BENNIE BEN CREE Being the Story of his Adventure to Southward in the Year '62 By Arthur Colton Doubleday & McClure Co. New York 1900 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0007] IN MEMORIAM Dedicated TO MY MOTHER BENNIE BEN CREE CHAPTER I.--BENSON AND CREE--THE COMMODORE INN, FORE AND AFT; AND A POINT STATED BY MY UNCLE BENSON. |If anyone would understand how Ben Cree comes to be what he is for better or worse, he should know first the Commodore Inn and what it meant in those days to have the great wharves for a playground. And I cannot conceive to this day how one can amuse oneself, or be satisfied with any neat door-yard or inland village street, unless one is born a girl with a starched pinafore, which I should think would be a pity. First, then, you should picture the Commodore Inn; its red bricks streaked with the rain and the beat of damp winds; its high veranda, with the paint coming off the white pillars, and the worn stone steps leading underneath. In front is the brick sidewalk, the cobbled street, the bit of open space with Harrier's junk-shop on the right corner; and then the warehouses on either side, all leading down to the slip, Doty's Slip, which is flanked by noble wharves, with huge piles leaning awry and very slippery. The warehouses are roomy and full of queer smells, as if the varied merchandize of fifty years had left something for its old friends, the warehouses, to remember it by. The contents of these warehouses changed continually: cotton, tobacco, slabs of crude rubber, and multitudes of boxes whose contents might be learned sometimes by asking the wharf-master, if you did not mind his cuffing you on the ears. Next there would be the river and its hurrying tides, its choppy waves, the ferryboats, sailboats, and tugs going to and fro: to right and left--seen well by climbing the warehouse roofs--are masts of many ships with innumerable amusing ropes, other wharves with the like slippery brown piles and dark places underneath where the water thieves hid and bored holes up through the planks into the molasses barrels. Mr. Hooley, the wharf policeman, told me of that, and there was much that was attractive in it. For there was a time, before my ideas became settled, when I thought of many different careers. To be a wharf policeman seemed too ambitious a thought, too vain and far away; so that I asked Mr. Hooley's advice about water thieving, having respect for his opinion. “Naw, Bennie Ben,” he said, “'tis low. 'Tis not for the son of yer father, an' yer mother a lady as was ever bor-rn.” “Do you think I could be a wharf policeman, Mr. Hooley?” “Ah,” he said, looking mysterious, “who knows that? Don't ye let young Dillon lick ye, an' maybe--but 'tis a long way fer ye to grow.”