NAMES must act upon character. Every preceding Waddy, save one short-lived Ira, from the first ancestor, the Waddy, cook of the Mayflower, had been a type of , of mild, endurance. During all Boston’s material changes, from a petty colony under Winthrop to a great city under General Jackson, and all its spiritual changes from Puritanism to Unitarianism, Boston divines had to the representative Waddy of their as the successor of Moses upon earth—Moses the man, not Moses the stalwart of rocks and of golden .
Why, then, was Ira Waddy, with whom this tale is to concern itself, other than his race? Why had he revolutionised the family history? Why was he a captor, not a captive of Fate? Why was the Waddy name no longer hid from the world in the unfragrant and musty gloom of a[2] blind court in Boston, but known and seen and heard of all men, wherever tea-chests and clipper-ships are found, or fire-crackers do pop? Why was Ira Waddy, in all senses, the man, while every other Waddy had been ? Brief questions—to be answered not so in this history of his Return.
Yes, the Waddy fortunes had altered. To the small shop, the only of the Waddy family, went little vulgar boys in days of Salem , in days of Dorchester sieges, and after when the Fourth of July began to noise itself abroad as a festival of the largest liberty: on all great festal days when parents and uncles with candy money, and were certain, and on all individual festal days when the unlooked-for came, then went , Whig and Tory, Federal and , to the Waddys’ shop and largely there. Not only the representative Mr. Waddy did they and bargain into bewilderment and total loss of profit, but also the representative Mrs. Waddy, a feeble, scrawny , whose courage died when she put the fateful question to the representative Mr. Waddy, otherwise never her .
But there was no more about the little shop. In fact, the shop had grown giantly with the fortunes of the name. A row of stately covered its site, and many other sites where neighbour[3] pride had once looked down upon it. The row was built of , without or gaud, enduring as the eternal hills. On its front, cut in solid letters on a gigantic block, were the words
WADDY BUILDINGS
was sold there in dust-heaps like a Vesuvius, not gingerbread in the penny ; cinnamon by the ceroons of a forest, not by the chewing-stick for dull Sabbath afternoons; tea by the of chests, product of a province, not by the tin shoeful, as the old-time Waddys had sold it for a century before the Tea Party. And Ira Waddy owned these buildings, which he had never seen.
It is not necessary that I should speculate to discover where the traits that Ira Waddy from his ancestors had their origin. Of this I have accurate information. My wonder is at the delay in a development of character certain to arrive. But late springs bring summers. Fires battened long below hatches gather strength for one swift leap to the main-truck.
Whitegift Waddy, cook of the Mayflower, was . How he came to be a Puritan, on the Mayflower, in its caboose and a cook,—out of his element in religion, in space, in place, and in profession,—I[4] cannot say; these are questions that the Massachusetts Historical Society will probably investigate, now that the Waddys are rich and can hire cooks to give society dinners. At all events, there he was, and there he daily made a porridge for Miles Standish, and there he peppered the same. Now as to pepper in cream there is question; in porridge none: I do not, therefore, blame Miles, peppery himself and loving pepper, for when, one day, a bowl of pepperless was placed before him. He sent for the cook and thus addressed him:
“Milksop! Thou hast the pepper forgot. I will teach thy caitiff life a lesson. Ho, trencherman! Bring pepper!”
It was brought. He poured it all into the porridge, and, by, compelled Waddy to swallow spoonful after spoonful. At the screams of the victim, the Pilgrim Grandfathers, Governor Carver, Father Winslow, and Elder Brewster, rushed from on deck into the cabin and the infuriated hero to desist as he valued the life of Mrs. Susanna White, who was soon to add a little Pilgrim to their colony.
“Enough!” said Standish. “The pepper hath entered into his soul.”
It had, indeed! Nothing was cooked on the Mayflower for six days. On the seventh, Whitegift Waddy re-entered the caboose. He had always been a meek, he was now a crushed man. Yet there[5] seemed to have grown within him, as we sometimes see in those the world has wronged, a quiet confidence in a future.
Pepper, thus implanted in the Waddy nature, seemed to have no effect for generations. It was, however, slowly their lumpishness. It was them to tricks of a strange . At last, the was , and our hero, Ira, the first really alive Waddy, was born. I have said the first, but there was another Ira Waddy who, at one period in his brief career, showed a momentary sparkle of the smouldered flame. Of him a word anon, as his fate had to do with the fates of others, strangely interwoven with the fate of his great-nephew and namesake.