The Book of the Bush. George Dunderdale
Dolphinholm in the Anglican Church at Garstang. One Sunday he started a hymn with a new tune. Three times his men broke down, and three times they were heard by the whole congregation whispering ferociously at one another. At length the parson tried to proceed with the service, and said: "Let us pray." But the bold butcher retorted: "Pray be hanged. Let us try again, lads; I know we can do it." He then started the hymn for the fourth time, and they did it. After the service the parson demanded satisfaction of the butcher, and got it in a neighbouring pasture.
The cholera came, and we soon grew very serious. The young man from Vermont walked with me after school hours, and we tried to be cheerful, but it was of no use. Our talk always reverted to the plague, and the best way to cure it or to avoid it. The doctors disagreed. Every theory was soon contradicted by facts; all kinds of people were attacked and died; the young and the old, the weak and the strong, the drunken and the sober. Every man adopted a special diet or a favourite liquor--brandy, whiskey, bitters, cherry-bounce, sarsaparilla. My own particular preventive was hot tea, sweetened with molasses and seasoned with cayenne pepper. I survived, but that does not prove anything in particular.
The two papers, the 'Joliet Signal' and the 'True Democrat', scarcely ever mentioned the cholera. It would have been bad policy, tending to scare away the citizens and to injure trade.
Many men suddenly found that they had urgent business to look after elsewhere, and sneaked away, leaving their wives and families behind them.
On Sunday Father Ingoldsby advised his people to prepare their souls for the visit of the Angel of Death, who was every night knocking at their doors. There were many, he said, whose faces he had never seen at the rails since he came to Joliet; and what answer would they give to the summons which called them to appear without delay before the judgment seat of God? What doom could they expect but that of damnation and eternal death?
The sermon needed no translation for the men of many nations who were present. Irishmen and Englishmen, Highlanders and Belgians, French and Germans, Mexicans and Canadians, could interpret the meaning of the flashing eye which roamed to every corner of the church, singling out each miserable sinner; the fierce frown, the threatening gesture, the finger first pointing to the heaven above, and then down to the depths of hell.
Some stayed to pray and to confess their sins; others hardened their hearts and went home unrepentant. Michael Mangan went to Belz's grocery near the canal. He said he felt pains in his interior, and drank a jigger of whisky. Then he bought half-a-gallon of the same remedy to take home with him. It was a cheap prescription, costing only twelve and a half cents, but it proved very effective. Old Belz put the stuff into an earthenware bottle, which he corked with a corncob. Michael started for home by the zigzag path which led up the steep limestone bluff, but his steps were slow and unsteady; he sat down on a rock, and took another dose out of his bottle. He never went any further of his own motion, and we buried him next day. We were of different opinions about the cause of his death; some thought it was the cholera, others the pangs of conscience, some the whisky, and others a mixture of all three; at any rate, he died without speaking to the priest.
Next day another neighbour died, Mr. Harrigan. He had lost one arm, but with the other he wrote a good hand, and registered deeds in the County Court. I called to see him. He was in bed lying on his back, his one arm outside the coverlet, his heaving chest was bare, and his face was ghastly pale. There were six men in the room, one of whom said:
"Do you know me, Mr. Harrigan?"
"Sure, divil a dog in Lockport but knows you, Barney," said the dying man.
Barney lived in Lockport, and in an audible whisper said to us: "Ain't he getting on finely? He'll be all right again to-morrow, please God."
"And didn't the doctor say I'd be dead before twelve this day?" asked Harrigan.
I looked at the clock on the mantelshelf. It was past ten. He died an hour later.
One day the young man from Vermont rose from his seat and looked at me across the schoolroom. I thought he was going to say something. He took down his hat, went to the door, turned and looked at me again, but he did not speak or make any sign. Next morning his place was vacant, and I asked one of the boys if he had seen the young man. The boy said:
"He ain't a-coming to school no more, I calkilate. He was buried this morning before school hours."
That year, '49 was a dismal year in Joliet.
Mr. Rogers, one of the school managers, came and sat on a bench near the door. He was a New Englander, a carpenter, round-shouldered, tall and bony. He said:
"I called in to tell you that I can't vote for appinting you to this school next term. Fact is the ladies are dead against you; don't see you at meeting on the Sabbath; say you go to the Catholic Church with the Irish and Dutch. I a'n't a word to say agen you myself. This is a free country; every man can go, for aught I care, whichever way he darn chooses--to heaven, or hell, or any other place. But I want to be peaceable, and I can't get no peace about voting for you next term, so I thought I'd let you know, that you mightn't be disappointed."
In that way Mr. Rogers washed his hands of me. I said I was sorry I did not please the ladies, but I liked to hear a man who spoke his mind freely.
Soon afterwards the Germans brought me word that the Yankees were calling a meeting about me. I was aware by this time that when a special gathering of citizens takes place to discuss the demerits of any individual, it is advisable for that individual to be absent if possible; but curiosity was strong within me; hitherto I had never been honoured with any public notice whatever, and I attended the meeting uninvited.
The Yankees are excellent orators; they are born without bashfulness; they are taught to speak pieces in school from their childhood; they pronounce each word distinctly; they use correctly the rising inflection and the falling inflection. Moreover, they are always in deadly earnest; there is another miserable world awaiting their arrival. Their humorists are the most unhappy of men. You may smile when you read their jokes, but when you see the jokers you are more inclined to weep. With pain and sorrow they grind, like Samson, at the jokers' mill all the days of their lives.
The meeting was held in the new two-storey school-house.
Deacon Beaumont took the chair--my chair--and Mr. Curtis was appointed secretary. I began to hate Deacon Beaumont, as also Mr. Curtis, who was the only other teacher present; it was evident they were going to put him in my place.
Each speaker on rising put his left hand in the side pocket of his pants. I was not mentioned by name, but nevertheless I was given clearly to understand that I had been reared in a land whose people are under the dominion of a tyrannical monarch and a bloated aristocracy; that therefore I had never breathed the pure air of freedom, and was unfitted to teach the children of the Great Republic.
Mr. Tucker, an influential citizen, moved finally that the school managers be instructed to engage a Mr. Sellars, of Dresden, as teacher at the West Joliet School. He said Mr. Sellars was a young man from New England who had been teaching for a term at Dresden, and had given great satisfaction. He had the best testimony to the character and ability of the young man from his own daughter, Miss Priscilla Tucker, who had been school marm in the same school, and was now home on a visit. She could give, from her own personal knowledge, any information the managers might require.
Mr. Tucker's motion was seconded. There was no amendment proposed, and all in favour of the motion were requested by Deacon Beaumont to stand up. The Yankees all rose to their feet, the others sat still, all but old Gorges, a Prussian, who, with his two sons, had come to vote for me. But the old man did not understand English. His son John pulled him down, but Deacon Beaumont had counted his vote, and the motion was carried by a majority of one. So I was, in fact, put out of the school by my best friend, old Gorges.
I went away in a dudgeon and marked off a cellar on my real estate, 30 feet by 18 feet, on the top of the bluff, near the edge of the western prairie. The ground was a mixture of stiff clay and limestone rock, and I dug at it all through the month of September. Curious people came along and made various remarks; some said nothing, but went away whistling. One day Mr. Jackson and Paul Duffendorff