Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 9

can yet understand the East without
taking into account. I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a
fact of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used
in any aesthetic study of the local conditions. I am not sure that I
valued it more even for literary purposes, than the steeple which the
captain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when he came and
went on his long voyages, or than the great palm-oil casks, which he
showed me, and which I related to the tree that stood
"Auf brennender Felsenwand."
Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
height, I am in doubt to this day.
I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest

publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most
immechanical of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the
great mills and factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold
their mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of their
special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell the
managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and
functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination
afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of
Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in
several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness
of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience
from ignoring them. As long as I was in Canada I was happy, for there
was no industry in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in
their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields;
but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went with that young
minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where they were
casting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from a
distance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away
sadly uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use.
A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now
heard for the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said
to myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as
reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I got to
Salem, my conscience stirred again. If I knew that there were
shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes?
This was a question which would not answer itself to my satisfaction,
and I had no peace till I learned that I could see shoemaking much
better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I
could readily run up there, if I did not wish to examine the shoe
machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up from Boston,
but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.

VII.
I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the
purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and
dropped it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own,
and probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust
to that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must
confess that my head had no room in it for the conception of any
machinery