from A New Home–Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) — Chapter XLI
from A New Home–Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839) — Chapter XLIII
from A New Home–Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839)
by Caroline Kirkland (AKA Mary Clavers)
CHAPTER XLIII.
On ne doit pas juger du merite d’un homme par ses grandes qualités, mais par l’usage qu’il en sait faire. Rochefoucault.
Des mots longs d’une toise, De grands mots qui tiendroint d’ici jusqu’ à Pontoise. Racine— Les Plaideurs.
But what he chiefly valued himself on, was his knowledge of metaphysics, in which, having once upon a time ventured too deeply, he came well nigh being smothered in a slough of unintelligible learning. Irving—Knickerbocker.
Mr. Simeon Jenkins entered at an early stage of his career upon the arena of public life, having been employed by his honored mother to dispose of a basket full of hard boiled eggs, on election day, before he was eight years old. He often dwells with much unction upon this his deb#t; and declares that even at that dawning period he had cut his eye-teeth.
‘There wasn’t a feller there,’ Mr. Jenkins often says, ‘that could find out which side I was on, for all they tried hard enough. They thought I was soft, but I let’em know I was as much baked as any on’em. ‘Be you a dimocrat?’ says one. Buy some eggs and I’ll tell ye, says I; and by the time he’d bought his eggs, I could tell well enough which side he belonged to, and I’d hand him out a ticket according, for I had blue ones in one end o’ my basket, and white ones in the other, and when night come, and I got off the stump to go home, I had eighteen shillin and four-pence in my pocket.’
From this auspicious commencement may be date Mr. Jenkins’s glowing desire to serve the public. Each successive election-day saw him at his post. From eggs he advanced to pies, from pies to almanacs, whiskey, powder and shot, foot-balls, playing-cards, and at length, for ambition ever ‘did grow with what it fed on,’ he brought into the field a large turkey, which was tied to a post and stoned to death at twenty-five cents a throw. By this time the still youthful aspirant had become quite the man of the world; could smoke twenty-four segars per diem, if any body else would pay for them; play cards in old Hurler’s shop from noon till day-break, and rise winner; and all this with suitable trimmings of gin and hard words. But he never lost sight of the main-chance. He had made up his mind to serve his country, and he was all this time convincing his fellow-citizens of the disinterested purity of his sentiments.
‘Patriotism!’ he would say, ‘patriotism is the thing! any man that’s too proud to serve his country aint fit to live. Some thinks so much o’ themselves, that if they can’t have jist what they think they’re fit for, they won’t take nothin; but for my part, I call myself an American citizen; and any office that’s in the gift o’ the people will suit me. I’m up to any thing. And as there aint no other man about here,—no suitable man, I mean,—that’s got a horse, why I’d be w