The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him

Paul Leicester Ford

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• Publié par: seab
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 28
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The
Honorable Peter Stirling and What
People Thought of Him, by Paul
Leicester Ford
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Title: The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him
Author: Paul Leicester Ford
Release Date: December 30, 2004 [eBook #14532]
Most recently updated: December 22, 2008
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE
PETER STIRLING AND WHAT PEOPLE THOUGHT OF HIM***
E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
Team
THE HONORABLE PETER STIRLING
and
WHAT PEOPLE THOUGHT OF HIM
by
PAUL LEICESTER FORDStitt Publishing Company New York
Henry Holt & Co.
1894
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
To
THOSE DEAR TO ME
AT
STONEY WOLDE,
TURNERS, NEW YORK;
PINEHURST;
NORWICH, CONNECTICUT;
BROOK FARM,
PROCTORSVILLE, VERMONT;
AND
DUNESIDE,EASTHAMPTON, NEW YORK,
THIS BOOK,
WRITTEN WHILE AMONG THEM,
IS DEDICATED.
CHAPTER I.
ROMANCE AND REALITY.
Mr. Pierce was talking. Mr. Pierce was generally talking. From the day that his
proud mamma had given him a sweetmeat for a very inarticulate "goo" which
she translated into "papa," Mr. Pierce had found speech profitable. He had
been able to talk his nurse into granting him every indulgence. He had talked
his way through school and college. He had talked his wife into marrying him.
He had talked himself to the head of a large financial institution. He had talked
his admission into society. Conversationally, Mr. Pierce was a success. He
could discuss Schopenhauer or cotillion favors; St. Paul, the apostle, or St.
Paul, the railroad. He had cultivated the art as painstakingly as a professional
musician. He had countless anecdotes, which he introduced to his auditors by
a "that reminds me of." He had endless quotations, with the quotation marks
omitted. Finally he had an idea on every subject, and generally a theory as
well. Carlyle speaks somewhere of an "inarticulate genius." He was not
alluding to Mr. Pierce.
Like most good talkers, Mr. Pierce was a tongue despot. Conversation must
take his course, or he would none of it. Generally he controlled. If an upstart
endeavored to turn the subject, Mr. Pierce waited till the intruder had done
speaking, and then quietly, but firmly would remark: "Relative to the subject we
were discussing a moment ago—" If any one ventured to speak, even sotto
voce, before Mr. Pierce had finished all he had to say, he would at once cease
his monologue, wait till the interloper had finished, and then resume his lecture
just where he had been interrupted. Only once had Mr. Pierce found this
method to fail in quelling even the sturdiest of rivals. The recollection of that day
is still a mortification to him. It had happened on the deck of an ocean steamer.
For thirty minutes he had fought his antagonist bravely. Then, humbled and
vanquished, he had sought the smoking-room, to moisten his parched throat,
and solace his wounded spirit, with a star cocktail. He had at last met his
superior. He yielded the deck to the fog-horn.
At the present moment Mr. Pierce was having things very much his own way.
Seated in the standing-room of a small yacht, were some eight people. With a
leaden sky overhead, and a leaden sea about it, the boat gently rose and fell
with the ground swell. Three miles away could be seen the flash-light marking
the entrance to the harbor. But though slowly gathering clouds told that wind
was coming, the yacht now lay becalmed, drifting with the ebb tide. The
pleasure-seekers had been together all day, and were decidedly talked out. For
the last hour they had been singing songs—always omitting Mr. Pierce, who
never so trifled with his vocal organs. During this time he had been restless. At
one point he had attempted to deliver his opinion on the relation of verse to
music, but an unfeeling member of the party had struck up "John Brown's
Body," and his lecture had ended, in the usual serial style, at the most
interesting point, without even the promise of a "continuation in our next."Finally, however, the singers had sung themselves hoarse in the damp night
air, the last "Spanish Cavalier" had been safely restored to his inevitable true-
love, and the sound of voices and banjo floated away over the water. Mr.
Pierce's moment had come.
Some one, and it is unnecessary to mention the sex, had given a sigh, and
regretted that nineteenth century life was so prosaic and unromantic. Clearing
his throat, quite as much to pre-empt the pause as to articulate the better, Mr.
Pierce spoke:
"That modern times are less romantic and interesting than bygone centuries is
a fallacy. From time immemorial, love and the battle between evil and good are
the two things which have given the world romance and interest. Every story,
whether we find it in the myths of the East, the folklore of Europe, the poems of
the Troubadours, or in our newspaper of this morning, is based on one or the
other of these factors, or on both combined. Now it is a truism that love never
played so important a part as now in shaping the destinies of men and women,
for this is the only century in which it has obtained even a partial divorce from
worldly and parental influences. Moreover the great battle of society, to crush
wrong and elevate right, was never before so bravely fought, on so many fields,
by so many people as to-day. But because our lovers and heroes no longer
brag to the world of their doings; no longer stand in the moonlight, and sing of
their 'dering does,' the world assumes that the days of tourneys and guitars
were the only days of true love and noble deeds. Even our professed writers of
romance join in the cry. 'Draw life as it is,' they say. 'We find nothing in it but
mediocrity, selfishness, and money-loving.' By all means let us have truth in our
novels, but there is truth and truth. Most of New York's firemen presumably sat
down at noon to-day to a dinner of corned-beef and cabbage. But perhaps one
of them at the same moment was fighting his way through smoke and flame, to
save life at the risk of his own. Boiled dinner and burned firemen are equally
true. Are they equally worthy of description? What would the age of chivalry be,
if the chronicles had recorded only the brutality, filthiness and coarseness of
their contemporaries? The wearing of underclothing unwashed till it fell to
pieces; the utter lack of soap; the eating with fingers; the drunkenness and foul-
mouthedness that drove women from the table at a certain point, and so
inaugurated the custom, now continued merely as an excuse for a cigar? Some
one said once that a man finds in a great city just the qualities he takes to it.
That's true of romance as well. Modern novelists don't find beauty and nobility
in life, because they don't look for them. They predicate from their inner souls
that the world is 'cheap and nasty' and that is what they find it to be. There is
more true romance in a New York tenement than there ever was in a baron's
tower—braver battles, truer love, nobler sacrifices. Romance is all about us, but
we must have eyes for it. You are young people, with your lives before you. Let
me give you a little advice. As you go through life look for the fine things—not
for the despicable. It won't make you any richer. It won't make you famous. It
won't better you in a worldly way. But it will make your lives happier, for by the
time you are my age, you'll love humanity, and look upon the world and call it
good. And you will have found romance enough to satisfy all longings for
mediæval times."
"But, dear, one cannot imagine some people ever finding anything romantic in
life," said a voice, which, had it been translated into words would have said, "I
know you are right, of course, and you will convince me at once, but in my
present state of une