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- insignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles
they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to
beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in
corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally
characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the
sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual
beggary.
Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by the
added thousands who contended with him against starvation,
nevertheless, somehow he continued to subsist, as those tough old oaks
of the cliffs, which, though hacked at by hail-stones of tempests, and
even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped by
rival trees and fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in
keeping the vital nerve of the tap-root alive. And even towards the
end, in his dismallest December, our veteran could still at intervals
feel a momentary warmth in his topmost boughs. In his Moorfields’
garret, over a handful of reignited cinders (which the night before
might have warmed some lord), cinders raked up from the streets, he
would drive away dolor, by talking with his one only surviving, and now
motherless child—the spared Benjamin of his old age—of the far Canaan
beyond the sea; rehearsing to the lad those well-remembered adventures
among New England hills, and painting scenes of rustling happiness and
plenty, in which the lowliest shared. And here, shadowy as it was, was
the second alleviation hinted of above.
To these tales of the Fortunate Isles of the Free, recounted by one who
had been there, the poor enslaved boy of Moorfields listened, night
after night, as to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. When would his
father take him there? “Some day to come, my boy,” would be the hopeful
response of an unhoping heart. And “Would God it were to-morrow!” would
be the impassioned reply.
In these talks Israel unconsciously sowed the seeds of his eventual
return. For with added years, the boy felt added longing to escape his
entailed misery, by compassing for his father and himself a voyage to
the Promised Land. By his persevering efforts he succeeded at last,
against every obstacle, in gaining credit in the right quarter to his
extraordinary statements. In short, charitably stretching a technical
point, the American Consul finally saw father and son embarked in the
Thames for Boston.
It was the year 1826; half a century since Israel, in early manhood,
had sailed a prisoner in the Tartar frigate from the same port to which
he now was bound. An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he showed
locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old Ocean seemed as a brother.
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