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.