The Merman and The Figure-Head
9781465654311
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Now I am not going to tell you a long story about Master Torrey, though I might do so if I had not a tale to tell you about something else—namely, this sea-nymph and the merman who figure at the head of this story. I was once told by a schoolmaster that in writing there was “nothing so important as a strict adherence to facts;” “fax” he called them. I treasured up this valuable precept in the inmost recesses of my mind, and I mean to adhere to facts if I possibly can. But I can’t adhere to facts till I get them, and to do that I don’t see but I shall have to tell you a little about Master Isaac Torrey, merchant of Salem, who was the means of putting this wonderful figure-head in the merman’s way. He was a merchant of Salem when Salem was a centre of trade, and sent many a brave ship to the Indies and the Mediterranean. He was thirty-four years old, and looked ten years younger. He was a man inclined to extravagance and luxury. He wore the handsomest waistcoats and the finest lace of any one in town. He had been educated in the gravest, strictest fashion of those grave days. His parents would have been horrified if they had found him reading a novel or a play, but they urged him on to study Virgil and Homer. Now if you will promise, my young readers, never to tell your respected instructors, I will let you into a secret. The truth is that the poems of Virgil and Homer are all full of stories as interesting and charming as any boy or girl could desire. But this is a circumstance which most school-teachers make it their first object in life to conceal, and they generally succeed so well that their pupils for the most part go through their whole course of education and never discover that their Virgils and Homers are anything but stupid school-books—a sort of intellectual catacombs enshrining the dryest bones of grammar and parsing. Now and then, however, a boy or girl finds out that there is food for the imagination in classic poetry. Such had been the case with Isaac Torrey, and the verses that he read with his tutor took such a hold upon him that he became what some of his friends called “half a heathen.” Not but that an acquaintance with the classics was thought becoming, nay, essential, to the character of a gentleman. In the speeches and writings of those days a due seasoning of allusions to the old gods and a sprinkling of Latin quotations was considered the proper thing. But this learning was rather looked upon as solid and ponderous furniture for the mind—an instrument of mental discipline. Fancy, imagination, amusement, were ideas much too light and frivolous to be connected with anything so grave, solid and respectable as the intellectual drill for which alone Latin and Greek were intended. So when Isaac Torrey talked about the old gods as if they had been real existences, and spoke of Achilles, Hector and Andromache as though they had been live creatures, he rather startled the excellent young divinity student who was his tutor. Once upon a time his father detecting a smell of burning followed it up to Isaac’s room, where he found his son in the midst of a cloud of blue smoke. He asked the cause, and was told that in order to procure fair weather for the next day’s fishing excursion he (Isaac) had been sacrificing a paper bull to Jupiter.
