MINE UNCLE JOHN

BY JAMES KIRKE PAULDING (1779-1860)

O those whose habits of abstraction may have let them into some of the secrets of their own minds, and whose freedom from daily toil has left them at leisure to analyze their feelings, it will be nothing new to say that the present is peculiarly the season of remembrance. The flowers, the zephyrs, and the warblers of spring, returning after their tedious absence, bring naturally to our recollection past times and buried feelings; and the whispers of the full-foliaged grove fall on the ear of contemplation like the sweet tones of far distant friends whom the rude jostlers of the world have severed from us and cast far beyond our reach. It is at such times that, casting backward many a lingering look, we recall, with a kind of sweet-souled melancholy, the days of our youth, and the jocund companions who started with us the race of life, but parted midway in the journey to pursue some winding path that allured them with a prospect more seducing, and never returned to us again. It is then, too, if we have been afflicted with any heavy sorrow, if we have even lost - and who has not an old friend or chosen companion, that his shade will hover around us; the memory of his virtues press on the heart; and a thousand endearing recollections, forgotten amidst the cold pleasures and midnight dissipations of winter, arise to our remembrance.

These speculations bring to my mind my Uncle John, the history of whose loves and disappointments I have promised to the world. Though I must own myself much addicted to forgetting my promises, yet, as I have been so happily reminded of this, I believe I must pay it at once, "and there is an end.' Lest my readers good-natured souls that they are should, in the ardor of peeping into millstones, take my uncle for an old acquaintance, I here inform them that the old gentleman died a great many years ago, and it is impossible they should ever have known him. I pity them for they would have known a good-natured, benevolent man, whose example might have been of service.

The last time I saw my Uncle John was fifteen years ago, when I paid him a visit at his old mansion. I found him reading a newspaper - for it was election-time, and he was always a warm Federalist, and had made several converts to the true political faith in his time; particularly one old tenant, who always just before the election became a violent anti-in

From Salmagundi, or the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-08-1820), by James Kirke Paulding, Washington Irving and William Irving; first series (1807-08), No. XI, dated July 2, 1807. Since No. X is dated May 16 and No. XII June 27, July 2 for No. XI is probably a mistake for June 2.

order that he might be convinced of his errors by my uncle, who never failed to reward his conviction by some substantial benefit.

After we had settled the affairs of the nation, and I had paid my respects to the old family chroniclers in the kitchen - an indispensable ceremony the old gentleman exclaimed, with heartfelt glee, "Well, I suppose you are for a trout-fishing; I have got everything prepared; but first you must take a walk with me to see my improvements." I was obliged to consent; though I knew my uncle would lead me a most villainous dance, and in all probability treat me to a quagmire, or a tumble into a ditch. If my readers choose to accompany me in this expedition, they are welcome, if not, let them stay at home like lazy fellows and sleep or be hanged. Though I had been absent several years, yet there was very little alteration in the scenery, and every object retained the same features it bore when I was a schoolboy; for it was in this spot that I grew up in the fear of ghosts, and in the breaking of many of the Ten Commandments. The brook, or river, as they would call it in Europe, still murmured with its wonted sweetness through the meadow; and its banks were still tufted with dwarf willows, that bent down to the surface. The same echo inhabited the valley, and the same tender air of repose pervaded the whole scene. Even my good uncle was but little altered, except that his hair was grown a little grayer, and his forehead had lost some of its former smoothness. He had, however, lost nothing of his former activity, and laughed heartily at the difficulty I found in keeping up with him as he stumped through bushes, and briers, and hedges; talking all the time about his improvements, and telling what he would do with such a spot of ground and such a tree. At length, after showing me his stone fences, his famous two-year-old bull, his new-invented cart, which was to go before the horse, and his Eclipse colt, he was pleased to return home to dinner.

After dinner and returning thanks which with him was not a ceremony merely, but an offering from the heart - my uncle opened his trunk, took out his fishing-tackle, and, without saying a word, sallied forth with some of those truly alarming steps which Daddy Neptune once took when he was in a great hurry to attend the affair of the siege of Troy. Troutfishing was my uncle's favorite sport; and, though I always caught two fish for his one, he never would acknowledge my superiority; but puzzled himself often and often to account for such a singular phenomenon.

Following the current of the brook, for a mile or two, we retraced many of our old haunts, and told a hundred adventures which had befallen us at different times. It was like snatching the hour-glass of time, inverting it, and rolling back again the sands that had marked the lapse of years. At length the shadows began to lengthen, the south wind gradually settled into a perfect calm, the sun threw his rays through the trees on the hill-tops in golden luster, and a kind of Sabbath stillness pervaded the whole valley, indicating that the hour was fast approaching which was to relieve for a while the farmer from his rural labor, the ox from his toil, the school urchin from his primer, and bring the loving plowman home to the feet of his blooming dairymaid.

As we were watching in silence the last rays of the sun beaming their

farewell radiance on the high hills at a distance, my uncle exclaimed, in a kind of half desponding tone, while he rested his arm over an old tree that had fallen: "I know not how it is, my dear Launce, but such an evening, and such a still, quiet scene as this, always makes me a little sad; and it is at such a time I am most apt to look forward with regret to the period when this farm, on which 'I have been young but now am old,' and every object around me that is endeared by long acquaintance when all these and I must shake hands and part. I have no fear of death, for my life has afforded but little temptation to wickedness; and when I die I hope to leave behind me more substantial proofs of virtue than will be found in my epitaph, and more lasting memorials than churches built or hospitals endowed, with wealth wrung from the hard hand of poverty, by an unfeeling landlord or unprincipled knave; but still, when I pass such a day as this and contemplate such a scene, I cannot help feeling a latent wish to linger yet a little longer in this peaceful asylum; to enjoy a little more sunshine in this world, and to have a few more fishing matches with my boy." As he ended, he raised his hand a little from the fallen tree, and, dropping it languidly by his side, turned himself toward home. The sentiment, the look, the action, all seemed to be prophetic. And so they were, for when I shook him by the hand, and bade him farewell the next morning-it was for the last time!

He died a bachelor, at the age of sixty-three, though he had been all his life trying to get married, and always thought himself on the point of accomplishing his wishes. His disappointments were not owing either to the deformity of his mind or person; for in his youth he was reckoned handsome, and I myself can witness for him that he had as kind a heart as ever was fashioned by heaven; neither were they owing to his poverty - which sometimes stands in an honest man's way for he was born to the inheritance of a small estate which was sufficient to establish his claim to the title of "one well to do in the world." The truth is, my uncle had prodigious antipathy to doing things in a hurry. "A man should consider," said he to me once, "that he can always get a wife, but cannot always get rid of her. For my part," continued he, "I am a young fellow, with the world before me" - he was about forty-"and am resolved to look sharp, weigh matters well, and know what's what, before I marry: in short, Launce, I don't intend to do the thing in a hurry, depend upon it." On this whimwham he proceeded. He began with young girls, and ended with widows. The girls he courted until they grew old maids, or married out of pure apprehension of incurring certain penalties hereafter; and the widows, not having quite as much patience, generally, at the end of a year, while the good man thought himself in the high road to success, married some harum-scarum young fellow who had not such an antipathy to doing things in a hurry.

My uncle would have inevitably sunk under these repeated disappointments for he did not want sensibility — had he not hit upon a discovery which set all to rights at once. He consoled his vanity for he was a little vain, and soothed his pride which was his master passion - by telling his friends very significantly, while his eye would flash triumph, "that he might have had her." Those who know how much of the bitterness of

disappointed affection arises from wounded vanity and exasperated pride will give my uncle credit for this discovery.

My uncle had been told by a prodigious number of married men, and had read in an innumerable quantity of books, that a man could not possibly be happy except in the married state; so he determined at an early age to marry, that he might not lose his only chance for happiness. He, accordingly, forthwith paid his addresses to the daughter of a neighboring gentleman farmer, who was reckoned the beauty of the whole world; a phrase by which the honest country people mean nothing more than the circle of their acquaintance, or that territory of land which is within sight of the smoke of their own hamlet.

This young lady, in addition to her beauty, was highly accomplished, for she had spent five or six months at a boarding-school in town, where she learned to work pictures in satin, and paint sheep that might be mistaken for wolves; to hold up her head, sit straight in her chair, and to think every species of useful acquirement beneath her attention. When she returned home, so completely had she forgotten everything she knew before, that on seeing one of the maids milking a cow, she asked her father, with an air of most enchanting ignorance, "what that odd-looking thing was doing to that queer animal?" The old man shook his head at this; but the mother was delighted at these symptoms of gentility, and so enamored of her daughter's accomplishments that she actually got framed a picture worked in satin by the young lady. It represented the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo was dressed in an orange-colored cloak, fastened round his neck with a large golden clasp; a white satin tamboured waistcoat, leather breeches, blue silk stockings and white-topped boots. The amiable Juliet shone in a flame-colored gown, most gorgeously bespangled with silver stars, a high-crowned muslin cap that reached to the top of the tomb; on her feet she wore a pair of short-quartered high-heeled shoes, and her waist was the exact facsimile of an inverted sugar loaf. The head of the noble County Paris" looked like a chimney-sweeper's brush that had lost its handle, and the cloak of the good friar hung about him as gracefully as the armor of a rhinoceros. The good lady considered this picture as a splendid proof of her daughter's accomplishments, and hung it up in the best parlor, as an honest tradesman does his certificate of admission into that enlightened body yclept the Mechanic Society.

With this accomplished young lady then did my Uncle John become deeply enamored, and, as it was his first love, he determined to bestir himself in an extraordinary manner. Once at least in a fortnight, and generally on a Sunday evening, he would put on his leather breeches, for he was a great beau, mount his gray horse Pepper, and ride over to see Miss Pamela, though she lived upward of a mile off, and he was obliged to pass close by a churchyard, which at least a hundred creditable persons would swear was haunted! Miss Pamela could not be insensible to such proofs of attachment, and accordingly received him with considerable kindness; her mother always left the room when he came, and my uncle had as good as made a declaration by saying, one evening, very significantly, "that he believed that he should soon change his condition"; when, somehow or other, he began to think he

was doing things in too great a hurry, and that it was high time to consider; so he considered near a month about it, and there is no saying how much longer he might have spun the thread of his doubts had he not been roused from this state of indecision by the news that his mistress had married an attorney's apprentice whom she had seen the Sunday before at church, where he had excited the applauses of the whole congregation by the invincible gravity with which he listened to a Dutch sermon. The young people in the neighborhood laughed a good deal at my uncle on the occasion, but he only shrugged his shoulders, looked mysterious, and replied, "Tut, boys! I might have had her."

NOTE BY WILLIAM WIZARD, ESQ.

Our publisher, who is busily engaged in printing a celebrated work, which is perhaps more generally read in this city than any other book, not excepting the Bible-I mean the New York Directory - has begged so hard that we will not overwhelm him with too much of a good thing, that we have, with Langstaff's approbation, cut short the residue of Uncle John's amours. In all probability it will be given in a future number, whenever Launcelot is in the humor for it-he is such an odd- but mum, for fear of another suspension.