The Old Homestead | Page 9

but on board of a Spanish vessel, and
spending many of the subsequent years in voyages, travels, and
outlandish incidents and vicissitudes, which, methought, had hardly
been paralleled since the days of Gulliver or De Foe. When his
dignified reserve was overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these
adventures with wonderful eloquence, working up his descriptive
sketches with such intuitive perception of the picturesque points that
the whole was thrown forward with a positively illusive effect, like
matters of your own visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably
done that I could never more than half believe them, because the
genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact themselves so artistically.
Many of his scenes were laid in the East, and among those
seldom-visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that there was an
Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and an odor of the Spice
Islands still lingering in his garments. He had much to say of the
delightful qualities of the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on a
predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized nations, and cut
every Christian throat among their prisoners; but (except for deeds of
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter of
religion and conscience with them) they are a gentle-natured people, of
primitive innocence and integrity.
But his best story was about a race of men (if men they were) who
seemed so fully to realize Swift's wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my
friend was much exercised with psychological speculations whether or
no they had any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other
savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless,
weaponless (though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less,
houseless, language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously

dissonant, whereby they held some rudest kind of communication
among themselves. They lacked both memory and foresight, and were
wholly destitute of government, social institutions, or law or rulership
of any description, except the immediate tyranny of the strongest;
radically untamable, moreover, save that the people of the country
managed to subject a few of the less ferocious and stupid ones to
outdoor servitude among their other cattle. They were beastly in almost
all their attributes, and that to such a degree that the observer, losing
sight of any link betwixt them and manhood, could generally witness
their brutalities without greater horror than at those of some
disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie. And yet, at times, comparing
what were the lowest general traits in his own race with what was
highest in these abominable monsters, he found a ghastly similitude
that half compelled him to recognize them as human brethren.
After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable acquaintance had
fallen under the ban of the Dutch government, and had suffered (this, at
least, being matter of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment, with
confiscation of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, our
minister at the Hague, had just made a peremptory demand of
reimbursement and damages. Meanwhile, since arriving in England on
his way to the United States, he had been providentially led to inquire
into the circumstances of his birth on shipboard, and had discovered
that not himself alone, but another baby, had come into the world
during the same voyage of the prolific vessel, and that there were
almost irrefragable reasons for believing that these two children had
been assigned to the wrong mothers. Many reminiscences of his early
days confirmed him in the idea that his nominal parents were aware of
the exchange. The family to which he felt authorized to attribute his
lineage was that of a nobleman, in the picture-gallery of whose
country-seat (whence, if I mistake not, our adventurous friend had just
returned) he had discovered a portrait bearing a striking resemblance to
himself. As soon as he should have reported the outrageous action of
the Dutch government to President Pierce and the Secretary of State,
and recovered the confiscated property, he purposed to return to
England and establish his claim to the nobleman's title and estate.
I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which, indeed, to do him justice,
have been recorded by scientific societies among the genuine

phenomena of natural history), not as matters of indubitable credence,
but as allowable specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring
and rich embroidery on the coarse texture and dull neutral tints of truth.
The English romance was among the latest communications that he
intrusted to my private ear; and as soon as I heard the first chapter,--so
wonderfully akin to what I might have wrought out of my own head,
not unpractised in such figments,--I began to repent having made
myself responsible for the future nobleman's passage homeward in the
next Collins steamer. Nevertheless,