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Updated: June 6, 2025
I placed myself gingerly in a plain cane-bottomed rocking-chair, which Rivarol assured me was a safe location. "That seat," he said, "is an arrangement upon which I much felicitate myself. I made it at Heidelberg. It has saved me a vast deal of small annoyance. I consign to its embraces the friends who bore, and the visitors who exasperate, me.
"Will you sit down, Monsieur?" she asked, timidly, advancing a cane-bottomed chair. Everything in these poor lodgings was of the most shabby description. In a cracked mirror with a broken frame were stuck cards of invitation, theatre checks, and race tickets admitting to the grand stand.
After striking a judicious balance between what he should eat for dinner and what he should reserve for breakfast, he fell to, ate sparingly, lit his pipe, and gazed around the wretched room, of which the walls were blue-washed with a most offensive shade of blue, the bare floor was frankly dry mud and dust, the roof was bare cob-webbed thatch and rafter, and the furniture a rickety table, a dangerous-looking cane-bottomed settee and a leg-rest arm-chair from which some one had removed the leg-rests.
Over this she wove an open network of narrow thongs of deer-hide, wetted to make it more pliable, and securely fastened to the frame: when dry it became quite tight, and resembled a sort of coarse bamboo-work, such as you see on cane-bottomed chairs and sofas.
The room he entered was bare, depressingly so; bare as to its uncarpeted cottonwood floor, bare in its hard-finished, smoke-tinted walls. In it, to the casual observer, there were visible but four objects: an old-fashioned walnut desk that had once borne a top, but which did so no longer; two cane-bottomed chairs with rickety arms; and, seated in one thereof, a man.
Four or five cane-bottomed chairs painted green were standing here and there about the. room.
There, all in one room, lighted by a huge wood-fire, rafters above, puncheon floor beneath cane-bottomed chairs and two beds the only furniture-"pap," barefooted, the old mother in the chimney-corner with a pipe, strings of red pepper-pods, beans and herbs hanging around and above, a married daughter with a child at her breast, two or three children with yellow hair and bare feet all looking with all their eyes at the two visitors who had dropped upon them from another world.
But he left her very seldom. All the time I remained in harbour I saw him only twice on shore. On the first occasion it was at my charterers, where he came in misanthropically to get paid for towing out a French barque the day before. The second time I could hardly believe my eyes, for I beheld him reclining under his beard in a cane-bottomed chair in the billiard-room of Schomberg's hotel.
Once again I said "Yes," patiently, standing on my other foot. "If you will be good enough to come with me I will show you your rooms." A door opened outward, disclosing a little square place with two cane-bottomed chairs. A man bounced out so suddenly that I nearly annihilated my sister, who was back of me.
As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can see him sitting in his straight-backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune or chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of John or Daniel. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain.
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