Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my
foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part
of my companion's character, if it have a better part, is that
which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type
whereby I recognise the man. As most of these old Custom-House
officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to
them, being paternal and protective, was favourable to the
growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It
was pleasant in the summer forenoons--when the fervent heat,
that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems--it
was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of
them all tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen
witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and came
bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity
of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the
intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to
do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon
the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however,
it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the
phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.
It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to
represent all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In
the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there
were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked
ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and
dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.
Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to
be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But,
as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be
no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation
from their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung
away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had
enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully
to have stored their memory with the husks. They spoke with far
more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or
yesterday's, to-day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the
shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the world's
wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.
The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the
respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States--was
a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a
legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or
rather born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary
colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an
office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the
early ages which few living men can now remember. This
Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years,
or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful
specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover
in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact
figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk
and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he
seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch. 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.