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Read Ebook: Vagabond Adventures by Keeler Ralph
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Ebook has 627 lines and 53883 words, and 13 pages
AMONG WHARVES AND CABINS.
AET. 11.
PREFATORY 11
FAMILY MATTERS 14
A FUGITIVE 23
A STORMY TIME 34
A BOY'S PARADISE 47
THE CONTUMELY OF CAPTAINS 54
ALMOST A TRAGEDY 62
TAKEN PRISONER 71
SQUALOR 80
A FINAL TRIUMPH 90
THREE YEARS AS A NEGRO-MINSTREL.
AET. 12-15.
MY FIRST COMPANY 101
I BECOME A BENEFICIARY 108
THE FATE OF THE SERENADERS 116
THE TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF THE "BOOKER TROUPE" 129
THE LAST OF THE "BOOKER TROUPE" 145
"THE MITCHELLS" 156
ON THE FLOATING PALACE 173
WILD LIFE 187
THE PERFORMER SOCIALLY 205
ADIEU TO THE STAGE 214
THE TOUR OF EUROPE FOR 1 IN CURRENCY.
AET. 20-22.
STARTING ON A CATTLE-TRAIN 223
TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS 230
STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS 242
A FIGHT WITH FAMINE 254
THE CONCLUSION 266
AMONG WHARVES AND CABINS.
AET. 11.
PREFATORY.
This little book is intended to contain a plain sketch of my personal history up to the close of my twenty-second year. The autobiographical form is used, not because of any supposed interest of the public in the writer himself, but because there does not seem to be any other way in which a connected account of the adventures can well be given.
No one, I think, can be more sensible than I am that my story is nothing if not true. Hume has wisely said, "A man cannot speak long of himself without vanity." I should like to be allowed to add that I have never known or conceived of a person--except probably the reader and writer of these pages--who could talk five minutes about himself without--lying. That is, to be sure, reducing the thing to mathematical exactness. An overestimating smile, or an underestimating shrug of the shoulders, or a tone of the voice even, will always--though sometimes inadvertently--
"leave it still unsaid in part, Or say it in too great excess."
While this is not so applicable to written history, still in the face of hyperbolic and bathetic possibilities I owe it to myself to premise that I am going to be more than ordinarily truthful in this autobiography.
And there is certainly some merit in telling the truth, for it is hard work when one is his own hero, and not what is sometimes termed a moral hero at that. I can too, I may add, claim this single merit from the start, with a meekness almost bordering on honesty; since it happens that I am forced to be veracious by the fact that there are scores of people yet in the prime of life who are cognizant of the main events of the ensuing narrative.
FAMILY MATTERS.
It may be laid down as a general principle, to start with, that a boy had better not run away from home. Good and pious reasons are not wanting, and might be here adduced, in substantiation of this general principle. Some trite moralizing might be done just now, in a grave statement that an urchin needs not run away into the world after its troubles, since they will come running to him soon enough, and that a home is the last fortress weary men build against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. Why, therefore, it may be asked, with overwhelming conviction to the adult,--who, by the way, is not supposed to be one of the congregation of the present preaching,--why, therefore, should the juvenile fugitive hasten unduly to leave what all the effort of his after life will be to regain?
Thus having done my duty by any boy of a restless disposition who may chance to read these memoirs and be influenced by my vagrant example, I proceed to state that I ran away from home at the mature age of eleven, and have not been back, to stay over night, from that remote period to this present writing.
It is due, however, to both of us,--the home and myself,--to observe that it was not a very attractive hearth that I ran from. My father and mother were dead, and no brothers or sisters of mine were there,--nothing at all, indeed, like affection, but something very much like its opposite. On the whole, I think, under exactly the same circumstances, I would run away again.
When, however, a great truth has once been discovered, it is always easy to find many paths of proof converging toward it. When Kepler, for instance, by some strange guess or inspiration, hit upon the colossal fact that the planets move in elliptical orbits, it was comparatively an easy thing,--or should have been, to make this scientific parallel correct,--to come at half a dozen proofs of it in the simple properties of the conic sections. Thus, too, fortunately for us, the respectability of our family can be proved in many ways, and even, like Kepler's Laws, by mathematics itself. Nay, our proofs can be, and indeed are, established by common arithmetical notation and numeration; because the members of our family are generally rich.
This is manifestly an unusual advantage for an autobiographer, since, as is well known, he almost invariably comes of "poor but honest parents." And there is no little pride mixed with the candor with which I boast, that I am to this day, pecuniarily, the poorest of my race.
The devious course of my wanderings, as a youthful negro-minstrel and as the European tourist of one hundred and eighty-one paper dollars, left me in the early part of my life no time or inclination to look into such commonplaces as the matters of my inheritance. It was but a week ago that I rode over the broad Ohio prairie where I was born, and passed by the pleasant farms which, with the broad prairie, were the patrimony left to me,--or, I should say, to the kind gentlemen who administered them for me. That property has never been any care to me. It was so thoroughly administered during my minority that I have never since had the trouble even of collecting rents.
Now there may be people, of a recklessly imaginative type, who suppose it would excite a pleasurable thrill to ride thus over a great prairie which bears one's own name, but no more tangible emolument for the quondam heir; and there may be people of so aspiring mental constitutions as to think it a grateful, rollicking piece of vanity to pass unrecognized through a town which was once sold by one's own administrator for fifty-two dollars: but I am free to confess that I have endured these honors within the past week, and have carried nothing away with me, in the matter of gratification or sentiment, but a dash of the sadness which has settled about the wreck and ruin of the old homestead.
Nothing seems to thrive there but the cold-spring at the foot of the sand-ridge, and the poplar and weeping-willow which grow above it. These trees had and have for me a plaintive undertone to the rhythm of their rustling leaves which I do not hope to make others hear. The willow was the whip with which a friend rode twenty miles from the county-seat to visit my father, in the early times, and it was stuck in the ground there, on the margin of the spring, by my little sister; the poplar was planted beside it by my mother. They are both tall trees now, and a sprig from one of them has been growing a long time over the graves of father, mother, and sister.
I was sent thither down Lake Erie from Toledo, on board the old steamer Indiana, Captain Appleby commanding. Many are yet living, I suppose, who will remember this craft,--the first of the kind upon which I ever embarked. For my part, at least, I think I shall forget everything else before I forget the noble sheet-iron Indian who stood astride of her solitary smoke-stack, and bent his bow and pointed his arrow at the lake breezes. A meagre brass-band, too, as was the generous custom of those days, was attached to the steamer, and discoursed thin, gratuitous music during the voyage. To a more sophisticated gaze the attenuated, besmoked brave of my juvenile rapture would, alas! have looked more like an indifferent silhouette plastered belligerently against the sky; but it was the first piece of statuary I ever saw, as that execrable brass band made the first concert I ever heard, and the Apollo Belvedere, at Rome, or Strauss's own orchestra, led by himself, at Vienna, has never since excited in me such honest thrills of admiration. It was many and many a month before that swarthy sheet-iron Indian ceased occasionally to sail at night through a mingled cloud of coal-smoke and brass music, in my boyish dreams.
The lake was remarkably calm, and the entire passage to Buffalo was for years one of my pleasantest memories. On that first voyage, undoubtedly, was engendered the early love of steamboats, the fruit of which ripened soon afterward into the adventures I am about to relate. Nothing, I am convinced, but this boundless affection for the species of craft in question enables me to remember, as shall be seen directly, the names of all the old lake steamers I had to do with in my boyhood.
And this, by the way, is no small internal evidence of the truth of what follows. But I should not have called your attention to the fact, and I should not have been forced to parade my conscientiousness here again, if I had not come already to the most embarrassing period in all my history.
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