Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter V
Chapter V.
With youth, good looks, an English education, the manners and heart of a gentleman, and the Puritan Colonel’s sword, Edwin Brothertoft went to New York to open his oyster.
“Hushed in grim repose,” the world, the oyster, lay with its lips tight locked against the brutal oyster-knives of blackguards.
But at our young blade’s first tap on the shell the oyster gaped.
How pleasant it is to a youth when his oyster gapes, and indolently offers him the succulent morsel within! His oyster is always uneasy at the hinge until it is generously open for an Edwin Brothertoft. He was that fine rarity, a thorough gentleman.
How rare they were then, and are now! rare as great poets, great painters, great seers, great doers. The fingers of my right hand seem too many when I begin to number off the thorough gentlemen of my own day. But were I ten times Briareus, did another hand sprout whenever I wanted a new tally, I never could count the thorough blackguards among my contemporaries. So much shade does it take to make sunshine!
The Colonial world gave attention when it heard a young Brothertoft was about to descend into the arena and wrestle for life.
“So that is he!” was the cry. “How handsome! how graceful! how chivalrous! how brilliant! what a bow he makes! his manners disarm every antagonist! He will not take advantages, they say. He is generous, and has visionary notions about fair play. He thinks a beaten foe should not be trampled on or scalped. He thinks enemies ought to be forgiven, and friends to be sustained, through thick and thin. Well, well! such fancies are venial errors in a young aristocrat.”
The city received him as kindly as it does the same manner of youth now, when its population has increased one hundred-fold.
The chief lawyer said, “Come into my office and copy papers, at a pound a week, and in a year you will be a Hortensius.”
The chief merchant said, “If you like the smell of rum, codfish, and beaver-skins, take a place in my counting-house, at a hundred pounds a year, and correct the spelling of my letters. I promise nothing; but I may want a partner by and by.”
The Governor of the Province and Mayor of the town, dullards, as officials are wont to be, each took the young gentleman aside, and said, “Here is a proclamation of mine! Now punctuate it, and put in some fine writing, — about Greece and Rome, you know, and Magna Charta, with a Latin quotation or two, — and I will find, you a fat job and plenty of pickings!”
The Livingston party proposed to him to go to the Assembly on their votes and fight the De Lanceys. The De Lanceys, in turn, said, “Represent us, and talk those radical Livingstons down.”
Lord London, Commander-in-Chief, swore that Brothertoft was the only gentleman he had seen among the dashed Provincials. “And,” says he, “you speak Iroquois and French, and all that sort of thing. Be my secretary, and I’ll get you a commission in the army, — dashed if I don’t!”
King’s College, just established, to increase the baker’s dozen of educated men in the Colony, offered the young Oxonian a professorship, Metaphysics, Mathematics, Languages, Belles-Lettres, — in fact whatever he pleased; none of the Trustees knew them apart.
Indeed, the Provincial world prostrated itself before this fortunate youth and prayed him, —
“Be the representative Young American! Convince our unappreciative Mother England:
- “That we do not talk through our noses;
- “That our language is not lingo;
- “That we are not slaves of the Almighty Wampum;
- “That we can produce the Finest Gentlemen, as well as the Biggest Lakes, the Longest Rivers, the Vastest Antres, and the Widest Wildernesses in the World.”
What an oyster-bed, indeed, surrounded our hero!
Alas for him! He presently found a Pearl.