Five Acres Too Much. Robert Barnwell Roosevelt
a magnificent race, especially when their biographer does not happen to own a house which has strayed on their land, and does want to run for alderman; and if they did not lie, steal, cheat, rob, murder, get drunk, perjure themselves, quarrel, fight, and insist upon damages unreasonably, they would be almost as good as other nations. Barney was evidently a superior Irishman, and, as no one had ever landed a load of house at his dock before, and probably never would again, he felt that the dignity of tenants was at stake, and must be sustained.
When these facts were reported to me I took down my law-books, and prepared a rod for Mr. Barney. There was the clear right to land at a public dock; there was the clear wrong of detaining property belonging to another. Damages began to loom up before my eyes, and a very pretty case as introduction to a lucrative legal practice in the place of my newly-intended residence. Vistas of writs, and suits, and appeals, and new trials, rose in my mind in graceful array, and I thanked Barney, who was reported to be not only “ugly,” but responsible, with all my heart. There were two difficulties in the way of legal action—first, that until the suit was terminated the residence could not be built; secondly, that Sille, who would have to be plaintiff, had disappeared from the sight of man. Now the house might be delayed, as the damages would thus be increased; but a suit without a plaintiff was beyond ordinary legal remedies, and was not provided for even by the new Code of Procedure. So Barney, Irishman-like, in spite of law, justice, sense, or hospitality, kept my house, or rather intended house, by “force and arms,” and the cellar and foundation were completed alone.
A cellar is a delightful part of a house, it is so cool in summer and warm in winter; it is such a nice place to store “things,” as the housewives call them; but to have all cellar and no house is carrying the point too far. It is a pleasant place when surmounted by the proper amount of beams and mortar, but alone is like an alligator’s countenance, altogether too open. I am not particular, and could have made out during the summer months, probably, if the cellar had only been upside down.
The foundation was built, the mason was out of work, and myself out of humor, when we were both again raised to the pinnacle of happiness by the arrival of another vessel, which fortunately selected another dock, and landed another house. On inquiry, it appeared that this was my house. Lest the reader may suppose that Nantucket was so overflowing with houses that they floated down the Sound and drifted ashore any where, it must be explained that the first house was merely the workshop. So the carts and trucks reappeared, and this time carried away the débris of what was once the house of some bluff seafaring man—timbers that were shivered, as he had no doubt often requested they should be, doors, windows, shingles, pieces of roof, floor-boards, posts, moulding, and a thousand other odds, ends, bits, and pieces, in the most admired confusion—and deposited them upon my entire five acres, scattered hither and thither, as though they were component parts of five houses instead of one.
As Mr. Sille had not come with the house, but was to arrive the next day—for it appeared he had been storm-bound in some of the numerous “bights,” as the Yankees call them, of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard—he sent a watchman who was to sleep among the “stuff,” and prevent Mr. Barney’s compatriots from converting it into firewood.
Mr. Sille was to arrive the next day. Week after week went by, but he did not appear. The house lay on the ground as though a hundred-pound rebel shell had dropped into the cellar and scattered it to the four winds of heaven; the watchman waited, watched, and prayed, doubtless, for relief, till his money was spent, and his shoes worn out, and his coat thread-bare; I alternated between imbecility and fury; Barney even was overcome, and sent word begging to have the workshop, which had been placed on top of a pile of his hay, removed; and Flushing made it the regular fashionable evening drive to visit my five acres to see how the house was—not getting on.
In about a month, when the mason had almost become crazy, myself frantic, and Barney idiotic, Sille reappeared from Nantucket or some other remote spot, looking like the ghost of his former self, and announced that he had been at the point of death. Not taking into consideration for a moment my losses and sufferings, he absolutely wanted sympathy; in the first place, he must nearly drown himself, and now he must catch the erysipelas, and expect me to feel for any one but myself. I asked him sternly whether this was his habit with every house that he moved, and explained that it must not happen again; that I had been sick too—very sick of the whole affair; that the watchman had become demoralized and run away; that it was nearly midsummer, and that all Flushing was laughing at us.
The watchman lived in a little place not larger than a good-sized dog-kennel that he constructed from pieces of roof, and the boys of the neighborhood considered it fine sport to pay him a visit of a dark night, and signalize their presence by a shower of stones. His food was never luxurious, being cooked by himself under many disadvantages and with few utensils; and when his money became scant, it was supplied mainly through the charity of the neighbors. He had no bedding and no change of clothes; and when a murder was committed near by, and the murderer was hunted through the place by constables, officers, and half the people as posse comitatus, accompanied by all the dogs in the village; and the crowd, yelling, screaming, and fighting, rushed over the watchman’s kennel at midnight, waking him out of sleep, he could stand it no longer, but incontinently fled to parts unknown; so that Sille had not arrived too soon, and found every thing needing care and attention. He went to work at once, and, bringing order out of chaos, began rapidly to construct the confused mass of material into the form and stature of a dwelling.
Murders are abhorrent things to me; either from some natural idiosyncracy, or from the training of my profession, which teaches obedience to the powers that be, and prefers technicalities to violence, I have a positive objection to murdering any one or being murdered myself—especially the latter. It is so dirty and bloody, the body is so dreadful to look at and so hard to dispose of, and the whole affair so sudden and altogether unpleasant. I was anxious to know, before settling in Flushing, whether murder was one of the institutions, and was to be guarded against like chills and fever, musquitoes, and other similar visitations.
A day or two after the occurrence, I applied to my invaluable friend Weeville for information, and inquired whether murders were a common event in that neighborhood. His manner in reply was very encouraging. He had lived in Flushing nine years, and this was the first case of the kind. It was the most peaceable place he knew; in fact, he had hardly ever heard a loud word spoken. He pictured it as the abiding-place of angels or Quakers, and put my scruples entirely at rest. Violence, or disputes even, among the Flushingites were not heard of, and murders were far rarer than deaths by lightning.
The day after this conversation there was a little friendly contest among various fire-companies at the peaceable village to determine which engine could throw the highest stream of water; and what was my amazement, on reading the accounts in the daily papers, to learn that the contest wound up in a free fight; that knives, pistols, and clubs were freely used, and that four persons were killed and forty wounded. For a family of semi-angels this was doing well. The philosophy of averages furnished one consolation, however—Flushing had evidently concentrated into one day its allowance of murders for the next five years.
None of Sille’s men were in the fight, although at first I anticipated finding my cellar a hospital, and expected a renewed experience in the matter of lint and bandages, such as occupied so much of our time during the war. He kept on steadily adding boards, and windows, and siding, and beams together, till they took on the semblance of a house. To be sure, it was rickety and open as yet: one man fell between the timbers, another out of a window, and a third from the roof—but that did not hurt the house.
Two Irishmen were one day at work digging a well, and I commenced moralizing at their fate—doomed to a lower existence than hewers of wood and drawers of water, not sufficiently intelligent, even, to cut sticks, and condemned to carry wood and dig for water; their life one of weary, heart-rending, back-breaking toil; no time for pleasure, no chance to cultivate the intellect and develop the mind—a miserable life, little better than death itself.
Musing on their hard lot, I peered down into the deep hole they were making in the ground during the intense