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Page 59
"Eet ees verra fine," said the Marquis, smiling blandly.
"R�vissant!" said Levasseur, and he dropped a five-franc piece into
Sally Eaton's hand. And so the procession of exhibiting managers talking
bad French, and of exhibited Frenchmen talking bad English, passed on;
all but good old Elkanah Ogden--God bless him!--who happened to have
come there with the governor's party, and who loitered a minute to talk
with Sally Eaton about me.
Years afterwards she told me how the old man kissed me, how his eyes
watered when he asked my story, how she told again of the moment when I
was heard screaming on the doorstep, and how she offered to go and bring
the paper which had been pinned to my bib. But the old man said it was
no matter,--"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his
name was not provided for him. We must not leave him here," he said; "he
shall grow up a farmer's lad, and not a little cockney." And so, instead
of going the grand round of infirmaries, kitchens, bakeries, and
dormitories with the rest, the good old soul went back into the
managers' room, and wrote at the moment a letter to John Myers, who took
care of his wild land in St. Lawrence County for him, to ask him if Mrs.
Myers would not bring up an orphan baby by hand for him; and if, both
together, they would not train this baby till he said "stop"; if, on the
other hand, he allowed them, in the yearly account, a hundred dollars
each year for the charge.
Anybody who knows how far a hundred dollars goes in the backwoods, in
St. Lawrence County, will know that any settler would be glad to take a
ward so recommended. Anybody who knew Betsy Myers as well as old Elkanah
Ogden did, would know she would have taken any orphan brought to her
door, even if he were not recommended at all.
So it happened, thanks to Lafayette and the city council! that I had not
been a "Child of the Public" a day, before, in its great, clumsy,
liberal way, it had provided for me. I owed my healthy, happy home of
the next fourteen years in the wilderness to those marvellous habits,
which I should else call absurd, with which we lionize strangers.
Because our hospitals and poorhouses are the largest buildings we have,
we entertain the Prince of Wales and Jenny Lind alike, by showing them
crazy people and paupers. Easy enough to laugh at is the display; but
if, dear Public, it happen, that by such a habit you ventilate your
Bridewell or your Bedlam, is not the ventilation, perhaps, a
compensation for the absurdity? I do not know if Lafayette was any the
better for his seeing the Deering Street Asylum; but I do know I was.
This is no history of my life. It is only an illustration of one of its
principles. I have no anecdotes of wilderness life to tell, and no
sketch of the lovely rugged traits of John and Betsy Myers,--my real
father and mother. I have no quest for the pretended parents, who threw
me away in my babyhood, to record. They closed accounts with me when
they left me on the asylum steps, and I with them. I grew up with such
schooling as the public gave,--ten weeks in winter always, and ten in
summer, till I was big enough to work on the farm,--better periods of
schools, I hold, than on the modern systems. Mr. Ogden I never saw.
Regularly he allowed for me the hundred a year till I was nine years
old, and then suddenly he died, as the reader perhaps knows. But John
Myers kept me as his son, none the less. I knew no change until, when I
was fourteen, he thought it time for me to see the world, and sent me to
what, in those days, was called a "Manual-Labor School."
There was a theory coming up in those days, wholly unfounded in
physiology, that if a man worked five hours with his hands, he could
study better in the next five. It is all nonsense. Exhaustion is
exhaustion; and if you exhaust a vessel by one stopcock, nothing is
gained or saved by closing that and opening another. The old up-country
theory is the true one. Study ten weeks and chop wood fifteen; study ten
more and harvest fifteen. But the "Manual-Labor School" offered itself
for really no pay, only John Myers and I carried over, I remember, a
dozen barrels of potatoes when I went there with my books. The school
was kept at Roscius, and if I would work in the carpenter's shop and on
the school farm five hours, why they would feed me and teach me all they
knew in what I had of the day beside.
"Felix," said John, as he left me, "I do not suppose this is the best
school in the world, unless you make it so. But I do suppose you can
make it so. If you and I went whining about, looking for the best school
in the world, and for somebody to pay your way through it, I should die,
and you would lose your voice with whining, and we should not find one
after all. This is what the public happens to provide for you and me. We
won't look a gift-horse in the mouth. Get on his back, Felix; groom him
well as you can when you stop, feed him when you can, and at all events
water him well and take care of him well. My last advice to you, Felix,
is to take what is offered you, and never complain because nobody offers
more."
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