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Page 56
I think I must have been undone already. But Dennis, like another
Lockhard, chose "to make sicker."
The audience rose in a whirl of amazement, rage, and sorrow. Some other
impertinence, aimed at Dennis, broke all restraint, and, in pure Irish,
he delivered himself of an address to the gallery, inviting any person
who wished to fight to come down and do so,--stating, that they were all
dogs and cowards and the sons of dogs and cowards,--that he would take
any five of them single-handed. "Shure, I have said all his Riverence
and the Misthress bade me say," cried he, in defiance; and, seizing the
Governor's cane from his hand, brandished it, quarter-staff fashion,
above his head. He was, indeed, got from the hall only with the greatest
difficulty by the Governor, the City Marshal, who had been called in,
and the Superintendent of my Sunday-School.
The universal impression, of course, was, that the Rev. Frederic Ingham
had lost all command of himself in some of those haunts of intoxication
which for fifteen years I have been laboring to destroy. Till this
moment, indeed, that is the impression in Naguadavick. This number of
the Atlantic will relieve from it a hundred friends of mine who have
been sadly wounded by that notion now for years; but I shall not be
likely ever to show my head there again.
No! My double has undone me.
We left town at seven the next morning. I came to No. 9, in the Third
Range, and settled on the Minister's Lot. In the new towns in Maine, the
first settled minister has a gift of a hundred acres of land.
I am the first settled minister in No. 9. My wife and little Paulina
are my parish. We raise corn enough to live on in summer. We kill bear's
meat enough to carbonize it in winter. I work on steadily on my "Traces
of Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries," which I hope to
persuade Phillips, Sampson, & Co. to publish next year. We are very
happy, but the world thinks we are undone.
THE CHILDREN OF THE PUBLIC
[This story originated in the advertisement of the humbug which it
describes. Some fifteen or twenty years since, when gift enterprises
rose to one of their climaxes, a gift of a large sum of money, I think
$10,000, was offered in New York to the most successful ticket-holder in
some scheme, and one of $5,000 to the second. It was arranged that one
of these parties should be a man and the other a woman; and the amiable
suggestion was added, on the part of the undertaker of the enterprise,
that if the gentleman and lady who drew these prizes liked each other
sufficiently well when the distribution was made, they might regard the
decision as a match made for them in Heaven, and take the money as the
dowry of the bride. This thoroughly practical, and, at the same time,
thoroughly absurd suggestion, arrested the attention of a distinguished
story-teller, a dear friend of mine, who proposed to me that we should
each of us write the history of one of the two successful parties, to be
woven together by their union at the end. The plan, however, lay latent
for years,--the gift enterprise of course blew up,--and it was not until
the summer of 1862 that I wrote my half of the proposed story, with the
hope of eliciting the other half. My friend's more important
engagements, however, have thus far kept Fausta's detailed biography
from the light. I sent my half to Mr. Frank Leslie, in competition for a
premium offered by him, as is stated in the second chapter of the story.
And the story found such favor in the eyes of the judges, that it
received one of his second premiums. The first was very properly awarded
to Miss Louisa Alcott, for a story of great spirit and power. "The
Children of the Public" was printed in Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper for January 24 and January 31, 1863. The moral which it tries
to illustrate, which is, I believe, an important one, was thus commended
to the attention of the very large circle of the readers of that
journal,--a journal to which I am eager to say I think this nation has
been very largely indebted for the loyalty, the good sense, and the high
tone which seem always to characterize it. During the war, the pictorial
journals had immense influence in the army, and they used this influence
with an undeviating regard to the true honor of the country.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
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