Chapter 2

His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed
through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and
cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs,
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him
merely as an animal—and there was very little else to look at—he was a
most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and
wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to
enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at or
conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on
a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of
removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him.
The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare
perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect,
and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients;
these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep
the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of
thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in
short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful
temper which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty
very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had
been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of
twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity,
had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been
sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition through and through
with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector. One brief sigh
sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.
The next moment he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far
readier than the Collector’s junior clerk, who at nineteen years was
much the elder and graver man of the two.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to
my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one
point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute
nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no
heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and
yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been
put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, but,
on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be
difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so
earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here,
admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not
unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts
of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and
with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of
age.

One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had
made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His
gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast
meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no
higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual
endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the
delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to
hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of
good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to
bring the savour of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils. There were
flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or
seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton
chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him
smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had
long been food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts
of bygone meals were continually rising up before him—not in anger or
retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and
seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy
and sensual: a tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib
of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams,
would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race,
and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career,
had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing
breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man’s life, so far as I could
judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some
twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which,
at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would
make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an
axe and handsaw.

But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad
to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have
ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer.
Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at,
suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old
Inspector was incapable of it; and, were he to continue in office to
the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to
dinner with just as good an appetite.

There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few
opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who,
after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had
ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years
before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable life.

The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his
earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial music
of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards
lightening. The step was palsied now, that had been foremost in the
charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning
his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress
across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace.
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at
the figures that came and went, amid the rustle of papers, the
administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk
of the office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was
mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy
and interest gleamed out upon his features, proving that there was
light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the
intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer
you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.
When no longer called upon to speak or listen—either of which
operations cost him an evident effort—his face would briefly subside
into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold
this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.
The framework of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet
crumpled into ruin.

To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages,
was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in
imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey
and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain
almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous
with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and
neglect, with grass and alien weeds.

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection—for, slight as
was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of
all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed
so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with
the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not a mere
accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His
spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy
activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse
to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome,
and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give
out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which
was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in
a blaze; but rather a deep red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight,
solidity, firmness—this was the expression of his repose, even in such
decay as had crept untimely over him at the period of which I speak.
But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness—roused by a trumpet’s peal,
loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only
slumbering—he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a
sick man’s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and
starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment his
demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, however, was
but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I
saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile—was the
features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have
amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like
most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was
just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or
Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates
any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men
with his own hand, for aught I know—certainly, they had fallen like
blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to which
his spirit imparted its triumphant energy—but, be that as it might,
there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the
down off a butterfly’s wing. I have not known the man to whose innate
kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.

Many characteristics—and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or been
obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are
usually the most evanescent; nor does nature adorn the human ruin with
blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only
in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the
ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now and
then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and
glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom
seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was
shown in the General’s fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers.
An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his
brow; but here was one who seemed to have a young girl’s appreciation
of the floral tribe.

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while
the Surveyor—though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation—was fond of
standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous
countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few
yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair;
unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and
touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his
thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector’s
office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the
flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and
Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and
neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to
sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an
old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle’s front,
and showed still a bright gleam along its blade—would have been among
the inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy
Collector’s desk.

There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier—the man of true and simple
energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his—“I’ll
try, Sir”—spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic
enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood,
comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country,
valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase—which it seems so
easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory
before him, has ever spoken—would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General’s shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to
be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and
abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my
life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness
and variety than during my continuance in office. There was one man,
especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new idea of
talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and
a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish as by the waving of an
enchanter’s wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his
proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so
harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the
regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he
stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its variously
revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its
officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience,
and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be
performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not
in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and
kind forbearance towards our stupidity—which, to his order of mind,
must have seemed little short of crime—would he forth-with, by the
merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as
daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric
friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him,
rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate as his
to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs. A stain on
his conscience, as to anything that came within the range of his
vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to
a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an
ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word—and it
is a rare instance in my life—I had met with a person thoroughly
adapted to the situation which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown
into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence
of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen
boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s
culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s
hearthstone—it was time, at length, that I should exercise other
faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had
hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as
a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an
evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether
different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard. I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.
Nature—except it were human nature—the nature that is developed in
earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the
imaginative delight wherewith it had been spiritualized passed away out
of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was
suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad,
unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay
at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might
be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity,
be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had
been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my
while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory
life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear,
that within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should
be essential to my good, change would come.

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have
been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of
thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s
proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs,
if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers,
and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought
me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and
probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had
ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for
me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in
the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen
like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House
officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may
often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of
making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means,
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are
recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that
circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I
especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke;
but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure to
reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me
a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary
talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an excellent fellow, who came into
the office with me, and went out only a little later—would often engage
me in a discussion about one or the other of his favourite topics,
Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s junior clerk, too a young
gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam’s letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards) looked
very much like poetry—used now and then to speak to me of books, as
matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of
lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.
The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint,
on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of
all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities
had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on
such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a
name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I
hope, will never go again.

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,
revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of
bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of
literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now
writing.

In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in
which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale
adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea
of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far
more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall,
therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this
day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams,
appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one
end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how
many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on
these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and
were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled, not
with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone equally
to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their
day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of all—without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the
clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of
the pen. Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local
history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem
might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants—old King
Derby—old Billy Gray—old Simon Forrester—and many another magnate in
his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before
his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the
greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem
might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their
traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward
to what their children look upon as long-established rank.

Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the king’s officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the
Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.

But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner, unfolding one and another document, and reading the
names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants never heard of now on ’Change, nor very
readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity—and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem
knew the way thither—I chanced to lay my hand on a small package,
carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope
had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks
engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial
materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened
an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that tied
up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to
light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favour
of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port
of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have
read (probably in Felt’s “Annals”) a notice of the decease of Mr.
Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper
of recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the
little graveyard of St. Peter’s Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected
predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel,
and a wig of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once
adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the
papers which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more
traces of Mr. Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his
head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull
itself.

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his
own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of
Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened
suddenly, and that these papers, which he probably kept in his official
desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to
relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was left
behind, and had remained ever since unopened.

The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early
day with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted some
of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and
other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for
petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with
rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the
present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far
as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for
the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task.