The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862

“We allow,” says Bill, in a tone halfway between Lablache’s De profundis and a burglar’s bull-dog’s snarl, “that we’ve did our work as good as need to be did. We ‘xpect we know our rights. We ha’n’t ben treated fair, and I’m damned if we’re go’n’ to stan’ it.”

“Stop!” says Wade. “No swearing in this shop!”

“Who the Devil is go’n’ to stop it?” growled Tarbox.

“I am. Do you step back now, and let some one come out who can talk like a gentleman!”

“I’m damned if I stir till I’ve had my say out,” says Bill, shaking himself up and looking dangerous.

“Go back!”

Wade moved close to him, also looking dangerous.

“Don’t tech me!” Bill threatened, squaring off.

He was not quick enough. Wade knocked him down flat on a heap of moulding-sand. The hat in mourning for Poole found its place in a puddle.

Bill did not like the new Emperor’s method of compelling kotou. Round One of the mill had not given him enough.

He jumped up from his soft bed and made a vicious rush at Wade. But he was damaged by evil courses. He was fighting against law and order, on the side of wrong and bad manners.

The same fist met him again, and heavier.

Up went his heels! Down went his head! It struck the ragged edge of a fresh casting, and there he lay stunned and bleeding on his hard black pillow.

“Ring the bell to go to work!” said Wade, in a tone that made the ringer jump. “Now, men, take hold and do your duty and everything will go smooth!”

The bell clanged in. The line looked at its prostrate champion, then at the new boss standing there, cool and brave, and not afraid of a regiment of sledge-hammers.

They wanted an Executive. They wanted to be well governed, as all men do. They wanted disorder out and order in. The new man looked like a man, talked fair, hit hard. Why not all hands give in with a good grace and go to work like honest fellows?

The line broke up. The hands went off to their duty. And there was never any more insubordination at Dunderbunk.

This was June.

Skates in the next chapter.

Love in good time afterward shall glide upon the scene.

CHAPTER IV.

A CHRISTMAS GIFT

The pioneer sunbeam of next Christmas morning rattled over the Dunderbunk hills, flashed into Richard Wade’s eyes, waked him, and was off, ricochetting across the black ice of the river.

Wade jumped up, electrified and jubilant. He had gone to bed, feeling quite too despondent for so healthy a fellow. Christmas Eve, the time of family-meetings, reminded him how lonely he was. He had not a relative in the world, except two little nieces,—one as tall as his knee, the other almost up to his waist; and them he had safely bestowed in a nook of New England, to gain wit and virtues as they gained inches.

“I have had a stern and lonely life,” thought Wade, as he blew out his candle last night, “and what has it profited me?”

Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—“A brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any man’s first thirty years of life.”

But, answered or not, the question troubled Wade no more. He shot out of bed in tip-top spirits; shouted “Merry Christmas!” at the rising disk of the sun; looked over the black ice; thrilled with the thought of a long holiday for skating; and proceeded to dress in a knowing suit of rough clothes, singing, “Ah, non giunge!” as he slid into them.

Presently, glancing from his south window, he observed several matinal smokes rising from the chimneys of a country-house a mile away, on a slope fronting the river.

“Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at last,” he thought. “I hope he is as fine a fellow as he was ten years ago. I hope marriage has not made him a muff, and wealth a weakling.”

Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite. His “Merry Christmas” to Mrs. Purtett was followed up by a ravished kiss and the gift of a silver butter-knife. The good widow did not know which to be most charmed with. The butter-knife was genuine, shining, solid silver, with her initials, M.B.P., Martha Bilsby Purtett, given in luxuriant flourishes; but then the kiss had such a fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation! The late Perry’s kisses, from first to last, had wanted point. They were, as the Spanish proverb would put it, unsavory as unsalted eggs, for want of a moustache. The widow now perceived, with mild regret, how much she had missed when she married “a man all shaven and shorn.” Her cheek, still fair, though forty, flushed with novel delight, and she appreciated her lodger more than ever.

Wade’s salutation to Belle Purtett was more distant. There must be a little friendly reserve between a handsome young man and a pretty young woman several grades lower in the social scale, living in the same house. They were on the most cordial terms, however; and her gift—of course embroidered slippers—and his to her—of course “The Illustrated Poets,” in Turkey morocco—were exchanged with tender good-will on both sides.

“We shall meet on the ice, Miss Belle,” said Wade. “It is a day of a thousand for skating.”

“Mr. Ringdove says you are a famous skater,” Belle rejoined. “He saw you on the river yesterday evening.”

“Yes; Tarbox and I were practising to exhibit to-day; but I could not do much with my dull old skates.”

Wade breakfasted deliberately, as a holiday morning allowed, and then walked down to the Foundry. There would be no work done to-day, except by a small gang keeping up the fires. The Superintendent wished only to give his First Semi-Annual Report an hour’s polishing, before he joined all Dunderbunk on the ice.

It was a halcyon day, worthy of its motto, “Peace on earth, good-will to men.” The air was electric, the sun overflowing with jolly shine, the river smooth and sheeny from the hither bank to the snowy mountains opposite.

“I wish I were Rembrandt, to paint this grand shadowy interior,” thought Wade, as he entered the silent, deserted Foundry. “With the gleam of the snow in my eyes, it looks deliciously warm and chiaroscuro. When the men are here and ‘fervet opus,’—the pot boils,—I cannot stop to see the picturesque.”

He opened his office, took his Report and began to complete it with ,s, ;s, and .s in the right places.

All at once the bell of the Works rang out loud and clear. Presently the Superintendent became aware of a tramp and a bustle in the building. By-and-by came a tap at the office-door.

“Come in,” said Wade, and, enter young Perry Purtett.

Perry was a boy of fifteen, with hair the color of fresh sawdust, white eyebrows, and an uncommonly wide-awake look. Ringdove, his father’s successor, could never teach Perry the smirk, the grace, and the seductiveness of the counter, so the boy had found his place in the finishing-shop of the Foundry.

“Some of the hands would like to see you for half a jiff, Mr. Wade,” said he. “Will you come along, if you please?”

There was a good deal of easy swagger about Perry, as there is always in boys and men whose business is to watch the lunging of steam-engines. Wade followed him. Perry led the way with a jaunty air that said,—

“Room here! Out of the way, you lubberly bits of cast-iron! Be careful, now, you big derricks, or I’ll walk right over you! Room now for Me and My suite!”

This pompous usher conducted the Superintendent to the very spot in the main room of the Works where, six months before, the Inaugural had been pronounced and the first Veto spoken and enacted.

And there, as six months before, stood the Hands awaiting their Head. But the aprons, the red shirts, and the grime of working-days were off, and the whole were in holiday rig,—as black and smooth and shiny from top to toe as the members of a Congress of Undertakers.

Wade, following in the wake of Perry, took his stand facing the rank, and waited to see what he was summoned for. He had not long to wait.

To the front stepped Mr. William Tarbox, foreman of the finishing-shop, no longer a boy, but an erect, fine-looking fellow, with no nitrate in his moustache, and his hat permanently out of mourning for the late Mr. Poole.

“Gentlemen,” said Bill, “I move that this meeting organize by appointing Mr. Smith Wheelwright Chairman. As many as are in favor of this motion, please to say ‘Aye.’”

“Aye!” said the crowd, very loud and big. And then every man looked at his neighbor, a little abashed, as if he himself had made all the noise.

“This is a free country,” continues Bill. “Every woter has a right to a fair shake. Contrary minds, ‘No.’”

No contrary minds. The crowd uttered a great silence. Every man looked at his neighbor, surprised to find how well they agreed.

“Unanimous!” Tarbox pronounced. “No fractious minorities here, to block the wheels of legislation!”

The crowd burst into a roar at this significant remark, and, again abashed, dropped portcullis on its laughter, cutting off the flanks and tail of the sound.

“Mr. Purtett, will you please conduct the Chairman to the Chair,” says Bill, very stately.

“Make way here!” cried Perry, with the manner of a man seven feet high. “Step out now, Mr. Chairman!”

He took a big, grizzled, docile-looking fellow patronizingly by the arm, led him forward, and chaired him on a large cylinder-head, in the rough, just hatched out of its mould.

“Bang away with that, and sing out, ‘Silence!’” says the knowing boy, handing Wheelwright an iron bolt, and taking his place beside him, as prompter.

The docile Chairman obeyed. At his breaking silence by hooting “Silence!” the audience had another mighty bob-tailed laugh.

“Say, ‘Will some honorable member state the object of this meeting?’” whispered the prompter.

“Will some honorable mumbler state the subject of this ‘ere meetin’?” says Chair, a little bashful and confused.

Bill Tarbox advanced, and, with a formal bow, began,—

“Mr. Chairman”—

“Say, ‘Mr. Tarbox has the floor,’” piped Perry.

“Mr. Tarbox has the floor,” diapasoned the Chair.

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen”—Bill began, and stopped.

“Say, ‘Proceed, Sir!’” suggested Perry, which the senior did, magnifying the boy’s whisper a dozen times.

Again Bill began and stopped.

“Boys,” said he, dropping grandiloquence, “when I accepted the office of Orator of the Day at our primary, and promised to bring forward our Resolutions in honor of Mr. Wade with my best speech, I didn’t think I was going to have such a head of steam on that the walves would get stuck and the piston jammed and I couldn’t say a word.

“But,” he continued, warming up, “when I think of the Indian powwow we had in this very spot six months ago,—and what a mean bloat I was, going to the stub-tail dogs with my hat over my eyes,—and what a hard lot we were all round, livin’ on nothing but argee whiskey, and rampin’ off on benders, instead of makin’ good iron,—and how the Works was flat broke,—and how Dunderbunk was full of women crying over their husbands and mothers ashamed of their sons,—boys, when I think how things was, and see how they are, and look at Mr. Wade standing there like a”—

Bill hesitated for a comparison.

“Like a thousand of brick,” Perry Purtett suggested, sotto voce.

The Chairman took this as a hint to himself.

“Like a thousand of brick,” he said, with the voice of a Stentor.

Here the audience roared and cheered, and the Orator got a fresh start.

“When you came, Mr. Wade,” he resumed, “we was about sick of putty-heads and sneaks that didn’t know enough or didn’t dare to make us stand round and bone in. You walked in, b’ilin’ over with grit. You took hold as if you belonged here. You made things jump like a two-headed tarrier. All we wanted was a live man, to say, ‘Here, boys, all together now! You’ve got your stint, and I’ve got mine. I’m boss in this shop,—but I can’t do the first thing, unless every man pulls his pound. Now, then, my hand is on the throttle, grease the wheels, oil the walves, poke the fires, hook on, and let’s yank her through with a will!’”

At this figure the meeting showed a tendency to cheer. “Silence!” Perry sternly suggested. “Silence!” repeated the Chair.

“Then,” continued the Orator, “you wasn’t one of the uneasy kind, always fussin’ and cussin’ round. You wasn’t always spyin’ to see we didn’t take home a cross-tail or a hundred-weight of cast-iron in our pants’ pockets, or go to swiggin’ hot metal out of the ladles on the sly.”

Here an enormous laugh requited Bill’s joke. Perry prompted, the Chair banged with his bolt and cried, “Order!”

“Well, now, boys,” Tarbox went on, “what has come of having one of the right sort to be boss? Why, this. The Works go ahead, stiddy as the North River. We work full time and full-handed. We turn out stuff that no shop needs to be ashamed of. Wages is on the nail. We have a good time generally. How is that, boys,—Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen?”

“That’s so!” from everybody.

“And there’s something better yet,” Bill resumed. “Dunderbunk used to be full of crying women. They’ve stopped crying now.”

Here the whole assemblage, Chairman and all, burst into an irrepressible cheer.

“But I’m making my speech as long as a lightning-rod,” said the speaker. “I’ll put on the brakes, short. I guess Mr. Wade understands pretty well, now, how we feel; and if he don’t, here it all is in shape, in this document, with ‘Whereas’ at the top and ‘Resolved’ entered along down in five places. Mr. Purtett, will you hand the Resolutions to the Superintendent?”

Perry advanced and did his office loftily, much to the amusement of Wade and the workmen.

“Now,” Bill resumed, “we wanted, besides, to make you a little gift, Mr. Wade, to remember the day by. So we got up a subscription, and every man put in his dime. Here’s the present,—hand ‘em over, Perry!

“There, Sir, is THE BEST PAIR OF SKATES to be had in York City, made for work, and no nonsense about ‘em. We Dunderbunk boys give ‘em to you, one for all, and hope you’ll like ‘em and beat the world skating, as you do in all the things we’ve knowed you try.

“Now, boys,” Bill perorated, “before I retire to the shades of private life, I motion we give Three Cheers—regular Toplifters—for Richard Wade!”

“Hurrah! Wade and Good Government!” “Hurrah! Wade and Prosperity!” “Hurrah! Wade and the Women’s Tears Dry!”

Cheers like the shout of Achilles! Wielding sledges is good for the bellows, it appears. Toplifters! Why, the smoky black rafters overhead had to tug hard to hold the roof on. Hurrah! From every corner of the vast building came back rattling echoes. The Works, the machinery, the furnaces, the stuff, all had their voice to add to the verdict.

Magnificent music! and our Anglo-Saxon is the only race in the world civilized enough to join in singing it. We are the only hurrahing people,—the only brood hatched in a “Hurrah’s nest.”

Silence restored, the Chairman, prompted by Perry, said, “Gentlemen, Mr. Wade has the floor for a few remarks.”

Of course Wade had to speak, and did. He would not have been an American in America else. But his heart was too full to say more than a few hearty and earnest words of good feeling.

“Now, men,” he closed, “I want to get away on the river and see if my skates will go as they look; so I’ll end by proposing three cheers for Smith Wheelwright, our Chairman, three for our Orator, Tarbox, three for Old Dunderbunk,—Works, Men, Women, and Children; and one big cheer for Old Father Iron, as rousing a cheer as ever was roared.”

So they gave their three times three with enormous enthusiasm. The roof shook, the furnaces rattled, Perry Purtett banged with the Chairman’s hammer, the great echoes thundered through the Foundry.

And when they ended with one gigantic cheer for IRON, tough and true, the weapon, the tool, and the engine of all civilization,—it seemed as if the uproar would never cease until Father Iron himself heard the call in his smithy away under the magnetic pole, and came clanking up, to return thanks in person.

CHAPTER V.

SKATING AS A FINE ART

Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its play-days, there is no play like Skating.

To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel for the drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the entrechats and pirouettes of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.

We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under whose feet sprang roses; but Zero’s heels and toes were armed with more precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid,—a hundred and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.

Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero’s product, finer even than diamond, was filled—at the rate of a million to the square foot—with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or abridgment. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.

Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in Christendom.

On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.

Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and schooners were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins, the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing their bar-rooms, regilding their bridal chambers, and enlarging their spittoon accommodations alow and aloft, for next summer. All the population was out on the ice, skating, sliding, sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart’s content.

One person out of every Dunderbunk family was of course at home, roasting Christmas turkey. The rest were already at high jinks on Zero’s Christmas present, when Wade and the men came down, from the meeting.

Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He stamped to settle himself, and then flung off half a dozen circles on the right leg, half a dozen with the left, and the same with either leg backwards.

The ice, traced with these white peripheries, showed like a blackboard where a school has been chalking diagrams of Euclid, to point at with the “slow unyielding finger” of demonstration.

“Hurrah!” cries Wade, halting in front of the men, who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk, the tug “L Ambuster,” were putting on their skates or watching him, “Hurrah! the skates are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?”

“Yes,” says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as Giotto’s autograph.

“Now, then,” Wade said, “we’ll give Dunderbunk a laugh, as we practised last night.”

They got under full headway, Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands. When they were near enough to the merry throng out in the stream, both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd.

Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a grand show of

SKATING AS A FINE ART

The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects them to do their duty.

It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of Fine Writing. Its eloquent motions must be seen.

To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power. And your machinery,—your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same shape stem and stern,—this must be as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it.

Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say, “See! this athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as Steers’s yacht, as Singer’s sewing-machine, as Colt’s revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization.” You wish to be so ranked among the people and things that lead the age;—consider the qualities you must have, and while you consider, keep your eye on Richard Wade, for he has them all in perfection.

First,—of your physical qualities. You must have lungs, not bellows; and an active heart, not an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles. You must have legs, not shanks. Their shape is unimportant, except that they must not interfere at the knee. You must have muscles, not flabbiness; sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin layer of flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you will strike, if you tumble,—which, once for all be it said, you must never do. You must be all momentum, and no inertia. You must be one part grace, one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manila hemp, and watch-spring. Your machine, your body, must be thoroughly obedient. It must go just so far and no farther. You have got to be as unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically, between forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your aplomb must be as absolute as the pounce of a falcon.

So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary to be a Great Artist in Skating. See Wade, how be shows them!

Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the first;—it always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm. Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then a fine aesthetic faculty,—in short, good taste. Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent to act in accordance with the laws of Art. Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable. That well-known skeptic, the King of tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had never seen ice and doubted even the existence of solid water. Widdrington, after the Battle of Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he had no legs,—poor fellow!

But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin in the elastic days of youth, when cold does not sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do not wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to it; if you have good taste and a lively invention; if you are a man, and not a lubber;—then, in fine, you may become a Great Skater, just as with equal power and equal pains you may put your grip on any kind of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade’s achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.

Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate, its M.A., its F.S.D., (Doctor of Frantic Skipping,) its A.G.D., (Doctor of Airy Gliding,) its N.T.D., (Doctor of No Tumbles,) and finally its highest degree, U.P. (Unapproachable Podographer).

Wade was U.P.

There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who had passed their Little Go and could skate forward and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps, were through the Great Go; these could do outer edge freely. A dozen had taken the Baccalaureate, and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross their feet, on the edge, forward and backward, and shift edge on the same foot, and so were Magistri Artis.

Wade, U.P., added to these an indefinite list of combinations and fresh contrivances. He spun spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He pivoted on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings, inner and outer edge, forward and back, He skated on one foot better than the M.A.s could on both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels; he cut up shines like a sunbeam on a bender; he swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased, like a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not muscle, moved him; he tore about in frenzies; his pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg flapped like a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped, whirling backward as he went, over a platoon of boys laid flat on the ice;—the last boy winced, and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew over, and the boy still holds together as well as most boys. Besides this, he could write his name, with a flourish at the end, like the rubrica of a Spanish hidalgo. He could podograph any letter, and multitudes of ingenious curlicues which might pass for the alphabets of the unknown tongues. He could not tumble.