a state of mind bordering on impatience. He said he would rather have
died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that
job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it
was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he
stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and
saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a
thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal
interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen
lightning-rods–“Let us have peace!” I shrieked. “Put up a hundred and
fifty! Put some on the kitchen! Put a dozen on the barn! Put a couple
on the cow! Put one on the cook!–scatter them all over the persecuted
place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted
canebrake! Move! Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and
when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods,
piston-rods–anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for
artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to
my lacerated soul!” Wholly unmoved–further than to smile sweetly–this
iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would
now proceed to hump himself. Well, all that was nearly three hours ago.
It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble
theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it
is the one subject that is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of
all this world’s philosophy.]
“economy is heaven’s best boon to man.” When the loose but gifted
Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be
granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he
would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition,
not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy.
Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker,
Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even
imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said:
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,
Post mortem unum, ante bellum,
Hic facet hoc, ex-parte res,
Politicum e-conomico est.
The grandeur of these conceptions of the old poet, together with the
felicity of the wording which clothes them, and the sublimity of the
imagery whereby they are illustrated, have singled out that stanza,
and made it more celebrated than any that ever–
[“Now, not a word out of you–not a single word. Just state your bill
and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these
premises. Nine hundred, dollars? Is that all? This check for the
amount will be honored at any respectable bank in America. What is that
multitude of people gathered in the street for? How?–‘looking at the
lightning-rods!’ Bless my life, did they never see any lightning-rods
before? Never saw ‘such a stack of them on one establishment,’ did I
understand you to say? I will step down and critically observe this
popular ebullition of ignorance.”]
THREE DAYS LATER.–We are all about worn out. For four-and-twenty hours
our bristling premises were the talk and wonder of the town. The
theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and
commonplace compared with my lightning-rods. Our street was blocked
night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from
the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day when a
thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to “go for” my house, as the
historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, so to
speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of
my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full,
windows, roof, and all. And well they might be, for all the falling
stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and
rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one
helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display