the strange light in his honest eyes, just behind the surprise with which they regarded me when, our simple meal over, I drew slowly from my pocket my five copper cents and placed them in his hand. Of course he would not take them. It was, no doubt, because they were my entire wealth that I straightway received the impression that he thought them too much for his somewhat meager hotel accommodations. And so I recall to his memory that he had also loaned me his small boat the afternoon before. Never mind, never mind, he said. Put your money away. You can take the small boat again if you want to. These were his exact words, and there was more true feeling in the way he said them than would go to make up many a longer speech I have since heard in the pathos of melodrama where the hero has magnanimously refused vast estates and lacks of rupees. If the reader will excuse me, the parenthesis, I should like to be allowed to say, right here, God bless that young fellow, or middle-aged fellow now, wherever he is. Whether a sudden apprehension of future and dire exigencies, or a gleam of my usual delight in small boats, or both together, flashed across my mind at that moment, I am not now prepared to state. But I remember I did put my money away and climbing down again into the little yaw, amused myself by imperiling my life once more in the swift current. This time, however, I ventured merely on short coasting voyages around the docks. At least I had not yet come to a decision about the feasibility of taking in something foreign in my way, being in the very act of casting a pair of longing eyes at the Canadian shore, when I was hailed by my friend of the Sand Scow and requested to bring the boat to land. A favourable breeze had sprung up, and the scow, now discharged of her sand, took her departure for a new load. I stood on the wharf and waved her adieu, and that was the last I ever saw of her. Or of the noble fellow who united in his own person her captain, mates, and crew. I may have felt a little more alone in the world now, for I remember I did not go back to my jolly play-fellows, the white fish-barrels, but boarded the diverse steam-boats instead in quest of work. I received the same prompt answer from all. They did not want me. As will be supposed, my one suit of clothes was by this time beginning to show marks of the service it had done among the greasy platters of pantries and cabins. This fact probably was the greatest barrier to my success, and the cause, too, of most of the rough language I received in answer to my applications. Toward night I became desperately hungry, for it will be remembered my last warm meal was the dinner of the day before, eaten upon the little steamer arrow on the way from Toledo. Weary with repeated refusals from steward after steward, I went boldly at last on board of the steamer Pacific and inquired for the captain. It was straightway demanded of me what such a beggar as I wanted of the captain. I resented the term beggar immediately. I proposed to work for what I got. I had money, if it came to that, in proof of which I jingled defiantly the five pennies in my pocket. No, I was no beggar. But I must see the captain. Carrying my point finally I was led to the room of the commander, whom I found to be a short, red-faced man with a voice like a Norwester. He was leaning back on a camp chair with his feet in a berth and smoking his after supper cigar. To his gruff, What do you want with me? I replied meekly that I desired to wash dishes or do anything for something to eat, that I had had nothing but a few crackers and some bread and molasses in thirty-six hours, and that I had applied to his steward that afternoon and had been refused, and that I was forced finally to come to him, hungry and wanting work. What's your name? demanded the captain. And who are you and where do you come from? I answered the first part of his question, but he noticed I hesitated after that. He gave me leconically to understand that I must tell him who I was or starve for all of him. I was forced to comply, that is, saying nothing about Buffalo. I mentioned my uncle, the ship-owner in Toledo. This was a fatal mistake, as I learned very soon to my sorrow. The captain's eye became suddenly and maliciously bright and his face redder than ever. For as many as ten awful seconds he mangled his cigar fiercely and silently between his teeth. Then, there proceeded from his mouth an addition to the smoke he had swallowed in his wrath, a terrible volley of oaths and curts, of which my uncle's heart and eyes were the objects. This captain, as came to my knowledge afterward, had been discharged from the employ of my uncle for some shortcoming or other, and he now proposed, it seems, to take his revenge. He sent hastily for one of the cabin-waiters and ordered him in my hearing to take me to a stateroom, give me a light supper, and then lock me in. I'm going, said the captain, and how well I remember his words. I'm going to take him to the house of vagrancy in the morning and then right to that old villain, his uncle, to come and take him out. The captain furthermore told the waiter to bear a hand and keep me safe till he should call for me the next morning. He always thought, and now he was sure, he would get even with that uncle of mine whose pride he was going to take down, and I was born away through another deluge of the captain's oaths. Of course the thought was very wrong, comprehending as it did many innocent and well-meaning people, but it seemed to me then, in that brief moment of despair, that all my troubles sprang from the fact that I was so unfortunate as to have wealthy relatives. They were the first and last cause of all my grief. The earth, I felt sure, was not broad enough to escape them in. Among the peach and plum trees of Caniott, or in the jungle of the crowded shipping at Detroit, the far-reaching fate was upon me. Though my small body was disguised in rags, still my own hunger wrought and spoke in the interests of those from whom it appeared hopeless to flee, and, more on their account than mine, I was now on my way to that place of unknown terror, the house of vagrancy. The captain's room was on the main deck, and the state room to which I was to be conducted was on the deck above. I was so terrified, or so small, that my jailer, the waiter, thought it safe as well as more convenient to release his hold of my collar and allow me to proceed him up the stairs. Now there was another companion-way on the opposite side of the steamer, corresponding to that up which we were to go, and as soon as we had attained the middle of the upper cabin, I sprang out of reach of my conductor and down the opposite stairs at about three jumps. I fled to the shore and up the docks with all the speed that my deathly terror lent me. I could hear my pursuer after me, but it was already dark, and I could hardly have seen him if I had dared to look around. I succeeded in reaching one of the vast piles of coal, which the good people of Detroit will remember as standing formerly on the wharf of the Michigan Central Steamers. Here I concealed myself. It was probably a half-hour before my jailer gave up the search, but it seemed four hours at least to me then. Twice he passed very near my hiding-place, and I recollect I was afraid lest he should hear the noise of my heartbeats. They sounded so terribly loud in my frightened ears. I heard him at last returning to the steamer, as I had reason to think for lights and people to aid him. Then I stole away noiselessly up toward the town, keeping a large coal-pile studiously between me and the place where my pursuer had disappeared, until, turning a corner, I took a side street which led me, as I supposed, into the heart of the city. What therefore was my horror when, after walking for about ten minutes in this and other crooked thoroughfares, I again found myself suddenly on the lower end of the wharf where lay the steamer Pacific and her dreadful captain. Once more I took to my heels, and this time succeeded in finding a street which led me, without further mishap, into one of the avenues. END OF CHAPTER VIII. Wondering about for what seemed a long time, turning from one thoroughfare into another, so as to make pursuit uncertain, it finally crossed my mind that it was past my bedtime. Fear had driven away my hunger so completely that I thought no more of it till the next day. Brushing and rubbing as much of the coal dust from my clothes as I could, I now walked boldly up to the counter of the commercial hotel, and said that I wanted to see the head porter. The clerk eyed me curiously as he asked me what I desired of the head porter. I wanted, I said, to black boots for the night's lodging. The clerk called the chief porter, and they both looked at me as a natural curiosity, I suppose, while they plied me with a few questions. They seemed pleased with my answers, or touched by my forlorn condition or my extreme youth, and decided that I might have a night's lodging without blacking boots for it. Accordingly, one of my questioners conducted me up into the highest story of the building, and pointing to a bed in a large dormitory, left me in the society of some dozen or more snoring waiters and cooks. I knew in an instant the nature of the occupation of my roommates, for I recognized on entering the apartment that post-culinary smell of dish-water, with which custom had rendered me familiar, and which the philosophic nostril will, I think, almost always detect about those whose constant business it is to prepare or serve the brandial dish. When I think of that dark dormitory now, and the sounds that rose from it, I am reminded of a Midsummer Night's frog pond. But I regarded it far more seriously then. I know not by what chain of reasoning I establish the connection between their sturdorous idiosyncrasies and their waking employments, yet I remember very distinctly that I occupied myself until I fell asleep in assigning the proper rank and position to each of the snorers. The baritone that came to me through the darkness from the far corner I concluded, after some deliberation, was that of the chief cook himself. Then there was a deep base, the real Mephistophelian hero of that opera of sleepers, whose exact whereabout in the room I could never quite discover, for his note sounded each time in the place farthest from the one where I had heard it last, or expected to hear it next. This basso cantante, I had not the slightest doubt, and I crouched lower on my pillow at the thought, was that most inscrutable and relentless of tyrants, in all dining-hauls and cabins, the head waiter. The several tenors distributed all round me a little too lavishly perhaps for the nicer harmonies of strict musical taste, being, as I suppose now, in the light of a larger experience, ambitious and fitful, as is the proverbial want of tenors, and running jealously ever and non into a dishonest falsetto, as if with a professional wish to attract attention, these several tenor snorers were, I felt sure, what the world might very well suffer of great many ambitious, fitful and dishonest tenors always to be, namely among the common rank and file of cooks and waiters. And I had firmly made up my mind long before I was lulled to sleep by the steady crescendo of the chorus, that the tapering treble which piped darkling, like some night-bird high over all, proceeded from some pale-faced meek-eyed scullion of outer kitchen, who, awake and in the presence of his chief, would not dare say his soul was his own. I slept soundly enough till about five o'clock the next morning when I arose hurriedly, whether my half-roused operetic company of the night before thought me a ghost, or how they explained my mysterious coming and going among them I did not wait to learn, leaving them to stare at one another in drowsy amazement I stole noiselessly and breakfastless away from the hotel. The fright of the evening proceeding had shaken my confidence in human nature generally. I cannot tell how, but I became impressed with the ludicrous idea that the hotel clerk or porter would take my five coppers away from me in payment for my lodging, to say nothing of my breakfast, if I should stay for it, so I went down to the docks of the lower part of the city, as far from the Pacific and her captain as possible. Here I had the good fortune to strike a bargain with the cook of a lumber schooner to wash his dishes for him, provided he should first give me all I could eat, and thus I broke my fast of twenty-four hours with the first full meal I had taken in forty-eight hours. While finishing up the work I had agreed to do I saw the steamer Pacific passing down the stream on her voyage away from Detroit, and I breathed freely once more. I spent some days now doing odd jobs for cooks and pantrymen for my board and lodging, while their vessels were in port. But my clothes were so worn and soiled by this and previous service that I could get no chance to work for wages as cabin-boy. Because of my clothes also no steamer would allow me to go out of port with her, for I was told that there was a law, then existing in most of the Lake Cities, by which a boat was made responsible for the support of all vagrants she carried into a town. I do not know whether this was the case. I know merely that I was invariably sent ashore on the departure of any craft for which I had been washing dishes or scouring knives. It was indeed a precarious existence that I led in this way, but one to which I could see no immediate end. I think it was twice I went with but two meals in forty-eight hours getting nothing from breakfast to breakfast. And I may say here I have always attributed great advantage to the fact that, after the short and disastrous companionship with my young friend of Irish descent mentioned some pages back, I was my own fetus acates in all these worst distresses. Two boys will certainly do more mischief together than half a dozen will do separately. Three boys together will do more than eighteen separately, and so on. In short, I fancy it may be laid down as a general principle that, under the conditions just enunciated, there is an increasing geometrical ratio between the number of boys and the amount of evil they will do. I have alluded before to an account of these experiences which I gave to my school fellows months afterward. The degree of fertile suggestion, which even the narrative stirred up in my auditory, should have made me thankful then, as I am certainly now, that I did thus lead my vagabond life alone. These ardent youngsters would interpolate in the very sickest and thrillingest movements of my story advice as to what I should have done, or hints as to what they would have done under the circumstances. During this narration to my school fellows, and now I am coming to the purpose of the present digression, a boy with a very sinister looking face, who has since happily died of the smallpox, asked me why I didn't steal. Avering with great frankness, that was what he would have done. Now that was the very first time the idea of stealing ever crossed my mind, in connection with my boyish calamities and deprivations. I am sure of this, for I remember the startling impression made upon me at the moment of the boy's suggestion. I dare not say that I would not have stolen, after some of my long fasts, if I had ever once thought of it. And I am only too glad that this anomaly should have occurred in my case, for, of a truth, it strikes me as much greater as a metaphysical phenomenon than as a juvenile virtue. Note, A. This bit of Seneca seems so appropriate that I hope the reader will excuse me for quoting it here, even if I did get it at second hand from Montaigne. In the very midst of my direst misfortunes, when it seemed that nothing worse could possibly happen to me, the Pacific came steaming back to Detroit. She arrived in the afternoon, and although I had had nothing to eat that day, I was in too great apprehension of her captain to think of anything but concealment, or escape from the city. After nightfall I stole on board the Michigan Central Steamer Mayflower and found the fourth porter. I had been among menial so long that I knew all about the ramifications of their grades, and what particular line of duties belonged to individuals of each grade. The fourth porter, I was well aware, had charged to the folksal, where the deckhands and firemen ate and slept. Now the fourth porter of the Mayflower was a lazy, good-natured, little pockmarked Irishman, whom I had no great difficulty in persuading to smuggle me to Buffalo on condition that I should do the greater part of his work in the folksal. I was glad it will be seen to make any port in the storm which at that time swept across my terrified imagination. Buffalo was not, of course, the best one for me, but anything seemed better just then than the prospect of that Sumerian house of vagrancy. My friend, the fourth porter, was so well pleased with the skill and taste I displayed in the cleansing of his greasy dishes that he lent a degree of zeal to the carrying out of his part of the contract, which well nigh proved fatal to me. For the next day, when we were out on the lake and the fares were collecting, he hid me away between two mattresses, as black as the coal handled by the sturdy firemen who usually slept on them. I was already half smothered when the clerk and his satellites descended into the folksal. But the fourth porter, to crush out, I suppose, the merest crease of suspicion, sat down on the mattress which covered me, and carelessly picked his teeth till the danger was passed. It was well that the folksal was so uninviting a place as to detain the clerk for a short time, since I should have screamed or perished in a half minute more. When drawn out at last, by the party of the first part, to our contract, I was very black in the face, not only from the smothering I had endured, but from the cold dust I had taken from the mattresses. CHAPTER X 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 fell 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 neighbouring 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 anyone knowing it. Gazing around toward the wharf, in the direction from which the sound had seemed to come, I saw nobody but some labourers 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 smokestacks 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 harboured me in the stable the first night of my runaway, 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 a remark that he guessed it wasn't so funny, after all, to go out in the world seeking a fellow's fortune. My own plate 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 today. 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 schoolmate 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 a bash 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 Mayflower. 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 upstairs 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 fullness, 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 worst 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 the 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 favour of going on a first-class steamboat and, rather forward, per adventure, 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 Fiat, a position was secured for me on the steamer in 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 stateroom keys and attend the steward's office. I had also the exclusive privilege of selling books and papers to the passengers. By favour, 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 complement to my diminutive size, or in disgust at their contents, to make me the presence 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. Spare 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 trampled 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. End of Chapter 10 A Final Triumph And End of Book 1 Section 11 of Vagabond Adventures This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Vagabond Adventures by Ralph Keeler Book 2 Three Years as a Negro Minstrel Chapter 1 My First Company Negro Minstrels were, I think, more highly esteemed at the time of which I am about to write, than they are now—at least, I thought more of them then, both as individuals and as ministers to public amusement, than I ever have since. The first troop of the kind I saw was the old concles, and I can convey no idea of the pleasurable thrill I felt at the banjo solo and the plantation jig. I resolved on the spot to be a Negro Minstrel. Mr. Ford, in whose theater President Lincoln was assassinated, was, I believe, the agent of this company. I made known my ambition to that gentleman and to Mr. Conkel himself, and they promised, no doubt, as the best means of getting rid of me, to take me with them the next year. Meantime I bought a banjo, and I had pennies screwed on the heels of my boots, and practiced Jordan on the former, and the juba-dance with a ladder, till my boarding-housekeeper gave me warning. I think there is scarcely a serious friend of mine acquainted with me at that period who does not remember me with sorrow and vexation. The racket that I made at all hours and in all places can be accounted for only by the youthful zeal with which I practiced, and which I despair of describing in anything so cold as words. I was then in my twelfth year, and my own master. It was, indeed, in that prosperous winter after the squalid summer of my six months wandering. I was going to school at Toledo, Ohio, and leading a very independent life on the money I had made out of the common investment of my five coppers and of my wages as Key Boy of the steamer North Indiana commanded by the late Captain Fiat. I mentioned this kindly old gentleman again, in the present connection, because he suffered a great deal from my early penchant to perform the clog dance on the thin deck above his stateroom. It is unnecessary to repeat here the eager and emphatic remonstrances which the good Captain would make when I had inadvertently seized the occasion of his watch below, to shuffle him out of a profound sleep. But I may remark in passing I have never known any one who regarded everything about Negro minstrelsy with so little reverence or admiration. It could not have been long after my interview with Messers Ford and Kunkel when my landlady gave me warning to take myself in banjo and obstreperous feet out of her house. With some difficulty, however, I found another place to board, where the plastering of the apartment below mine was proof against the coppers on my heels and the complicated shuffles of Juba. For a month or two before I continued to go to school, devoting only my spare hours to minstrelsy, I should no doubt have abandoned my studies much sooner than I did, had it not been for a love affair which for a while divided my attention with my banjo. My dulcinea was a red-cheeked little creature in a Czech apron. I had a rival in the same school with us whom I vanquished by an unfair and lavish expenditure of my superior wealth. I used to get up foot-races for pennies in which I contrived that her little brother should always beat and carry off the rewards. This was, for a time, effectual. My rival was completely ousted, and my two absorbing affections joined hands, as I may say figuratively, when the young lady and I met after school in her father's woodshed, and I played Jordan for her on the banjo. She may have tired of my music, since that one tune executed mechanically was the alpha and omega of my repertory, or she may have tired of me. I cannot speak definitely. If I had ever essayed to accompany the instrument with my voice it would have been different. Then I never should have forgiven myself, and I could have forgiven her, after the denouement which closed her heart and her father's woodshed to me for ever. For in the course of a few brief weeks a taller and much handsomer boy than either my former rival or myself took the little miss away from us both. In my disgust I left school and devoted all the energies of my blighted spirit to minstrelcy. I organized a band of boys into a troop, styling them the young metropolitan's, and appointed myself musical director, though I knew no more of music than of chemistry. I spent my money for instruments for the company, and for furniture to deck the room in which we met for rehearsal. The musical instruments, however, were the least of the expense, since these consisted, if I well recollect, of the banjo before mentioned, three sets of bones, a tambourine, a triangle, and an accordion. With these, nevertheless, we succeeded in making it very unpleasant for some quiet-loving two-tons who were accustomed to dream over their beer at the veershaft in the same wooden building, and indeed just under the apartment in which we rehearsed every evening. On certain occasions when I executed my juba-dance, or in company with others, performed with the Virginia walk-around, these honest Germans would leave their beer, and sometimes their hats and pipes, behind them in terror, and rush precipitately into the middle of the street. There they would stand and gaze in silent amazement up at the windows, or utter their surprise and wrath at the proceedings in the expressive but unintelligible speech of the fatherland. The host, a portly gentleman with a red nose, remonstrated with us about four times a week, to little purpose. The owner of the building also remonstrated, but we had rented the apartment and would not leave till our time was out. We were constrained, however, to forego our jig and walk around. Still our music and singing, to which we were now confined, came near breaking up the poor retail gumbreeness of the saloon beneath. His stem-guests fell off one by one, and sought a quieter neighborhood for their evening potations. It was only the bravest of them that could be prevailed upon to return for anything more than their hats and pipes, after having been driven into the street on any of our siege nights. The best praise I can give to the young gentleman who played the accordion is that he was worthy to be under such a musical director as myself. He could play only one tune from beginning to end, and that was the gum-tree canoe. Now it happened none of us could sing the song, which, as is well known, is of the slow melancholy, sentimental order, so this single tune would have been of very little benefit to us had we not luckily pressed it into the incongruous double-service of opening overture and closing quick-step. The songs that we sang, or attempted to sing, were executed to the accompaniment of the three sets of bones, the tambourine, triangle, and banjo, with an uncertain ghostly second on the accordion, which, being the same for all tunes and following no lead whatever, was of a sufficiently legubrious and dismal nature when it was not wholly drowned by the clanger of the other instruments. My company, it must be confessed, had zeal, but little talent. I spent what was left of my summer's earnings before I could get them up to a point that would, in my judgment, warrant a hope of success should we give the public exhibition for which my minstrels were clamorously ambitious. After many long months of fruitless trial the rent of our room becoming due, our furniture and instruments were seized, the landlord turned us out of doors, the German beer-seller crossed himself thankfully, and I was as completely ruined as many a manager before me.