The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 | Page 2

in the summer." I joke to myself about that

sometimes, thinking I should claim kindred with them; for, looking
back over the sixty years of Zack Humphreys's life, they seem to me to
have pretty much gone in preparing the bread and meat from day to day.
I see but little result of all the efforts of that time beyond that solitary
chop; and a few facts and hopes, may be, gathered outside of the
market, which, Josiah says, absorb all of the real world. All day, sitting
here at my desk in Wirt's old counting-house, these notions of Josiah's
have dogged me. These sums that I jotted down, the solid comforts they
typified, the homes, the knowledge, the travel they would buy,--these
were, then, the real gist of this thing we called life, were they? The
great charities money had given to the world,--Christ's Gospel preached
by it.--Did it cover all, then? Did it?
What a wholesome (or unwholesome) scorn of barter Knowles had!
The old fellow never collected a debt; and, by the way, as seldom paid
one. The "dirty dollar" came between him and very few people. Yet the
heart in his great mass of flesh beat fiercely for an honor higher than
that known to most men. I have sat here all the afternoon, staring out at
the winter sky, scratching down a figure now and then, and idly going
back to the time when I was a younger man than now, but even then
with neither wife nor child, and no home beyond an eating-house;
thinking how I caught old Knowles's zest for things which lay beyond
trade-laws; how eager I grew in the search of them; how he inoculated
me with Abolitionism, Communism, every other fever that threatened
to destroy the commercial status of the world, and substitute a
single-eyed regard for human rights. It occurred to me, too, that some
of those odd, one-sided facts, which it used to please me to gather
then,--queer bits of men's history, not to be judged by Josiah's rules,--it
might please others to hear. What if I wrote them down these winter
evenings? Nothing in them rare or strange; but they lay outside of the
market, and were true.
Not one of them which did not bring back Knowles, with his unwieldy
heat and bluster. He found a flavor and meaning in the least of these
hints of mine, gloating over the largess given and received in the world,
for which money had no value. His bones used to straighten, and his
eye glitter under the flabby brow, at the recital of any brave, true deed,

as if it had been his own; as if, but for some mischance back yonder in
his youth, it might have been given to even this poor old fellow to
strike a great, ringing blow on Fate's anvil before he died,--to give his
place in the life-boat to a more useful man,--to help buy with his life
the slave's freedom.
Let me tell you the story of our acquaintance. Josiah, even, would hold
the apology good for claiming so much of your time for this old
dreamer of dreams, since I may give you a bit of useful knowledge in
the telling about a place and people here in the States utterly different
from any other, yet almost unknown, and, so far as I know, undescribed.
When I first met Knowles it was in an obscure country town in
Pennsylvania, as he was on his way across the mountains with his son.
I was ill in the little tavern where he stopped; and, he being a physician,
we were thrown together,--I a raw country lad, and he fresh from the
outer world, of which I knew nothing,--a man of a muscular, vigorous
type even then. But what he did for me, or the relation we bore to each
other, is of no import here.
One or two things about him puzzled me. "Why do you not bring your
boy to this room?" I asked, one day.
His yellow face colored with angry surprise. "Antony? What do you
know of Antony?"
"I have watched you with him," I said, "on the road yonder. He's a
sturdy, manly little fellow, of whom any man would be proud. But you
are not proud of him. In this indifference of yours to the world, you
include him. I've seen you thrust him off into the ditch when he caught
at your hand, and let him struggle on by himself."
He laughed. "Right! Talk of love, family affection! I have tried it. Why
should my son be more to me than any other man's son, but for an
extended selfishness? I have cut loose all nearer ties than those which
hold all men as brothers, and Antony comes