The Delicious Vice | Page 9

sainted mother to spare her for her old father,
who was waiting her coming, Joquita passed all bounds. I killed
her--with a single knife thrust I remember. She was buried right on the
spot where the Tilden and Hendricks flag pole afterwards stood in the
campaign of 1876. It was with bitter melancholy that I fancied the red
stripes on the flag had their color from the blood of the poor, foolish
jealous girl below.
* * * * *
Ah, well--
Let us all own up--we men of above forty who aspire to respectability
and do actually live orderly lives and achieve even the odor of
sanctity--have we not been stained with murder?--aye worse! What
man has not his Bluebeard closet, full of early crimes and villainies? A
certain boy in whom I take a particular interest, who goes to
Sunday-school and whose life is outwardly proper--is he not now on
week days a robber of great renown? A week ago, masked and armed,
he held up his own father in a secluded corner of the library and
relieved the old man of swag of a value beyond the dreams--not of
avarice, but--of successful, respectable, modern speculation. He
purposes to be a pirate whenever there is a convenient sheet of water
near the house. God speed him. Better a pirate at six than at sixty.
Give them work to do and good novels to read and they will get over it.
History breeds queer ideas in children. They read of military heroes,
kings and statesmen who commit awful deeds and are yet monuments
of public honor. What a sweet hero is Raleigh, who was a farmer of

piracy; what a grand Admiral was Drake; what demi-gods the fighting
Americans who murdered Indians for the crime of wanting their own!
History hath charms to move an infant breast to savagery. Good strong
novels are the best pabulum to nourish difference between virtue and
vice.
Don't I know? I have felt the miracle and learned the difference so well
that even now at an advanced age I can tell the difference and indulge
in either. It was not a week after the killing of Joquita that I read the
first novel of my life. It was "Scottish Chiefs." The dead bodies of ten
thousand novels lie between me and that first one. I have not read it
since. Ten Incas of Peru with ten rooms full of solid gold could not
tempt me to read it again. Have I not a clear cinch on a delicious
memory, compared with which gold is only Robinson Crusoe's "drug?"
After a lapse of all these years the content of that one tremendous,
noble chapter of heroic climax is as deeply burned into my memory as
if it had been read yesterday.
A sister, old enough to receive "beaux" and addicted to the piano-forte
accomplishment, was at that time practicing across the hall an
instrumental composition, entitled, "La Rève." Under the title, printed
in very small letters, was the English translation; but I never thought to
look at it. An elocutionist had shortly before recited Poe's Raven at a
church entertainment, and that gloomy bird flapped its wings in my
young emotional vicinity when the firelight threw vague "shadows on
the floor." When the piece of music was spoken as "La Rève," its sad
cadences, suffering, of course, under practice, were instantly wedded in
my mind to Mr. Poe's wonderful bird and for years it meant the
"Raven" to me. How curious are childish impressions. Years afterward
when I saw a copy of the music and read the translation, "The Dream"
under the title, I felt a distinct shock of resentment as if the French
language had been treacherous to my sacred ideas. Then there was the
romantic name of "Ellerslie," which, notwithstanding considerable
precocity in reading and spelling I carried off as "Elleressie" Yeas
afterward when the actual syllables confronted me in a historical sketch
of Wallace, the truth entered like a stab and I closed the book. O sacred
first illusions of childhood, you are sweeter than a thousand year of
fame! It is God's providence that hardens us to endure the throwing of
them down to our eyes and strengthens us to keep their memory sweet

in our hearts.
* * * * *
It would be an affront then, not to assume that every reputable novel
reader has read "Scottish Chiefs." If there is any descendant or any
personal friend of that admirable lady, Miss Jane Porter, who may now
be in pecuniary distress, let that descendant call upon me privately with
perfect confidence. There are obligations that a glacial evolutionary
period can not lessen. I make no conditions but the simple proof of
proper identity. I am not rich but I am