TIM SWALLOW-WHISTLE, THE TAILOR;
OR,
"EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY."
Tim Swallow-whistle, the tailor, lived at Horncastle, a thriving little agricultural town in the centre of Lincolnshire, and now well-known even to the verge of Europe for its prodigious yearly horse fair, to which Russ and Pruss, Netherlander and Austrian, Frenchman, Swiss, and Italian, with even, at times, the turban'd Turk, may be beheld flocking to purchase from the rare show of steeds: "but let that pass!" Tim was not one of your fashionable tailors, it is true, but he was reckoned an "uncommon neat hand" at his trade. Indeed, old Cocky Davy, who was a very emperor among the Lincolnshire tailors, always declared Tim to be the cleverest apprentice that ever received his indentures at his hands. Old Cocky—he was so termed on account of the particular loftiness of his carriage—Old Cocky had one especial maxim; it was, "Strike your needle dead, you dog; and make your thread cry 'twang!'"—and no one apprentice that ever sat upon Davy's shop-board so fully gratified his master by the gallant and complete style in which he fulfilled this maxim, as did Tim Swallow-whistle. Cocky Davy was often heard to say—ay, and to swear it too, when in his cups—that it did his heart good to see the masterly manner in which Tim used to strike the cloth. And then, for finishing a button-hole, "Good heavens!"—Cocky Davy would declare in the White Swan parlour, when the clock was on the stroke of twelve—"why, Tim could turn the thing off his fingers with every cast of the thread as regular and exact as if he had worked it by geometry;" and then Cocky would thump his pewter tankard with vehement force upon mine host's white wooden table, and call to have it refilled for the last time that night.
It may easily be guessed that Tim Swallow-whistle was not only a clever hand, but a hard-working lad, while an apprentice, or otherwise he would not have worn such excelling commendations from a master who was quite as frequently found in the parlour of the White Swan as in his own shop, and therefore found it of incalculable value to himself to possess an apprentice who would work hard while his master played. Now, as a loitering apprentice usually makes a worthless, idle man, so a diligent lad is almost invariably found to carry his early habits of industry into mature life, and to make a stirring and prosperous citizen, unless some untoward circumstances arise to bereave him of the power for exertion, or to deprive him of its legitimate and well-deserved fruits.
Tim Swallow-whistle did not belie the promise of his youth. He was full forty years old when the incidents occurred we are about to relate; and up to that time, as he used himself to say, "Nobody could ever say he had an idle bone in his skin." But, let a man be as industrious and well-disposed as he may, ten to one but somebody or other in this crooked world will be found determined to find fault with him. So it was with Tim: he "minded his own business" most emphatically; for he was regularly found on his shop-board every morning, winter or summer, as the clock struck five; and he seldom quitted it before seven at night, unless on some special holiday occasion: he "paid every one their own"—that is to say, he kept no scores, either at the baker's, the butcher's, the grocer's, or at the alehouse: he had a whole coat on his back—though there was, here and there, a patch in it of his own neatest style of repair: and, to conclude the catalogue of his competency in his own language, "he had always something to eat when other folk went to dinner."
Tim contrived to keep up to this standard of comparative comfort, too, in spite of a breeding wife, who had stocked his cottage with nine "small children," though he was not married till he was thirty. With so many excellences, who could have thought that any one would be bad enough to attempt to mar Tim's well-earned happiness? But the world is, what we have just termed it, a crooked world; and so poor Tim was doomed to meet with undeserved annoyance.
Just opposite Tim's little shop lived a great professor of sour-godliness. Unluckily, he was not only of the same homely trade with Tim, but was enabled to hold up his head more loftily among his fellow-tradesmen, by reason that a maiden aunt happened to die and leave him a neat little freehold that brought him in 50l. a-year, in addition to his earnings by the shears, needle, and thimble. Jedediah Prim—for so was this fortunate tailor called—was adjudged by his neighbours to be ill-disposed towards his poorer brother snip, solely because Tim had always sufficient employ for himself and an apprentice, whereas Prim's manners were so uninviting, and his character so mean, that he barely ensured occupation for his own solitary needle.
Since Prim, at heart, was a worshipper of Mammon above all other gods, it was not at all wonderful that he felt envious at his neighbour's trade. Nevertheless, Prim ever affected the greatest scorn of these neighbourly charges of avarice and envy, and most piously averred that he had no other distaste to "the man over the way," as he called Tim, than that which was created in his soul by "the ungodly man's profaneness!" "He is every day selling his soul to Satan by the whistling of the Evil One's own tunes!" was Prim's godly lamentation over the evil ways of his neighbour. This was a severe hit at the only kind of recreation in which poor Tim indulged. He had been a hard whistler, as well as a hard worker, from a lad; and from the peculiarity of his way of whistling, which very much resembled an endless twitter, Tim caught the curious soubriquet of "Swallow-whistle" among his fellow-apprentices at Cocky Davy's, and kept it to his dying day.
Now, whistling or twittering are but very humble kinds of melody, but I care not however lowly or merely imitative may be the degree of the divine faculty of music that a human creature may be endowed with, I'll warrant him, there will be something like real nobility of heart or mind about him, let his vocation and whereabouts in this ill-arranged world be what it may. And truly, so much might, without hesitancy, be affirmed of twittering Tim the tailor of Horncastle. With all his knowledge of the ill-will borne towards him by Prim the puritan, Tim Swallow-whistle would have sprung off his shop-board like a bounding fawn, and with a bounding heart of joy, to have done the envious Jedediah a good turn. Yet, with all his bountiful good-nature, Tim possessed a fair share of shrewdness. He had lived long enough to learn that over-weening envy usually overshoots its mark, and most severely punishes its own voluntary slaves. Thus, of all men in the little town of Horncastle, Tim Swallow-whistle was least disturbed at what every one talked of as a scandalous matter, namely, the envy and malevolence of Jedediah Prim, the religious tailor. "Never mind; 'every dog has his day!'" Tim would reply, and twitter away again, to every successive tale his neighbours brought him, about what Prim said, and what Prim did: for you never knew of two neighbours being "at outs" in your life, but a host of voluntary messengers, on either side, could be found to fetch and carry fuel to maintain the heat between them.
What moved Tim Swallow-whistle more than any other event in his life was the fact of Prim the puritan being made overseer of the poor, and throwing Tim's poor old grandmother entirely upon his maintenance. The aged woman had nearly reached a century of years; and, at the mere cost of half-a-crown per week to the parish, was nursed in her second childhood by Tim's widowed mother, who lived in a little cottage, hard by her son. Tim had willingly, nay eagerly, contributed to supply the wants of the two aged women through all the difficulties felt by a man situated as he was, with an increasing family, for there was not a grain of sordidness in his noble nature; but it was no joke for poor Tim to have the entire weight of the burthen cast upon him. For several days after the announcement was formally made him—and pious Prim took care to have the devilish satisfaction of performing the annoying business himself—poor Tim suspended his twittering, and "struck his needle dead" in a savage mood of reflection. Tim's reflection ended, however, in the way that, with such a heart, it was natural for it to end,—in the manly resolve that he would work the very skin off his fingers, and go without a meal every day in the week, rather than permit his old grandmother to want. "Every dog has his day!" echoed Tim, recovering his wonted elasticity of spirits; "Jedediah Prim will not be overseer of the poor for the parish of Horncastle to all eternity;" and away he burst into a mellifluous twitter that floated, in the form of "Merrily danced the Quakers," gaily across the street, and entered into the very "porches of the ears" of Prim the puritan, much to the deadly annoyance of that heart of envy. During the continuance of Tim's overture for the day, there entered into his cottage a travelling tinker, who besought leave of the tailor to light his pipe.
"Ay, lad, and welcome," blithely answered Tim; and away he went twittering his old burthen of "Merrily danced the Quakers."
"Marry, good faith, maister!" said the tinker, folding his arms and looking as if he felt inclined for 'a bit of chat,' as they say in Lincolnshire; "why, that was the very tune my poor old mother was so fond of! I can't help feeling fond on't, d'ye know, maister; for my mother was a good mother to me—the Lord rest her soul!" and the hardy tinker's voice faltered in a way that showed his heart had its tender place, notwithstanding his rough exterior. Tim's twittering was arrested; the tinker had touched him on a tender chord, and his whole heart vibrated, sympathetically.
"Sit you down a while, friend, and smoke your pipe quietly," said Tim, pointing to a seat near his shop-board; "I'll tell our Becky to get out the copper kettle for you to mend as soon as she comes down stairs; we haven't used it these three years for want o'mending."
"And times have been too hard for you to have it mended before, I reckon, maister," said the tinker.
"Nay, as for that," replied Tim with a smile and a shake of the head, "they're not much mended now; I find it to be only a cross-grained world, I'll assure you, friend; but I always make it a maxim to take things as easy as I can; for, as I always say, 'Every dog has his day,' and among the rest of the poor dogs one doesn't know but one's own turn to have a day may come yet."
"Right, maister, right!" ejaculated the tinker, drawing a full breath at his pipe, and puffing out a full cloud of satisfaction; "there's sartainly a comfort in thinking so: yet it isn't a pleasing thing to be striving to do one's best, and to pay every one their own, and yet to be trampled upon, as poor folks too commonly are in this world."
"Very true, friend," chimed in Tim Swallow-whistle, assenting readily to a remark that reminded him so strikingly of his own experience; "very true: there's nothing that gives an honest man any uneasiness equal to that: for my part, I've no wish to be richer or loftier than my neighbours; but I must say the man must feel it hard who's ill-used, after striving to do the best he can for everybody as well as himself."
"Well, you see, maister, it shows that what the Scripter says is true, 'that money is the root of all evil,'" rejoined the tinker; "for you'll always observe that a man begins to trample upon you as soon as he happens to begin to get on in the world a little better than yourself."
"'Tis too often the case, friend," said Tim, not fully approving of the tinker's sweeping remark, but still feeling the forceful truth of it in his own case; "and yet I can't understand how it should be so."
"At any rate, maister," said the tinker, interrupting the other, "one can understand one thing: that if things could be put more on a level in this world, there wouldn't be such foul dealings as we see now; for if one man wasn't allowed to be so much stronger in the pocket than another, all men would be more likely to gain respect; all this bowing and scraping of poor to rich would be at an end, I mean."
"Why, yes," interjected the tailor, stopping his needle when it was but half way through the cloth and feeling a disposition to be abstracted; "that's true enough—true enough, friend: but for my part I don't see how the vast difference between the rich and the poor is to be remedied. You see it's the nat'ral course of things: some folk are idle, and others unlucky; while money makes money, when a man once gets hold on't—that is, if he tries to turn it over, and takes care of it as it gathers."
"Just so, maister; that's all very true as far as it goes," rejoined the tinker; "but I think that's not exactly what the parson calls the end o' the chapter. I'm but a plain man, and no great scholar; but I always take Brimmijem and Sheffield in my yearly round, and one hears a bit o' long headed-talk, maister, now and then in such places: you'll excuse me if I tell you a little of what I think about these things."
"Prythee, don't mention that, in that sort of a way," said Tim, hastily; "I'll assure thee that there's nobody likes a man that speaks his mind better than I do."
"Thank ye, maister," continued the tinker; "then I'll tell you what I think: I think there ought to be a law to compel folk that make money so fast to use it in making their fellow-creatures happy, instead of spending it on finery and foolishness."
"Why, you would make folks kind and good by law then, friend! Hum! I can't see," disputed Tim, again suspending his needle, and looking very metaphysically upon the corner pane of his shop window, "I can't see how that scheme would be likely to succeed. Excuse me, friend, but I think you are talking about may-be's that'll never fly."
"Look ye, now, maister," resumed the tinker, laying down his pipe, raising his hand with the fore-finger pointed, and looking greatly in earnest to substantiate his theory; "this is my point: God Almighty made us all of the same flesh and blood, not some of china and the rest of brown marl: he made us to live like brothers; and if one had better wit than the rest, it was his duty to use it for the benefit of all his brothers and sisters, as well as for his own benefit. So, if a man by money makes money, since he can't do that without the help of other folk, I maintain that that money ought to be distributed, and all that it will buy, for the benefit of all, but more especially for the comfort of those whom the money-maker made use of in making his money."
"You mean, if I understand you," said Tim Swallow-whistle, looking as much like a logician as he knew how, in order to keep the tinker in countenance—"you mean, my friend, that when men with full pockets employ men with empty ones, and by the labour of the poor make their full pockets flow over, there ought to be a fairer division of the profit."
"That's exactly what I mean, maister," answered the tinker, smiling with enthusiasm, "you have hit the nail on the head, completely: I think there ought to be a law, ay, and I think it's more needed than any other law, to prevent the rich from employing the poor just for what wages they please, and to so order things that every man who makes money by other men's labour shall be compelled to give his workmen such a share of his profits as will enable them and their wives and children to live in decency and comfort, instead of rich men being allowed to grow richer and wantoner every day, while their poor slaves go, often, with naked backs and hungry bellies. Ah, maister," concluded the tinker in a tone where the heart was heard, "you know little about the real suffering there is in England; but I can tell you one thing,—and that is, that in the manufacturing places, where this pinch-gut system is most felt, thousands say they won't stand it much longer!"
The tinker ended this speech in a tone of voice so loud that Tim Swallow-whistle felt prompted to look round him for listeners. To his great chagrin, Prim the Puritan stood pricking his ears, but a few yards from Tim's door, with his back turned towards it, but evidently collecting every seditious syllable uttered by the travelling tinker. Tim placed his fore-finger significantly to his lips; and the tinker, marking the direction of Tim's eyes, took the hint, and immediately turned the conversation to the subject of the copper tea-kettle. The tailor's wife was called down-stairs; the kettle was produced; the bargain was readily struck; and the tinker proceeded, out of doors, with his vocation. Tim Swallow-whistle, meanwhile, being left to uninterrupted reflection, turned over and over again, in his mind, the weighty thoughts which had been started by the traveller. Tim could not easily quell the indignation against money-making oppression which the tinker's tale had raised within him; and the plain man's plain reasoning, respecting the rights of the labouring poor, appeared to him uncontradictable; yet all his sympathies for the distressed yielded, at length, to the strength of his common sense, and the consciousness that, care as much as he might, he could not alter the state of the oppressed:—
"The world is as it is," said Tim to himself, mustering up as much wisdom as he was master of; "it has not been right this many a long year, if all that our forefathers said can be true: and, what's worse, one doesn't see much chance of its being speedily set to rights. But what's the use of grumbling at it, day after day? that would only whitter the flesh off one's poor bones. No, no; what the man says is true enough, no doubt," concluded the soliloquising Swallow-whistle; "but I will not make myself uneasy about what I can't mend: at least I won't any further than I can help. Let the world wag! I'll try to make myself as easy as I can in it, with all its awkwardness. Every dog has his day,—and perhaps mine will come yet."
This was no elevated moral channel in which Tim's thoughts were running when the tinker re-entered; but it was one which had served to drain Tim's heart from the troublous inundation of discontent, amid the toils and difficulties of his whole mature life. Tim invited the tinker to take another pipe, and entered on the old subject in a way that showed his mind was made up.
"Well, my good friend," he began, "I have been thinking about what has fallen to your lot to see; and I must take the liberty to tell you, that although I cannot help feeling grieved for the distress of others, yet I very much doubt the wisdom of a man dwelling on these thoughts of sorrow till he feels a disposition to be discontented with every thing around him."
"So do I, maister," chimed in the tinker, interrupting Tim,—"so do I: but when one sees and hears of things that one knows to be wrong, one can hardly prevent one's sen, you know, from turning 'em over in one's mind, and trying to think how they could be righted. I'm not a man given to low spirits, mysen, maister; I contrive to keep my heart up, and go on; though I don't think the world's quite right, for all that."
"I'm glad to hear what you said just now," continued Tim: "I assure you I've some little rough usage to bear; but I always find cheerfulness, and a disposition to make the best o'things, by far the wisest way of living."
"So do I, maister," again burst in the tinker, very much to the annoyance of the tailor, who wanted to come to the end of his "say," without interruption—"so do I; only, you know there's no harm in talking about these things, now and then. And, besides, maister, you know, the world never will be any better, if we all shut our eyes, and say we see no wrong in it."
"Right, very right," replied Tim, a little bit put out of the path he had intended to take, but still resolved to make direct for his point, if he could; "I don't deny that: but how long will it be before the world is bettered, even if we keep our eyes open, and tell aloud of all the wrong we know in it? You and I are not the first who have discovered the world to be wrong, depend on't. Tinkers and tailors," continued Tim, smiling as he proceeded, "have been found in many countries, as far as my little book-larning informs me, who have imagined they could repair the rents in the world; but, in too many cases, these fellows were the very greatest practisers upon the helplessness of their weaker brethren. As for the few who have been in earnest, they have usually been silenced, in one way or other, by those whose interest it was to keep up the wrong in the world. That the world never will be better," concluded Tim, "I will not undertake to say; but the day, I fear, is so far distant, my good friend, that you and I will neither of us be likely to live to see it. Don't take it amiss; but I can't help thinking so."
The tinker was ready with an answer; but two customers of Tim's here came in, and the travelling tinker, thinking that it would be both ill-mannered and wearisome to the tailor for him to stay, and attempt to renew the conversation, wished Tim "Good day," and prepared to set out again on his journey. Tim extended his hand, and returned the tinker's friendly gripe in a way that told the traveller his few strong hints would be thought of on another day.
With all Tim Swallow-whistle's shrewdness, he was perfectly free from craft. The thoughts created in his mind by this conversation with the travelling tinker naturally found their way, now and then, into his exchanges of opinion with his customers. Prim the Puritan was not slow in learning this: in fact, his evil nature had plotted Tim's destruction from the moment that he overheard the conversation between Tim and the tinker. Spies were sent to draw the tailor out; and, eventually, poor Tim was set down in the day-book of every influential man in Horncastle as a "dangerous and seditious fellow." From that day, poor Tim Swallow-whistle's business began to decline. The trial was a bitter one to Tim; for his aged grandmother sank to the grave, beholding the clouds of adversity gather around her grandchild's dwelling; but, in the serenity of death, steadfastly directed her weeping descendant to trust in uprightness, and it would be his comfort. Then his mother sickened and died,—yielding, after a hard struggle, to the Last Enemy, but expiring with an exultant smile, after assuring her child that her own greatest consolation was that she had been dutiful to her mother, and she was confident he would yet see bright days as the reward of his spotless filial piety.
In vain Tim asked for parochial relief in the hour of his sore straitness, when his wife's health failed with the labour of waiting upon her sick relatives, and when Tim's earnings dwindled to a starving pittance by reason of his being compelled to wait upon those around him that could not help themselves. Prim held the purse-strings of the parish tight. Tim fasted often when his neighbours fed, and fed well: but he never despaired. "Every dog has his day," he still thought, but refrained from saying much, and still battled with thoughts that would have unmanned him.
Tim was repeating to himself his old adage one afternoon, about six months after his mother's death, when the clergyman of the parish entered his cottage, and, to Tim's indescribable surprise, desired Tim to take the measure of him for a new suit! Now the fact was, that the clergyman was, necessarily, more than once in Tim's dwelling during the successive illnesses of his grandmother and mother; and, although prejudiced against the tailor, from the reports circulated to his detriment, yet he was too sensible a man not to use his opportunities of scrutinising Tim's real character, and too much a gentleman, in the best sense of the word, to permit a poor but worthy man to suffer if his own help could avail to relieve him. The clergyman saw that Tim wore his heart too much on the outside of his waistcoat to be a rogue; and the clergyman determined to help Tim by his patronage and his "good word."
The prejudices against Tim, however, were not dispelled all at once, though many began to look upon him with new eyes when they heard that the town-parson had actually given him orders for a new suit. The climax of the poor tailor's sorrows was now, however, gone by; and the future was preparing for him its triumphs and joys. One event gave him some trouble; but what kind of trouble? Ah! it was of that kind which is most truly troublous to a heart which has struggled to train itself into correctness. The termination of Prim's two years of overseership arrived, and the parish vestry would not pass his accounts, having discovered him to be guilty of an immense embezzlement! Tim had real trouble with his own heart throughout the whole of the day on which he first learnt this fact. Exultation over his old enemy was the feeling that strove to be uppermost; but Tim virtuously kept it down.
Succeeding years displayed a striking contrast in the lives of Tim Swallow-whistle and Prim the Puritan. The houses which the cheating overseer had recently bought with the fruits of his fraud were sold to raise law-expenses; even his aunt's freehold went to the hammer for the same purpose: and Prim only escaped a prison by some technical flaw in the wording of the proceedings taken out against him. He was ruined, however, and became comparatively a beggar, while his character sank for life. Tim's honesty and industry, on the other hand, raised him daily in the estimation of his neighbours. Competence, amounting, at length, well-nigh to wealth, beamed upon him, and, ere his grey hairs went down to the grave, he lived to leave a crown-piece, often, at the door of the ragged and wretched man who was once his envious persecutor and the oppressive overseer.—Tim Swallow-whistle preserved, even to his dying day, that nobility of heart which forbade him to triumph over a fallen enemy; but he would often repeat, half mechanically, to himself, when passing from the poverty-stricken door of Prim the Puritan, "Every dog has his day."