Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories: With IllustrationsStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories: With Illustrations
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
New England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Storytelling -- Fiction
I remember the first morning out. As we were driving ahead, under a
stiff breeze, I came on deck, and found the respectable Deacon Muggins,
who in his Sunday coat had serenely embarked the day before, now
desolately clinging to the railing, very white about the gills, and
contemplating the sea with a most suggestive expression of disgust and
horror.
“Why, deacon, good-morning! How are you? Splendid morning!” said I
maliciously.
He drew a deep breath, surveyed me with a mixture of indignation and
despair, and then gave vent to his feelings: “Tell ye what: there was
one darned old fool up to Brunswick yesterday! but he ain't there now:
he's _here_.” The deacon, in the weekly prayer-meeting at Brunswick,
used to talk of the necessity of being “emptied of self:” he seemed to
be in the way of it in the most literal manner at the present moment.
In a few minutes he was extended on the deck, the most utterly limp and
dejected of deacons, and vowing with energy, if he ever got out o' this
'ere, you wouldn't catch him again. Of course, my chum and I were not
seasick. We were prosperous young sophomores in Bowdoin College, and
would have scorned to acknowledge such a weakness. In fact, we were
in that happy state of self-opinion where we surveyed every thing
in creation, as birds do, from above, and were disposed to patronize
everybody we met, with a pleasing conviction that there was nothing
worth knowing, but what we were likely to know, or worth doing, but what
we could do.
Capt. Stanwood liked us, and we liked him: we patronized him, and he was
quietly amused at our patronage, and returned it in kind. He was a
good specimen of the sea-captain in those early days in Maine: a man in
middle life, tall, thin, wiry, and active, full of resource and shrewd
mother-wit; a man very confident in his opinions, because his knowledge
was all got at first-hand,--the result of a careful use of his own five
senses. From his childhood he had followed the seas, and, as he grew
older, made voyages to Archangel, to Messina, to the West Indies, and
finally round the Horn; and, having carried a very sharp and careful
pair of eyes, he had acquired not only a snug competency of worldly
goods, but a large stock of facts and inductions, which stood him in
stead of an education. He was master of a thriving farm at Harpswell,
and, being tethered somewhat by love of wife and children, was mostly
stationary there, yet solaced himself by running a little schooner to
Boston, and driving a thriving bit of trade by the means. With that
reverence for learning' which never deserts the New-Englander, he liked
us the better for being collegians, and amiably conceded that there were
things quite worth knowing taught “up to Brunswick there,” though he
delighted now and then to show his superiority in talking about what he
knew better than we.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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