Puddnhead Wilson | Page 4

symbol, whose
testimony is infallible. A home without a cat--and a well-fed,
well-petted, and properly revered cat-- may be a perfect home, perhaps,
but how can it prove title?
All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick
sidewalks, stood locust trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing,
and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrancer in spring,
when the clusters of buds came forth. The main street, one block back
from the river, and running parallel with it, was the sole business street.
It was six blocks long, and in each block two or three brick stores, three
stories high, towered above interjected bunches of little frame shops.
Swinging signs creaked in the wind the street's whole length. The
candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility proud and ancient along

the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated merely the humble
barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing. On a chief
corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to bottom with
tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy notice to the
world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for business at
that corner.
The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river; its
body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most rearward
border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about its base line of
the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the town in a half-moon curve,
clothed with forests from foot to summit.
Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to
the little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big
Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight;
and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients." These
latter came out of a dozen rivers-- the Illinois, the Missouri, the Upper
Mississippi, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red River,
the White River, and so on--and were bound every whither and stocked
with every imaginable comfort or necessity, which the Mississippi's
communities could want, from the frosty Falls of St. Anthony down
through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.
Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked
grain and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and
comfortable and contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing
slowly-- very slowly, in fact, but still it was growing.
The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian
ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately
manners, he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous.
To be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his only
religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected, esteemed,
and beloved by all of the community. He was well off, and was
gradually adding to his store. He and his wife were very nearly happy,
but not quite, for they had no children. The longing for the treasure of a

child had grown stronger and stronger as the years slipped away, but
the blessing never came--and was never to come.
With this pair lived the judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt, and
she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason, and not
to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people, and
did their duty, and had their reward in clear consciences and the
community's approbation. They were Presbyterians, the judge was a
freethinker.
Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged almost forty, was
another old Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First
Families. He was a fine, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the
nicest requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an
authority on the "code", and a man always courteously ready to stand
up before you in the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful
or suspicious to you, and explain it with any weapon you might prefer
from bradawls to artillery. He was very popular with the people, and
was the judge's dearest friend.
Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F.F.V. of
formidable caliber--however, with him we have no concern.
Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than
he by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his
hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and
scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective
antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous
man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing.
On the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house;
one to