Chapter 11

by Herman Melville

　　ONLY A PAGE OR SO.The transaction concluded, the two still remained seated, falling intofamiliar conversation, by degrees verging into that confidential sort ofsympathetic silence, the last refinement and luxury of unaffected goodfeeling. A kind of social superstition, to suppose that to be trulyfriendly one must be saying friendly words all the time, any more thanbe doing friendly deeds continually. True friendliness, like truereligion, being in a sort independent of works.At length, the good merchant, whose eyes were pensively resting upon thegay tables in the distance, broke the spell by saying that, from thespectacle before them, one would little divine what other quarters ofthe boat might reveal. He cited the case, accidentally encountered butan hour or two previous, of a shrunken old miser, clad in shrunken oldmoleskin, stretched out, an invalid, on a bare plank in the emigrants'quarters, eagerly clinging to life and lucre, though the one was gaspingfor outlet, and about the other he was in torment lest death, or someother unprincipled cut-purse, should be the means of his losing it; bylike feeble tenure holding lungs and pouch, and yet knowing anddesiring nothing beyond them; for his mind, never raised above mould,was now all but mouldered away. To such a degree, indeed, that he had notrust in anything, not even in his parchment bonds, which, the better topreserve from the tooth of time, he had packed down and sealed up, likebrandy peaches, in a tin case of spirits.The worthy man proceeded at some length with these dispiritingparticulars. Nor would his cheery companion wholly deny that there mightbe a point of view from which such a case of extreme want of confidencemight, to the humane mind, present features not altogether welcome aswine and olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatoryconsiderations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task forevincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be asomewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare'swords, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way wasnot to be condemned.The other was not disposed to question the justice of Shakespeare'sthought, but would hardly admit the propriety of the application in thisinstance, much less of the comment. So, after some further temperatediscussion of the pitiable miser, finding that they could not entirelyharmonize, the merchant cited another case, that of the negro cripple.But his companion suggested whether the alleged hardships of thatalleged unfortunate might not exist more in the pity of the observerthan the experience of the observed. He knew nothing about the cripple,nor had seen him, but ventured to surmise that, could one but get at thereal state of his heart, he would be found about as happy as most men,if not, in fact, full as happy as the speaker himself. He added thatnegroes were by nature a singularly cheerful race; no one ever heard ofa native-born African Zimmermann or Torquemada; that even from religionthey dismissed all gloom; in their hilarious rituals they danced, so tospeak, and, as it were, cut pigeon-wings. It was improbable, therefore,that a negro, however reduced to his stumps by fortune, could be everthrown off the legs of a laughing philosophy.Foiled again, the good merchant would not desist, but ventured still athird case, that of the man with the weed, whose story, as narrated byhimself, and confirmed and filled out by the testimony of a certain manin a gray coat, whom the merchant had afterwards met, he now proceededto give; and that, without holding back those particulars disclosed bythe second informant, but which delicacy had prevented the unfortunateman himself from touching upon.But as the good merchant could, perhaps, do better justice to the manthan the story, we shall venture to tell it in other words than his,though not to any other effect.