The Confidence-Man: His MasqueradeMelville, Herman
General
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
Melville, Herman
Mississippi River -- Fiction; Satire; Steamboats -- Fiction; Swindlers and swindling -- Fiction
they never look for him, nor call; they know he will not come. Suns and
seasons fleet; the tiger-lily blows and falls; babes are born and leap
in their mothers' arms; but, the Indian-hater is good as gone to his
long home, and "Terror" is his epitaph.'
"Here the judge, not unaffected, would pause again, but presently
resume: 'How evident that in strict speech there can be no biography of
an Indian-hater _par excellence_, any more than one of a sword-fish, or
other deep-sea denizen; or, which is still less imaginable, one of a
dead man. The career of the Indian-hater _par excellence_ has the
impenetrability of the fate of a lost steamer. Doubtless, events,
terrible ones, have happened, must have happened; but the powers that be
in nature have taken order that they shall never become news.
"'But, luckily for the curious, there is a species of diluted
Indian-hater, one whose heart proves not so steely as his brain. Soft
enticements of domestic life too, often draw him from the ascetic trail;
a monk who apostatizes to the world at times. Like a mariner, too,
though much abroad, he may have a wife and family in some green harbor
which he does not forget. It is with him as with the Papist converts in
Senegal; fasting and mortification prove hard to bear.'
"The judge, with his usual judgment, always thought that the intense
solitude to which the Indian-hater consigns himself, has, by its
overawing influence, no little to do with relaxing his vow. He would
relate instances where, after some months' lonely scoutings, the
Indian-hater is suddenly seized with a sort of calenture; hurries openly
towards the first smoke, though he knows it is an Indian's, announces
himself as a lost hunter, gives the savage his rifle, throws himself
upon his charity, embraces him with much affection, imploring the
privilege of living a while in his sweet companionship. What is too
often the sequel of so distempered a procedure may be best known by
those who best know the Indian. Upon the whole, the judge, by two and
thirty good and sufficient reasons, would maintain that there was no
known vocation whose consistent following calls for such
self-containings as that of the Indian-hater _par excellence_. In the
highest view, he considered such a soul one peeping out but once an age.
"For the diluted Indian-hater, although the vacations he permits himself
impair the keeping of the character, yet, it should not be overlooked
that this is the man who, by his very infirmity, enables us to form
surmises, however inadequate, of what Indian-hating in its perfection
is."
"One moment," gently interrupted the cosmopolitan here, "and let me
refill my calumet."
Which being done, the other proceeded:--
CHAPTER XXVII.
SOME ACCOUNT OF A MAN OF QUESTIONABLE MORALITY, BUT WHO, NEVERTHELESS,
WOULD SEEM ENTITLED TO THE ESTEEM OF THAT EMINENT ENGLISH MORALIST WHO
SAID HE LIKED A GOOD HATER.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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