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"Gentlemen's dressing-room up-stairs to the right, Colonel," called Beasley, as he closed the door. There was a pause of awed silence among us. Dowden. "By the Almighty!" said Simeon Peck, hoarsely. "Who WHAT was Dave Beasley talkin' to? There wasn't nobody THERE!" "Git out," Grist bade him; but his tone was perturbed. "He seen that reporter. He was givin' us the laugh."
When Mr. Edward Dowden tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions of his career.
The turf-cutter seized old Olly Dowden, and, somewhat more gently, poussetted with her likewise.
My brother's widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole Executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my Brother, to the heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by her first husband, in fee simple, recoverable by fine invested property, mind, for there is the difficulty subject to leet and quit rent in short, worded in the most guarded terms, to shut out the property from Isaac Dowden the husband.
His social creed was well formulated by Dowden in these words: "Banish from earth some few monsters of selfishness, malignity, and hypocrisy, set to rights a few obvious imperfections in the machinery of society, inspire all men with a cheery benevolence, and everything will go well with this excellent world of ours." Every student of the science of society, however, owes a debt to Dickens.
"I expect I was pretty clumsy about it," said Dowden, cheerfully. "Well, well " he flicked his cigar with a smothered ejaculation that was half a sigh and half a laugh; "it's a mighty strange case. Here they keep on living next door to each other, year after year, each going on alone when they might just as well " He left the sentence unfinished, save for a vocal click of compassion.
It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized.
In the first field, the literature of knowledge, must lie all history, with Hume and Gibbon; all science, with Darwin and Fiske; all philosophy, with Spencer and William James; all political writing, with Voltaire and Webster. Near that same field must lie many of those essays in criticism of which Professor Dowden speaks.
Dowden again: "Grist's against us because he had a quarrel with a clerk in Beasley's office, and wanted Beasley to discharge him, and Beasley wouldn't; Sim Peck's against us out of just plain wrong-headedness, and because he never was for ANYTHING nor FER anybody in his life.
It might have been better mannered for me to address myself to Mr. Dowden, or one of the very nice elderly women, who were my fellow-guests, than to open a conversation with Miss Apperthwaite; but I did not stop to think of that. "You have a splendid old house next door to you here, Miss Apperthwaite," I said. "It's a privilege to find it in view from my window."
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