No More Learning

_Quaerenda pecunia primum, virtus post nummos_. He hoisted sail for
Eldorado, and shipwrecked on Point Tribulation. _Quid, non mortalia
pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? _ The speculation has sometimes crossed
my mind, in that dreary interval of drought which intervenes between
quarterly stipendiary showers, that Providence, by the creation of a
money-tree, might have simplified wonderfully the sometimes perplexing
problem of human life. We read of bread-trees, the butter for which lies
ready-churned in Irish bogs. Milk-trees we are assured of in South
America, and stout Sir John Hawkins testifies to water-trees in the
Canaries. Boot-trees bear abundantly in Lynn and elsewhere; and I have
seen, in the entries of the wealthy, hat-trees with a fair show of
fruit. A family-tree I once cultivated myself, and found therefrom but a
scanty yield, and that quite tasteless and innutritious. Of trees
bearing men we are not without examples; as those in the park of Louis
the Eleventh of France. Who has forgotten, moreover, that olive-tree,
growing in the Athenian's back-garden, with its strange uxorious crop,
for the general propagation of which, as of a new and precious variety,
the philosopher Diogenes, hitherto uninterested in arboriculture, was so
zealous? In the _sylva_ of our own Southern States, the females of my
family have called my attention to the china-tree. Not to multiply
examples, I will barely add to my list the birch-tree, in the smaller
branches of which has been implanted so miraculous a virtue for
communicating the Latin and Greek languages, and which may well,
therefore, be classed among the trees producing necessaries of
life,--_venerabile donum fatalis virgae_. That money-trees existed in
the golden age there want not prevalent reasons for our believing. For
does not the old proverb, when it asserts that money does not grow on
_every_ bush, imply _a fortiori_ that there were certain bushes which
did produce it? Again, there is another ancient saw to the effect that
money is the _root_ of all evil.
From which two adages it may be safe to
infer that the aforesaid species of tree first degenerated into a shrub,
then absconded underground, and finally, in our iron age, vanished
altogether. In favorable exposures it may be conjectured that a specimen
or two survived to a great age, as in the garden of the Hesperides; and,
indeed, what else could that tree in the Sixth AEneid have been with a
branch whereof the Trojan hero procured admission to a territory, for
the entering of which money is a surer passport than to a certain other
more profitable and too foreign kingdom? Whether these speculations of
mine have any force in them, or whether they will not rather, by most
readers, be deemed impertinent to the matter in hand, is a question
which I leave to the determination of an indulgent posterity. That there
were, in more primitive and happier times, shops where money was
sold,--and that, too, on credit and at a bargain,--I take to be matter
of demonstration. For what but a dealer in this article was that AEolus
who supplied Ulysses with motive-power for his fleet in bags? what that
Ericus, King of Sweden, who is said to have kept the winds in his cap?
what, in more recent times, those Lapland Nornas who traded in favorable
breezes? All which will appear the more clearly when we consider, that,
even to this day, _raising the wind_ is proverbial for raising money,
and that brokers and banks were invented by the Venetians at a later
period.

And now for the improvement of this digression. I find a parallel to Mr.
Sawin's fortune in an adventure of my own. For, shortly after I had
first broached to myself the before-stated natural-historical and
archaeological theories, as I was passing, _haec negotia penitus mecum
revolvens_, through one of the obscure suburbs of our New England
metropolis, my eye was attracted by these words upon a signboard,--CHEAP
CASH-STORE. Here was at once the confirmation of my speculations, and
the substance of my hopes. Here lingered the fragment of a happier past,
or stretched out the first tremulous organic filament of a more
fortunate future. Thus glowed the distant Mexico to the eyes of Sawin,
as he looked through the dirty pane of the recruiting-office window, or
speculated from the summit of that mirage-Pisgah which the imps of the
bottle are so cunning to raise up. Already had my Alnaschar-fancy (even
during that first half-believing glance) expended in various useful
directions the funds to be obtained by pledging the manuscript of a
proposed volume of discourses.