Elsie Venner CHAPTER IX.The Doctor Orders the Best Sulky
by Oliver Wendell Holmes
(With a Digression on "Hired Help.")
"ABEL! Slip Cassia into the new sulky, and fetch her round."
Abel was Dr. Kittredge's hired man. He was born in New Hampshire, a
queer sort of State, with fat streaks of soil and population where
they breed giants in mind and body, and lean streaks which export
imperfectly nourished young men with promising but neglected
appetites, who may be found in great numbers in all the large towns,
or could be until of late years, when they have been half driven out
of their favorite basement-stories by foreigners, and half coaxed
away from them by California. New Hampshire is in more than one
sense the Switzerland of New England. The "Granite State" being
naturally enough deficient in pudding-stone, its children are apt to
wander southward in search of that deposit,--in the unpetrified
condition.
Abel Stebbins was a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or
mule between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England
serving-man. The Old World has nothing at all like him. He is at
once an emperor and a subordinate. In one hand he holds one five-
millionth part (be the same more or less) of the power that sways the
destinies of the Great Republic. His other hand is in your boot,
which he is about to polish. It is impossible to turn a fellow
citizen whose vote may make his master--say, rather, employer--
Governor or President, or who may be one or both himself, into a
flunky. That article must be imported ready-made from other centres
of civilization. When a New Englander has lost his self-respect as a
citizen and as a man, he is demoralized, and cannot be trusted with
the money to pay for a dinner.
It may be supposed, therefore, that this fractional emperor, this
continent-shaper, finds his position awkward when he goes into
service, and that his employer is apt to find it still more
embarrassing. It is always under protest that the hired man does his
duty. Every act of service is subject to the drawback, "I am as good
as you are." This is so common, at least, as almost to be the rule,
and partly accounts for the rapid disappearance of the indigenous
"domestic" from the basements above mentioned. Paleontologists will
by and by be examining the floors of our kitchens for tracks of the
extinct native species of serving-man. The female of the same race
is fast dying out; indeed, the time is not far distant when all the
varieties of young woman will have vanished from New England, as the
dodo has perished in the Mauritius. The young lady is all that we
shall have left, and the mop and duster of the last Ahnira or Loizy
will be stared at by generations of Bridgets and Noras as that famous
head and foot of the lost bird are stared at in the Ashmolean Museum.
Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man, took the true American view of his
difficult position. He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold
it, he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain. The Doctor, on
his part, treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not
order a gentleman to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he
treated him like a man. Every order was given in courteous terms.
His reasonable privileges were respected as much as if they had been
guaranteed under hand and seal. The Doctor lent him books from his
own library, and gave him all friendly counsel, as if he were a son
or a younger brother.
Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to
"hire out," he could never stand the word "servant," or consider
himself the inferior one of the two high contracting parties. When
he came to live with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss
the old gentleman, if he did not behave according to his notions of
propriety. But he soon found that the Doctor was one of the right
sort, and so determined to keep him. The Doctor soon found, on his
side, that he had a trustworthy, intelligent fellow, who would be
invaluable to him, if he only let him have his own way of doing what
was to be done.
The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet. He was
grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely
smiled, but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in
the evening. He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man
could properly do, would go to the door or "tend table," bought the
provisions for the family,--in short, did almost everything for them
but get their clothing. There was no office in a perfectly appointed
household, from that of steward down to that of stable-boy, which he
did not cheerfully assume. His round of work not consuming all his
energies, he must needs cultivate the Doctor's garden, which he kept
in one perpetual bloom, from the blowing of the first crocus to the
fading of the last dahlia.
This garden was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many
cantos. Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate
could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating
dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible
through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed
in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel,
the plain serving-man. It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect.
He worshipped God according to the strict way of his fathers; but a
florist's Puritanism is always colored by the petals of his flowers,
--and Nature never shows him a black corolla.
He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must
be some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with the
servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two
continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair
to let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky without touching
his features in half-shadow into our background.
The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her
cinnamon color, cassia being one of the professional names for that
spice or drug. She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an
Englishman would perhaps say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare,
with a low forehand, as is common in this breed, but with strong
quarters and flat hocks, well ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair
of lively ears,--a first-rate doctor's beast, would stand until her
harness dropped off her back at the door of a tedious case, and trot
over hill and dale thirty miles in three hours, if there was a child
in the next county with a bean in its windpipe and the Doctor gave
her a hint of the fact. Cassia was not large, but she had a good
deal of action, and was the Doctor's show-horse. There were two.
other animals in his stable: Quassia or Quashy, the black horse, and
Caustic, the old bay, with whom he jogged round the village.
"A long ride to-day?" said Abel, as he brought up the equipage.
"Just out of the village,--that 's all.---There 's a kink in her
mane,--pull it out, will you?"
"Goin' to visit some of the great folks," Abel said to himself."
Wonder who it is."--Then to the Doctor,--"Anybody get sick at
Sprowles's? They say Deacon Soper had a fit, after eatin' some o'
their frozen victuals."
The Doctor smiled. He guessed the Deacon would do well enough. He
was only going to ride over to the Dudley mansion-house.