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Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts of Colcord's life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying out, exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region. "No wonder," said the Doctor bluffly.
The curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the New-Englander is just as much an idolater as the Hindoo. This man was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his God. A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists!
Grandfather here remarked that many a New-Englander, who had passed his boyhood and youth in obscurity, afterward attained to a fortune which he never could have foreseen even in his most ambitious dreams. John Adams, the second President of the United States and the equal of crowned kings, was once a schoolmaster and country lawyer.
It is like returning to times twenty years gone by for a New-Englander to witness such simplicity of manners. The next morning, May 8th, I rose and breakfasted early, and took the rail soon after eight o'clock, leaving Mr. Bowman behind; for he had business in Newcastle, and would not follow till some hours afterwards.
Perhaps he will become the prophet, the seer, of his age, as he is its Poet. The New-Englander is the man without a climate. Why is his country recognized? You won't find it on any map of Paris. And yet Paris is the universe. Strange anomaly! The greater must include the less; but how if the less leaks out? This sometimes happens. And yet there are phenomena in that country worth observing.
Nowhere is conventionality more in reverence; yet when a New-Englander, man or woman, happens to elect to break with it, nowhere is the break so utter and so defiant.
The Master got talking the other day about the difference between races and families. I am reminded of what he said by what I have just been saying myself about coarse-fibred and fine-fibred people. We talk about a Yankee, a New-Englander, he said,-as if all of 'em were just the same kind of animal. "There is knowledge and knowledge," said John Bunyan. There are Yankees and Yankees.
The New-Englander or New-Yorker in traveling in the Southern States may note the enormous depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses or railroad cuts.
This is the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. A person thoroughly heated or frozen is good for nothing. Look at the Bongos. The New-Englander, by incessant activity, hopes to get warm. Edwards made his theology. Thank God, New England is not in Paris! Hudson's Bay, Labrador, Grinnell's Land, a whole zone of ice and walruses, make it unpleasant for New England.
But at the end of the year he told me that he thought I was "too much of a Virginian" ever to follow this occupation, and that, having seen my father and known his position, he was surprised that he had ever favored such a pursuit for me. This was, indeed, the falsehood I had told him. It was in a Canadian village that I parted with this gentlemanly and generous New-Englander.
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