Library Collections: Document: Full Text

"Yes," says Bill, "the Captain's had seas of trouble; I don't wonder he's sort'er sad and down at the mouth. Who wouldn't be?"

Aunt Dorothy, smoking her pipe, and leaning on her staff, shook her old sides as she laughed and shouted -- "The Captain's thinking of my blessing, I guess; don't you, aunt Prescott? ha, ha!"

In this group of paupers there is Dan Barnes, an old man of sixty-five, with a firm, iron-like constitution, of late somewhat shaken by his excessive intemperance, the besetting sin of a life-time. He is coarse, brutal and ugly. Ten years of his precious probation, he has passed in the State Prison, by his assiduous attention to business there, materially lessening the expenses of his sojourn in that quiet institution, though learning there no valuable lessons to apply in his individual practice outside. He is a hard fellow, being an old fighter and swearer, but shiftless and thriftless -- a starving old pauper at the last. There is hardly a more unblushing villain, a more desperate character than he, only that being nearly three-score-and-ten, and broken up somewhat by a life of extraordinary forage on society, and collision with conscience, as well when out of as when in the quarters furnished him by the State, he cannot execute all the wickedness that is in him. He will practice it out more perfectly, as is supposed, when he gets into the prison house, which favors uneasy souls in acting out character, i.e., perfect character -- a character that here, by reason of some moral and social relations, they find it a little difficult to make as transparent as they could humbly wish. Maugre all this, it is fearful to have him about -- to hear his coarse jests, listen to his foolish speeches and songs, his oaths and obscenity. It is one of the objections to a life at the poor-house, that Dan is one of its regular inmates -- so thinks old aunt Dorothy -- the widow Prescott even, with all her goodness and charity; the young, half-witted Roxy Waldins and squalid Mag Davis. So thought once old Joe Harnden. Even colored Bill dislikes him; and Jims, the boy, hates him as he hates salt pork when it is sweet, and coming but once in a week, fails to go round! "C---- pork," says Jims on such uneasy occasions. Alas! that the imprecation should have a reflex influence more direful than its direct. In like manner even, Mrs. Joanna Dodge, the old lady in a red cotton handkerchief for her head dress, and the lame, staff-using widow Rice, and tall Ebenezer Cowles, ruined by hard drink, and Brige, the old shoe-maker of Crampton.

And even old Joe Tucker and Polly his wife, and all the others wish Dan, comfortable and sober in his old apartments, another secured to him against all outsiders by the careful consideration of the State, for the term of his natural life. It is uncomfortable to any man of spirit to be harassed in this way. So Dan is continually ruffled by the treatment he receives from his fellow mendicants, and determines that he will be a real porcupine among the snakes. Dan had once owned a farm; he had a good house, a pleasant wife, and was thought to be well off. But by degrees his own coarse nature revealed itself, he got down to a point so low in character and position, that there was no relief. He went to prison. His wife, who had long suffered sadly at his hands, now obtained a separation from him, and, albeit, she survived his liberation, she never saw him more. He was a bloated, swearing, evil man, and few there were of any class in human life, who affiliated with him. Dan, with one of his muttered oaths, declared that he had studied character a good deal in his former residence, meaning his long ten years' residence, to which we have already alluded, and was sure that Captain Bunce was "trying a sort of States prison reform of life." Nobody knew better than Dan what State prison penitence meant! Very generally Captain Bunce was criticised by his poor people who, on the whole, rather regarded him as working a sort of up-hill-repentance for the shortcomings of his past life.

But Captain Bunce had in a measure forgotten Joe Harnden, aunt Dorothy's blessing, and the widow's prayers. The "short comings of his past life" were, it is true, overwhelming him, but the short comings themselves were the out goes of his establishment, that he rather considered had been too generous -- too satisfactory to the town, unnecessarily burdensome to himself. He was, in a sort of penitent brown-study as to the best way of retrieving his past errors, and applying his humanity by a more stringent and rigid rule, avoiding such a tremendous going beyond his duty. He could not get over it that he should lose the "good opinion," as he called it, of Squire Ben Stout, and of the other selectmen, or that they should be troubled with the idea that he was treating the paupers too well.

"Heaven knows," soliloquized he, "that I never meant to do that; the most I ever dreamed of was to do about right, but to be charged with squandering money on them too lavishly -- ah! 'that is the unkindest of all cuts.' "The Captain had heard this saying in his life as applied to others, but he now thought it would apply to him better than anything else he could recall to mind, either of an oral or recorded nature, and so he "out with it," adding, as he put his hands in his pockets and fumbled over the loose coppers and ten cent pieces there, "Heaven save me from my best friends," which was another sentiment the Captain recollected just in time to give him some comfort.