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- after a fashion done accordingly. As to the interspersed ballads and
ditties--at the which, peradventure, thou mayest stare even as Rip van
Winkle, after his resurrection, did at his son--I do assure thee, Dean,
they are essentially but thoughts and conceits of thine own, the product
of seeds which planted and spontaneously developing in me, eventually
effloresced into rhyme.
But to soften the liberty here taken, as well as the licence throughout,
yes, and not without hope to propitiate and even please thee, I have so
contrived matters that thou personated the part here allotted thee at
the special instance of M. de Grandvin; thus in a literary way
associating thee with one whose social companionship thou so
unaffectedly lovest, and whose magnanimous spirit thou art ever fain to
imbibe. Vale!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
JACK GENTIAN
(_Omitted from the final sketch of him._)
True, hardly to-day art thou what formerly thou wast. Thou thyself
sometimes hintest that thy decline has even more than begun. With which
confession for warrant some there be--alas for them! who in private are
not slow to contribute confirmatory words and enlarge thereon.
‘Failing?’ says one. ‘To be sure! And how manifest the signs. In July
you see him parrying the sun with his big white umbrella green-line;
nevertheless, ere the straw hats yet begin to disappear from the
promenade, reassuming his slouched felt sombrero he betakes himself to
the street’s sunny side.’ ‘I have noted that,’ says another; ‘but--will
you believe it?--late I espied him musing on a shaded bench in Madison
Square; in the forenoon it was, too, not far from a seated file of
disreputable nondescripts, non-producers in deplorable attire, plunged
in lugubrious reveries on their doubtless misspent lives. Yes, and
presently he rose, and after looking about him went straight up to a
solitary old vagabond, and standing before him seemed making personal
inquiries of him, and concluded by putting hand in pocket and bestowing
something upon him. Now seems not that an indication of impaired
senses?--deliberately to put a premium on improvidence and
thriftlessness, or worse?’ ‘You go a little too far there,’ observes a
middle-aged merchant and vestryman, the comfortable president of a
charity; ‘the Major was always benevolent, as officially I have reason
to know, always benevolent, but too often, as I hear, unsystematically
so; and this unwisdom may very likely increase with years. But I hardly
thought that he had any way so far decayed in his sense of what is
beseeming in a gentleman whatever his years, as publicly to idle, and in
business hours, and in such vicinity as you mention. Besides, those
Madison Square benches so frequented by the untidy, how can some of them
be otherwise than infected, yes, and with vermin. Dear me,’ in a tone of
real concern, ‘it were almost enough to banish him from respectable
society were it not the esteemed Major and the Dean.’
‘And with a warm deposit at his bank, too; forget not that, my good
sir,’ gravely observed a waggish young berry-brown cynic in yachtsman’s
attire, secretly amused at all this. Whereat the respectable vestryman
with some severity, ‘Sir, that has nothing to do with the matter. This
is America, Christian America, thank God; where, be it what it may,
one’s bank account is of no account whatever in an American’s estimate
of a fellow American.’ Upon which the elders cast a quiet glance toward
the young gentleman, significant of their sense that he had been justly
rebuked; and the rebuked wag, as conscious of the fact, assumed a
contrite demeanour into which, however, he contrived to infuse a twinkle
of irony.
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