An offer for the Horse — Difficulty of Shipping him according to the Terms of Bill of Lading — Anticipations — Marine Sketch — Mrs. Sparrowgrass buys a Patent Bedstead — An essay on Mechanical Forces, and Suggestions in regard to a Bronze Legislature — The New Bedstead is tried and found — “not available.”
“MRS. SPARROWGRASS,” said I, during one of the remarkably bland evenings we have had lately; “there is, at last, as offer for our horse.” This good news being received with an incredulous look, I pulled from my pocket the Louisville Journal, and read therein as follows:
“Well,” said Mrs. Sp., “what of that? What can you do in relation to the matter? You have not seen the other horse.” “True,” I replied, “but that need not prevent me SHIPPING MINE! And you may depend upon it, if ever I get him on board ship, and the bill of lading is in my pocket, no earthly power can make me take him back again. I shall say to the captain, ‘My dear sir; that horse is not accustomed to going, but, if he has any go in him, he will have to go now.’ ” This play upon words, so entirely original, struck me as being pretty fair; whereupon, I sat down quite complacently to read the rest of the paper. “But,” continued Mrs. Sparrowgrass, smoothing her hair with both hands, “suppose, after they get him on board the vessel, they should find out what kind of a horse he was, and suppose, then, they should refuse to take him, how could you help it?” “Why, my dear,” replied I, “if I have a bill of lading, they must take him. A bill of lading is a certificate or contract signed by the captain and owners of the vessel, in which they agree to carry such and such goods from the port where they receive them, to the port to which the vessel is bound. A bill of lading reads something like 210 this: ‘Shipped in good order, and well-conditioned’” — —
“How does it begin?” said Mrs. S., with the first word in the key of C sharp.
‘Shipped in good order, and well-conditioned,” I responded, but my voice was in the key of F minor. For here, at the very threshold of my hope, was a barrier. The terms of the bill of lading itself would prevent me shipping him. How could I say he was “in good order and well conditioned?”
To my mind, there is nothing so common in life as disappointments. Let any man take his happiest day, and see if it be not somewhat flecked and flawed with them. I think the most favored could count twenty balks to one success in his past days. The human mind is apt to anticipate the end before the beginning has begun. Tom Ailanthus hears he has fallen heir to an estate worth one hundred thousand dollars, and before he sleeps, buys a house near Fifth Avenue, furnishes it, gets married, presents his wife with a splendid set of diamonds, invests forty thousand as special partner in some safe concern, makes another fortune, does the tour of Europe, gets back, 211 marries off his daughters, moves into the country, builds a villa, with lawns, fish-ponds, conservatories, hot and cold graperies, and circulates around his domains, the Sir Roger de Coverley of the neighborhood. But when the estate comes to be settled, and its value established, Tom Ailanthus, who before never had kept a dollar long enough in his company to get thoroughly acquainted with it, finds himself a poor man, with only fifty thousand. His anticipations have presented him with fifty thousand disappointments. So we go:
THE HORSE — HIS EXODUS.
SCENE II.
SCENE III.
“Now, Mrs. Sparrowgrass, I had imagined all that panorama; and here we are, with the horse upon our hands, just because bills of lading begin in the way they do. I believe I shall have to make him a present to some bone-boiling establishment.” “That is a cruel thought,” said Mrs. S. “By the way,” said I, “what do you think of my poetry, my dear?” Mrs. Sparrowgrass answered she had not heard any poetry, except now and then a rhyme, which seemed to come in the prose very well. “Prose,” said I, “prose? Do you not know the verse is octameter catalectic, alternating with lines of a trochee and a half, sometimes irregulated in order to give scope to my fancy?” Mrs. Sparrowgrass said it did not strike her in that way. “Then if it did not strike you it cannot be poetry. Of course not. Poetry to be poetry must 215 strike. If it do not, then it is not poetry, but, Mrs. Sp. it may be (excuse me) werse.”
I have bought me a new patent bedstead, to facilitate early rising, called a “wake-up.” It is a good thing to rise early in the country. Even in the winter time it is conducive to health to get out of a warm bed by lamp-light; to shiver into your drawers and slippers; to wash your face in a basin of ice-flakes; and to comb out your frigid hair with an uncompromising comb, before a frosty looking-glass. The only difficulty about it lies in the impotence of human will. You will deliberate about it, and argue the point. You will indulge in specious pretences, and lie still with only the tip end of your nose outside the blankets; you will pretend to yourself that you do intend to jump out in a few minutes; you will tamper with the good intention, and yet indulge in the delicious luxury. To all this the “wake-up,” is inflexibly and triumphantly antagonistic. It is a bedstead with a clock scientifically inserted in the head-board. When you go to bed, you wind up the clock, and point the index-hand to that hour on the dial, at which you wish to rise in the morning. Then you place yourself in the hands of the invention, and 216 shut your eyes. You are now, as it were, under the guardianship of King Solomon and Doctor Benjamin Franklin. There is no need to recall those beautiful lines of the poet’s —
“Mrs. Sparrowgrass,” said I, contemplatively, after the grimy machinists had departed, “this machine is one of the most remarkable evidences of progress, the ingenuity of man has yet developed. In this bedstead we see a host of cardinal virtues made practical by science. To rise early, one must possess courage, prudence, self-denial, temperance, and fortitude. The cultivation of these virtues, necessarily attended with a great deal of trouble, may now be dispensed with, as this engine can entirely set aside, and render useless, a vast amount of moral discipline. I have no doubt, in a short time we shall see the finest attributes of the human mind superseded by machinery. Nay, more, I have very little doubt that, as a preparatory step in this great progress, we shall have physical monitors of cast-iron and wheel-work to regulate the ordinary routine of duty in every family.” 218 Mrs. Sparrowgrass said she did not precisely understand what I meant. “for instance,” said I, in continuation, “we dine every day; as a general thing, I mean. Now sometimes we eat too much, and how easy, how practicable it would be to regulate our appetites by a banquet-dial. The subject, having had the superficial area of his skull, and the cubic capacity of his body worked out respectively by a licensed craniologist, and by a licensed corporalogist, gets from each a certificate, which certificates are duly registered in the country clerk’s office. From the county clerk he receives a permit, marked, we will say, ten.” “Not ten pounds, I hope,” said Mrs. S. “No, my dear,” I replied, “ten would be the average of his capacity. We will now suppose the chair, in which the subject is seated at dinner, rests upon a pendulous platform, over a delicate arrangement of levers, connected with an upright rod, that runs through the section of table in front of his plate, and this rod, we will suppose, is toothed into a ratchet-wheel, that moves the index of the banquet-dial. You will see at once, any absorption of food would be instantly indicated by the index. All 219 then, he is called upon to do, is to watch the dial, until the hand points to ‘ten,’ and then, stop eating.” “But,” said Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “suppose he shouldn’t be half through?” “Oh,” said I, “that would not make any difference. When the dial says he has had enough, he must quit.” “But,” said Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “suppose he would not stop eating?” “Then,” said I, “the proper way to do would be to inform against him, and have him brought immediately before a justice of the peace, and if he did not at once swear that he had eaten within his limits, fine him, and seize all the victuals on his premises.” “Oh,” said Mrs. S., “you would have a law to regulate it, then?” “Of course,” said I, “a statute — a statutory provision, or provisionary act. Then, the principle once being established, you see how easily and beautifully we could be regulated by the simplest motive powers. All the obligations we now owe to society and to ourselves, could be dispensed with, or rather transferred to, or vested in, some superior machine to which we would be accountable by night and day. Nay, more than that, instead of sending representatives to legislate for us, how easy it would be to construct a legislature of bronze 220 and wheel-work — an incorruptible legislature. I would suggest a hydraulic or pneumatic congress, as being less liable to explode, and more easily graduated than one propelled by steam simply. All that would be required of us then would be to elect a state engineer annually, and he, with the assistance of a few underlings, could manage the automata as he pleased.” “I do not see,” replied Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “how that would be an improvement upon the present method, from all I hear.” This unexpected remark of Mrs. S. surprised me into silence for a moment, but immediately recovering, I answered that a hydraulic or pneumatic legislature would at least have this advantage — it would construct enactments for the State at, at least, one fiftieth part of the present expense, and at the same time do the work better and quicker.
“Now, my dear,” said I, as I wound up the ponderous machinery with a huge key, “as you are always an early riser, and as, of course, you will be up before seven o’clock, I will set the indicator at that hour, so that you will not be disturbed by the progress of science. It is getting to be very cold, my dear, but how beautiful the stars 221 are to-night. Look at Orion and the Pleiades! Intensely lustrous, in the frosty sky.”
The sensations one experiences in lying down upon a complication of mechanical forces, are somewhat peculiar, if they are not entirely novel. I once had the pleasure, for one week, of sleeping directly over the boiler of a high-pressure Mississippi steamboat; and, as I knew, in case of a blow-up, I should be the first to hear of it, I composed my mind as well as I could under the circumstances. But this reposing upon a bed of statics and dynamics, with the constant chirping and crawling of wheel-work at the bed’s head, with a thought now and then of the inexorable iron elbow below, and an uncertainty as to whether the clock itself might not be too fast, or too slow, caused me to be rather reflective and watchful, than composed and drowsy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the lucent stars in their blue depths, and the midnight moon now tipping the Palisades with a fringe of silver fire, and was thinking how many centuries that lovely light had played upon those rugged ridges of trap and basalt, and so finally sinking from the reflective to the imaginative, and from the imaginative to the indistinct, at last 222 reached that happy state of half-consciousness, between half-asleep and asleep, when the clock in the machine woke up, and suddenly struck eight! Of course, I knew it was later, but I could not imagine why it should strike at all, as I presumed the only time of striking was in the morning, by way of signal. As Mrs. S. was sound asleep, I concluded not to say anything to her about it; but I could not help thinking what an annoyance it would be if the clock should keep on striking the hours during the night. In a little while the bed-clothes seemed to droop at the foot of the bed, to which I did not pay much attention, as I was just then engaged listening to the drum below, that seemed to be steadily engaged in winding up its rope, and preparing for action. Then I felt the upper part of the patent bedstead rising up, and then I concluded to jump out, just as the iron elbow began to utter a cry like unto the cry of a steel katy-did, and did jump, but was accidentally preceded by the mattress, one bolster, two pillows, ditto blankets, a brace of threadbare linen sheets, one cover-lid, the baby, one cradle (over-turned), and Mrs. Sparrowgrass. To gather up these heterogeneous materials of comfort required some little time, and, 223 in the meanwhile, the bestead subsided. When we retired again, and were once more safely protected from the nipping cold, although pretty well cooled, I could not help speaking of the perfect operation of the bedstead in high terms of praise, although, by some accident, it had fulfilled its object a little earlier than had been desirable. As I am very fond of dilating upon a pleasing theme, the conversation was prolonged until Mrs. Sparrowgrass got sleepy, and the clock struck nine. Then we had to turn out again. We had to turn out every hour during the long watches of the night, for that wonderful epitome of the age of progress. When the morning came, we were sleepy enough, and the next evening we concluded to replace the “wake-up,” with a common, old-fashioned bedstead. To be sure, I had made a small mistake the first night, in not setting the “indicator,” as well as the index of the dial. But what of that? Who wants his rest, that precious boon, subjected to contingencies? When we go to sleep, and say our prayers, let us wake up according to our natures, and according to our virtues; some require more sleep, some less; we are not mere bit’s of mechanism after all; who know what world we 224 may chance to wake up in? For my part, I have determined not to be a humming-top, to be wound up, and to run down, just like that very interesting toy, one of the young Sparrowgrassii has just now left upon my table, minus a string.