When I, at the unripe age of seventeen, left my father’s poor cottage-house on Tom’s Run and threw myself into life’s struggle, I sought Pittsburg as a nearest promising arena of effort. I had a small place at a smaller wage as a sort of office boy and porter for a down-town establishment devoted to a commerce of iron; but as I came early to cut my connection with that hard emporium we will not dwell thereon.
I have already told you how by nature I was a gambler. I had inborn hankerings after games of chance, and it was scant time, indeed, before I found myself on terms of more or less near acquaintance with every card sharper of the city. And I became under their improper tutelage an expert cheat myself. At short cards and such devices as faro and roulette, I soon knew each devious turn and was in excellent qualification to pillage my way to eminence if not to riches among the nimble-fingered nobility of the green tables into whose midst I had coaxed or crowded my way. Vast was my ambition to soar as a blackleg, and no student at his honest books burned with more fire to succeed. I became initiate into such mysteries as the “bug,” the “punch,” the “hold-out”; I could deal “double” or “from the bottom;” was a past master of those dubious faro inventions, the “snake,” the “end squeeze,” and the “balance top;” could “put back” with a clean deftness that might deceive even my masters in evil doing, and with an eye like a hawk read a deck of marked cards with the same easy certainty that I read the alphabet. It was a common compliment to my guilty merit that no better craftsman at crooked play ever walked in Diamond Alley.
No, as I’ve heretofore explained, there dawned a day when I gave up card gambling and played no more. It is now twenty years since I wagered so much as a two-bit piece in any game other than the Wall Street game of stocks. And yet it was no moral arousal that drew me from roulette, from farobank and from draw poker. I merely awoke to the truth that the greatest simpleton of cards is the professional gambler himself; and with that I turned my back on the whole scurvy business and quit the dens for the exchange. And with no purpose to preach, I say openly and with a fullest freedom that the game of stock speculation is as replete of traps and pitfalls, and of as false and blackleg character as any worst game of iniquitous faro that is dealt with trimmed and sanded deck from a dishonest box. As an arena of morals the stock exchange presents no conscious improvement beyond what is offered by the veriest dead-fall ever made elate with those two rings at the bell which tell the waiting inmates that some “steerer” is on the threshold with rustic victim to be fleeced. I once read that the homestead of Captain Kidd, the pirate, stood two centuries ago on that plot of ground now covered by the New York Stock Exchange; and I confess to a smile when I reflected how the spirit of immortal rapine would seem to hover over the place. The exchange is a fit successor to the habitat of that wild freebooter who died and dried in execution dock when long ago the Stuart Anne was queen.
During those earlier months in Pittsburg, I was not permitted by my father—who had much control of me, even unto the day of his death—to altogether abandon Tom’s Run, and the good, grimy miner folk, its inhabitants. My week’s holiday began with each Saturday’s noon; from that hour until Monday morning I was free; and thus, obeying my father’s behests, Saturday evening and Sunday, I was bound to pass beneath my parents’ roof.
It was during one of these visits home when I first cheated at cards—memorable event!—and it was on another that my roguery was discovered and my father struck that blow.
As already stated, my father was of Welsh extraction. It was no less the fact, however, that his original stock was Irish; his grandfather—I believe it to have been that venerable and I trust respected gentleman—coming to Wales from somewhere on the banks of the Blackwater. And my father, excellent man! had vast pride in his Irish lineage and grew never so angry, particularly if a bit heated of his Saturday evening cups, as when one spoke of him as offshoot of the rocky land of leeks and saintly David.
“What!” he would cry; “because I was born in Wales, do you take me for an onion-eating Welshman? Man, I’m Irish and don’t make that mistake again!”
The vigor wherewith his mine-hardened fist smote the table as conclusion to this, carried such weight of emphasis that no man was ever found to fall a second time into the error.
For myself, the question whether my ancestors were Welsh or Irish held little interest. I was looking forward not backward, and a hot avarice to hunt dollars drove from my bosom the last trace of concern touching a genealogy. I would sooner have one year’s run of uninterrupted luck at a gambling table than to know myself a direct descendant of the Plantagenets. Not so my dear old father; to the hour when death closed his eyes—already sightless for ten years—burned out with a blast, they were—he ceased not to regale me with tales of that noble line of dauntless Irish from whom we drew our blood. For the ten years following the destruction of his eyes by powder, I saw much of my father, for I established him at a little country tavern near enough to the ocean to hear the surf and smell the salt breath of it, and two or three times a week I made shift to get down where he was. And whether my stay was for an hour or for a night—as on Sunday this latter came often to be the chance—he made his pedigree, or what he dreamed was such, the proud burden of his conversation.
Brian Boru, I remember, was an original wellhead of our family. My father was tireless in his settings forth of this hero king of Munster; nor did he fail at the close of his story to curse the assassin who struck down Boru at Clontarf. Sometimes to tease him, I’d argue what must have been the weak and primitive inconsequence of the royal Boru. I’d suggest that by the sheer narrowness and savagery of the hour wherein that monarch lived, he could have been nothing more royal than the mere king of a kale patch, and probably wore less of authority with still less of revenue and reverence than belong commonly with any district leader of Tammany Hall.
At these base doubtings my parent’s wrath would mount. He would wax vivid with a picture of the majesty and grandeur of the great Boru; and of the halls wherein he fed and housed a thousand knights compared with whom in riches, magnificence, and chivalrous feats those warriors who came about King Arthur’s round table showed paltry, mean and low. To crown narration he would ascribe to Boru credit as a world’s first law giver and hail him author of the “Code Brian.”
“Shure!” he would say; “he called his scholars and his penmen about him and he made them write down as the wor-rds fell from th’ mouth av him th’ whole of th’ Code Brian; an’ this in tur-rn was a model of th’ Code Napoleon that makes th’ law av Fr-rance to-day.”
It was in vain I pointed out that Napoleon’s Code found its roots and as well, its models, in the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian—I had learned so much Latin from Father Glennon—and that nowhere in the English law was the Code Brian, as he called it, so much as adverted to.
“An’ that’s th’ Sassenach jealousy av thim!” he would say. “An’ who was this Justinian? Who, indade, but a thievin’ Roman imp’ror who shtole his laws from King Boru just as th’ Dagoes now are shtealin’ th’ jobs at th’ mines from th’ Irish an’ Welsh lads to whom they belong av r-rights.”
After this I said no more; I did not explain that Justinian and his Pandects and the others of his grand body of civil law were in existence five centuries before the martyred Boru was born. That discovery would have served no purpose beyond my parent’s exasperation and earned for myself as well as the world’s historians naught save a cataract of hard words.
You marvel, perhaps, why I dwell with such length on the memory of my father—a poor, blind, ignorant miner of coal! I loved the old man; and to this day when my hair, too, is gray and when I may win my wealth and count my wealth and keep my wealth with any of the land, I recall him as the only man for whom I ever felt either love or confidence or real respect.
Yes; I heard much of the blood of the truculent yet wise Boru; also of younger ancestors who fought for the Stuarts against Cromwell, against Monmouth, against William; and later in both the “Fifteen” and in the “Forty-five.” Peculiarly was I made to know of my mother’s close connection by blood with the house of that brave Sarsfield “who,” as my father explained, “fairly withstud th’ Dootchman at th’ Boyne; an’ later made him quit befure th’ walls av Limerick.” There was one tradition of the renowned Sarsfield which the old gentleman was peculiarly prone to relate, and on the head of him who distrusted the legend there was sure to fall a storm. That particular tale concerned the Irish soldier and the sword of Wallace wight.
“Thish William Wallace,” m............