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Page 9
"My dear Porter, I am delighted to see you, and I shall be with you in
one moment. I shall then have ceased to be a grub and have become a most
beautiful butterfly, ready to fly away home with you as soon as ever you
like," he called out in greeting, and in a twinkling had torn off his
wrappers, and stood there a revealed acquaintance, carefully collecting
his "traps," and beaming cheerfully even upon the friend, who had not
come to a pantomime and showed that he disapproved of harlequins in
private life.
Mr. Porter, however, was all cordiality, and very speedily transferred
his guests to his own house in the vicinity of Boston.
The season was not the one for gaining a fair idea of the society of the
city and neighborhood; but if all the people who were away at the
sea-side and the mountains were half as charming as those left behind
and invited by Mr. Porter, to meet his friends, it is certain that Sir
Robert lost a great deal. On the other hand, it is equally certain that
if they had been at home Sir Robert would most likely be there now, and
this chronicle of his travels would end here. As it was, he found
something novel and agreeable at every step, a fresh interest every hour
of his stay. He began at the beginning, and promptly found out what kind
of soil the city was built on, went on to consider such questions as
drainage, elevation, water-supply, wharves, quays, bridges, and worked
up to libraries, museums, public and private collections of pictures,
and what not. He ordered three pictures of Boston artists,--two autumnal
scenes, and an interior, a negro cabin, with an hilarious sable group
variously employed, called "Christmas in the Quarters." Then the
questions of fisheries, maritime traffic, coast and harbor defences,
light-houses, the ship-building interests, life-saving associations, and
railway systems, pressed for investigation, to say nothing of the mills
and manufactories, wages of operatives, trades-unions, trade problems,
and all the pros and cons of free trade _versus_ protective tariff. Over
these he pondered and pored until all hours every night; and the diary
had now to be girt about with two stout rubber bands to keep it from
scattering instructive leaflets about promiscuously and prematurely. And
by day there were sites literary, historical, or generally interesting
to be visited, engagements with many friends to keep, endless
occupations apparently.
There was so much to see and do that the place was delightful to him,
and he certainly made himself vastly agreeable in return to such of its
inhabitants as came in his way.
"I have added to my circle some very valuable acquaintances, whom I
shall hope to retain as friends," he wrote to England, "notably a
medical man who confirms my germ-propagation theory of the 'vomito,'
which is now raging in the Southern part of the States (I had it, you
remember, on the west coast of Africa, and studied it in the
Barbadoes),--an exceptionally clever man, and, like all such men,
inclined to be eccentric. I think I was never more surprised than to
come upon him the other day in a side-street, where he was positively
having his boots polished _in public_ by a ragged gamin who offered to
'shine' me for a 'dime.' He behaved sensibly about it,--betrayed no
embarrassment, though he must have felt excessively annoyed, made no
apologies, and only remarked that he had been out in the country, and
did not wish to be taken for a miller in the town.
"I was led to believe before coming here that I should not be able to
tell that Boston was not an English town. It did not so impress me on a
surface-view, but it was not long before I recognized that the warp and
woof of the social fabric is that of our looms, though the pattern is a
little different,--a good sort of stuff, I think, warranted _to wash_
and wear. The variation, such as it is, tried by what I call my
differential nationometer, gives to the place its own peculiar,
delightful quality." The rigid gentleman, who was a great deal at the
Porters', was rather inclined to insist upon the great purity and beauty
of his English, to which he repeatedly invited attention, and, as Mr.
Ramsay would have said, "went in for" certain philological refinements
which Sir Robert had never heard before, and thoroughly disliked. But as
there are more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh, and better oranges
can be bought for less money in New York than in New Orleans, so it may
be that if you want to find really superior English you must leave
England altogether,--abandon it to its defective but firmly-rooted
_patois_, and seek in more classic shades for the well--spring of Saxon
undefiled. But Sir Robert was not inclined to do this. There were limits
to his liberality and spirit of investigation. When the rigid gentleman
instanced certain words to which he gave a pronunciation that made them
bear small resemblance to the same words as spoken by any class of
people laboring under the disadvantage of having been born and bred in
England, Sir Robert got impatient, and testily dismissed the subject
with, "Oh, come, now! I can stand a good deal, but I can't stand being
told that we don't know how to speak English in England." Something,
however, must be pardoned to a foreigner. If Sir Robert would not
consent to set Emerson a little higher than the angels, as some other
Bostonians could have wished, and had never so much as heard of Thoreau
and other American celebrities not wholly insignificant, he had an
immense admiration for Longfellow, and could spout "Hiawatha" or
"Evangeline" with the best, associated Hawthorne with something besides
his own hedges in the month of May, and was eager to be taken out to
Beverly Farms, that he might "do himself the honor to call upon" the
wisest, wittiest, least-dreaded, and best-loved of Autocrats. When the
day fixed for his departure came, he was still revelling in what the
Historical Society of Massachusetts had to show him, and actually
stayed over a day that he might see the finest collection of cacti in
the country, and at last tore himself away with much difficulty and
lively regrets, carrying with him a collection of Indian curiosities
given him by Mr. Porter, whom he considered to have behaved "most
handsomely" in making him such a present. "I can't rob you outright, my
dear fellow. I feel a cut-purse, almost, when I think of taking all
these valuable and deeply-interesting objects illustrative of the life
and civilization of the aborigines," he said. "Give me duplicates, if
you will be so generous, but nothing unique, I insist." He finally
accepted one gem in the collection,--a towering structure of feathers
that formed "a most delightful head-dress, quite irresistibly
fascinating," tried it on before a mirror that gave back faithfully the
comical reflection, and incidentally delivered a lecture on the
head-ornaments of many savage and civilized nations of every age, though
not at all in the style of the famous Mr. Barlow.
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