Rattlin the Reefer | Page 7

the house being larger than we required for our accommodation, we again received old Ford, the only paradise, I am rather afraid, that will ever own him as an inmate. An awful man was old Ford, my godfather. His mingled prayers and blasphemies, hymns and horrid songs, defiance and remorse, groans and laughter, made everyone hate and avoid him. Hell-fire, as he continually asserted, was ever roaring before his eyes; and, as there is a text in the New Testament that says, there is no salvation for him who curses the Holy Ghost, he would, in the frenzy of his despair, swear at that mysterious portion of the Trinity by the hour, and then employ the next in beating his breast in the agony of repentance. Many may think all this sheer madness; but he was not more mad than most of the hot-headed methodists, whose preachers, at that time, held uncontrolled sway over the great mass of people that toiled in the humbler walks of life. Two nights in the week we used to have prayer-meetings at our house; and, though I could not have been five years old at the time, vividly do I remember that our front room used, on those occasions, to be filled to overflow, with kneeling fanatics, old Ford in the centre of the room, and a couple of lank-haired hypocrites, one on each side of the reprobate, praying till the perspiration streamed down their foreheads, to pray the devil out of him. The ohs! and the groanings of the audience were terrible; and the whole scene, though very edifying to the elect, was disgraceful to any sect who lived within the pale of civilisation.
I must now draw upon my own memory. I must describe my own sensations. If I reckon by the toil and turmoil of the mind, I am already an old man. I have lived for ages. I am far, very far, on my voyage. Let me cast my eyes back on the vast sea that I have traversed; there is a mist settled over it, almost as impenetrable as that which glooms before me. Let me pause. Methinks that I see it gradually break, and partial sunbeams struggle through it. Now the distant waves rise, and wanton and play, pure and lucid. 'Tis the day-spring of innocency. How near to the sanctified heavens do those remote waves appear! They meet, and are as one with the far horizon. Those sparkling waves were the hours of my childhood--the blissful feelings of my infancy. As the sea of life rolls on, the waves swell and are turbid; and, as I recede from the horizon of my early recollections, so heaven recedes from me. The thunder-cloud is high above my head, the treacherous waters roar beneath me, before me is the darkness and the night of an unknown futurity. Where can I now turn my eyes for solace, but over the vast space that I have passed? Whilst my bark glides heedlessly forward, I will not anticipate dangers that I cannot see, or tremble at rocks that are benevolently hidden from my view. It is sufficient for me to know that I must be wrecked at last; that my mortal frame must be like a shattered bark upon the beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my boyish days--I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to marbles and an untroubled breast--to hoop and high spirits--at least, in imagination.
I shall henceforward trust to my own recollections. Should this part of my story seem more like a chronicle of sensations than a series of events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of destiny. The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move, may be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean in apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure as he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable price, too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, among the great, or the fortuitously rich. Nothing that is abstractedly mental, is low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is the description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate vulgarity of the soul; it is this which but too often makes those who rustle in silks and roll in carriages, lower than