Assimasqua Mountain rises abruptly to the west of the four ponds, a noble hill or range, five miles in length.
The west shore of the Assimasqua lakes sweeps abruptly up to the high crest of the ridge, which is very irregular. It is partly wooded, partly half-grown-up pasture, partly ledge, and along the high grassy summit small chasms open and lead away into deep woods of hemlock. The steep east side is covered for most of its length with an amazing growth of juniper, hundreds and hundreds of close-massed bushes of great size and thickness. The ridge holds a number of little dark mountain tarns, and half a dozen good brooks tumble down its sides in small cascades. The folds of its forest skirts broaden out to the west into the bottom lands at its feet. To the east, the valleys of the brooksdeepen and sharpen into ravines through the woods, as they draw near the lakes.
The shores all about the four lakes, as I said, are heavily wooded, and there are but one or two farms, and these only small clearings. A singular person lived in one of them, who worked for years over a great invention, a boat which was to utilize the wind by means of a windmill, which in turn worked a small paddle-wheel. No one now knows whether he had never heard of such a thing as a sail, or merely thought sails dangerous. He was absorbed in his project; and he did get his boat to go, in time, and at least a few times she trundled a clumsy course around the lake.
Near the south end of the Mountain is the old Hale place. Mr. Hale was a gentle-looking man, very neat, with a quiet voice and ways. He kept his wide fields finely cultivated, and had a large orchard, and twelve Jersey cows. The lane through which they filed home at night is enclosed between the two mightiest stump fences I have ever seen, fully ten feet high, and a perfect wilderness to climb over. They look like thebrandished arms of witches, or like enormous antlers, against the sky, and are thickly fringed all along their base with delicate Dicksonia fern. Stump fences are fast becoming rare with us, and these must be the over-turned stumps of first-growth pine.
After Mr. and Mrs. Hale died, the farm passed to a sister, Mrs. Wrenn, and when her husband, too, died—he had been a slack man, with no hold on anything—she made the fatal mistake, too common among old people on the farms, of making over the property to a kinsman (in this case, a married step-niece and her husband) on condition of support. I never knew Mrs. Wrenn, but a young farmer’s wife, a friend of mine, was anxious about her troubles, and through her there came to our notice an incident which seemed to light up the whole gray region of the farm.
The neighbors began to hear rumors of neglect and abuse. Mrs. Wrenn was never seen, and those who knew the skinflint ways of her entertainers suspected trouble and presently confided their fears to the young doctor of the neighborhood. He came atonce, and found the poor soul in a fatal illness, left alone in unspeakable dirt and squalor in a sort of out-house, with unwashed bed-clothes, no one to feed or tend her, and food which she could not touch put roughly beside her once a day. There were signs too of actual rough handling.
“Don’t try to make me live!” the old lady whispered, with command and entreaty. “Don’t ye dare to keep me living,” and he assured her solemnly that he would not, except in reason, and would only make her more comfortable. He rated the bad woman in charge till he had her well frightened, and then, though it was not only dark already, but raining fast (and though he was poor himself, with his way to make and no financial backing) he drove five miles to town and brought back and installed a nurse at his own expense.
“The tears were running down his cheeks,” the nurse herself told me, “when he assured that poor old creature that either he or I would be with her day and night, that we would never leave her, and she would be safe with us. He paid my charges, and allsupplies and food, out of his own pocket. He saw her every day, and when her release came, he was close beside her, and had her hand in his. He couldn’t have been more tender to his own mother. And he gave that bad woman a part of what she deserved.”
I should like to say something more of this young physician. He started as a farm boy, with no capital beyond insight and purpose, and skilled hands, and was led to his career, or rather could not keep himself from his career, because of the fire of pity and tenderness that possessed him. He has come to honor and recognition now, but at the time of which I write, and for years, he was known only to a thirty-mile circle of farm people, a good part of them too poor to pay for any services. He gave himself to them, without knowing that he was giving anything. He was a born citizen, too, served as overseer of the poor, and as selectman, and people consulted him about their quarrels and troubles.
I spoke of the incident about Mrs. Wrenn, which the nurse had told me a year or more after it happened, to the doctor’s wife, someweeks since. He had never told her of it. Her eyes filled with tears.
“That is just like him,” she said.
The Ridge slopes down to the west, to the rich plains through which the Marston communities are scattered—Marston Centre, North and West Marston, Marston Plains. The “Four Marstons” are a notable district, for Marston Academy had the luck to be founded, nearly a hundred years ago, by persons of liberal education, and the dwellers in the comfortable four-square brick houses of the neighborhood have more than kept up its intellectual traditions; though the town has no railroad communication, and only one mill, the shovel factory, since the old saw-mill which cut the first-growth pines on the slopes of Assimasqua has been given up.
The Marston saw-mill is chiefly remembered because of Hiram Andros, who worked there as sawyer for forty-five years, and had the name of the best judge of timber in the State. Thesawyer’sis a notable position. He himself does no actual work, but stands near the saw, and in the brief moment when each log is run on to the carriage, holds up therequisite number of fingers to show whether it is to be a three, a four, or five-inch timber, or cut into boards or planks; which cut will make the best use of the log, with the least waste. The sawyer gets high pay, six to ten dollars a day, and earns it, for on his single judgment, delivered in that fraction of a minute, the mill’s prosperity hangs.
What is it that gives a town so distinct a color and fibre? Marston people have kept, generation after generation, a fine flavor and distinction. They are in touch with the world, in the best sense, and men of science and leaders of thought in university life, as well as business magnates, have gone out from Marston, yet still feel they belong there.
Eliphalet Marston, who built and owned the shovel factory, made it his study to produce the best shovel that could be made, the best wearing, the soundest. In later life his son tried to induce him to go about through the country, and look up his customers, to increase trade. The son was very emphatic; it was what everyone did, the only way to keep up-to-date and advertise the business, and Eliphalet must not become moss-grown.He shook his head, but after much hammering started off, though not really persuaded. He went to a big wholesale dealer in Chicago, but did not mention his name, merely said he was there to talk shovels.
“Don’t mention shovels to me,” said the dealer. “There’s just one shovel that’s worth having, just one that’s honest, and that’s the one that I’m handling. There it is,” he said, producing it. “Look at it; that’s the onlyshovelthat’s made in this country; made by a man named Marston, at Marston Plains, State of ——”
Eliphalet chuckled, and went home.
The Barnards were Marston people, a brilliant but strange family; and next door to the Barnards lived a remarkable woman, Miss Persis Wayland. She was a tall handsome person, of a large frame. She lived to a great age, passing all her later life alone, save for one attendant, in her father’s large house, with its gardens and hedges around it. She was well-to-do, and dressed with old-fashioned stateliness in heavy black silk.
She was a woman of fine understanding, and a trained scholar. She read fourlanguages easily, and at forty took up the study of Hebrew, that she might have her Bible free from the perversions of translation. She was about thirty when the religious temperament which was later to dominate her first manifested itself. She has told me herself of her experience.
She had been conscious for years of a vague dissatisfaction, and of life’s seeming empty and purposeless. She threw herself, first into study, then into works of charity, in her effort to find peace. She rose early, and worked till she was utterly worn out and exhausted, at her Sunday School class, at missionary work, and till late hours at her Spanish and Latin, all to no purpose.
Then one day she found herself at a meeting at which a Methodist evangelist (she herself was a strict Episcopalian) was to speak. She went in without thought, from a chance impulse as she passed the door. After the speaking, those who felt moved to do so were asked to come forward and kneel; and as she knelt, she felt the breath of the Spirit upon her forehead.
“It was as plain as the touch of your handand mine,” she said, as she laid her handsome old hand on my fingers; and from that moment, all her life, the light never left her, she felt “held round by an unspeakable peace and sunshine.”
She always held to her own church, but became more and more of a Spiritualist, till she saw her rooms constantly thronged with the faces of her childhood, father and mother, and the brothers and sisters and playmates who had passed on.
She gradually withdrew from active life, and for the last ten years, I think, never stepped outside her door. She had a fine presence always, rapt and stately. She was distantly glad to see friends who called upon her, but never showed much human warmth. She lived till her ninety-eighth year.
THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFTTHE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFT
In the farming country near Marston began the ministry of Clarissa Gray, the beloved evangelist. An unusual experience in illness led this grave, charming girl to thought apart upon the things of God, and as she grew up, persons vexed in spirit began to turn to her for comfort. Her personality was so tranquil and at rest that she seemed to diffuse a sense of musing peace about her; yet she was not dreamy; her nature was rather so limpidly clear that she was never pre-occupied, and she had clear practical good-sense. Hard-drinking, violent men would yield to her direct and fearless influence. Presently she was asked more and more widely to lead in meeting, and to her unquestioning nature this came as a clear call. Her voice, fervent and pure, led in prayer, her crystal judgement solved problems, till without her ever knowing it the community lay in the hollow of her small hands.
I was last at Marston on a day of deep winter. We were to make a visit in the town, and then explore the fields and woods of the west slopes of Assimasqua.
A marked change comes to us by the middle of January. We emerge from the softened twilight world of earlier winter into a brilliancy of white, with bright blue shadows. The deep snow is changed by the action of the wind and its own weight, to a wonderful smooth firmness. It takes on carved and graven shapes, and might be a sublimated building material, a fairy alabaster or marble,fit to built the palaces in the clouds. After each storm the snow-plough piles it, often above one’s head, on both sides of the roads and sidewalks; we walk between high walls built of blocks and masses of blue-shadowed white.
The brightness is almost too great, through the middle of the day; it is dazzling; but about sunset a curious opaque look falls on the landscape; a flattening, till they are like the hues of old pastels, of all the delicate colors. The country has an appearance of almost infinite space, under the snow, and the wind carves out pure sharp wave-like curves of drift about the fields and hills.
The still air, dry and fiery, is like champagne. It almostburns, it is so cold and pure. A great feeling of lightness comes to moccasined feet, in walking in this rarefied air through powdery snow; but fingers and toes quickly become numb without even feeling the cold.
Starting early out of Marston Plains village, we passed a tall rounded hill which had a grove of maples near its top, the countless fine lines of their stems like the strings ofsome harp-like instrument. The light breeze, hardly more than a stirring, made music through them. The sunrise was hidden behind this hill, but the delicate bare trees were lighted up as with a gold mist.
As we entered the forest on the skirts of Assimasqua, the wind rose outside. A fresh fall of snow the day before had weighted every branch of the evergreens with piled-up whiteness, which now came down in bright showers, the snow crystals glinting around us where stray sunbeams stole down among the trees: but in the shelter of the great pines and hemlocks not a breath of wind reached us, and the woods were held fast in the snow hush, against which any chance sound rings out sharply.
The bark of the different trees was like a set of fine etchings, the yellow birches shining as if burnished; the patches of handsome dark mosses on the ash-trees, and the fine-grained bark of lindens, ashes, and hop-hornbeams stood out brightly.
As we followed a wood road we heard chirruping and tweeting, and saw a flock of pine siskins among the pine-tops, and later weheard the vigorous tapping of a great pileated woodpecker.
All the northern woodpeckers winter with us; as do bluejays, and chickadees, (the “friendly birds” of the Indians); juncos and nuthatches; and partridges, which burrow under the snow for roots and berries, and are sometimes caught, poor things, by the foxes, when the crust freezes over them. Crows stay with us through a very mild winter, but more often are off to the sea, thirty miles distant, to grow fat on periwinkles; and very rarely indeed a winter wren or a song-sparrow remains with us. The beautiful cream-white snow-buntings, cross-bills, fat handsome pine-grosbeaks, golden-crowned kinglets, brown-creepers, and those pirates, the butcher birds, come for short winter visits. Evening grosbeaks, and Bohemian wax-wings, we see more rarely. By the end of February, when the cold may be deepest, the great owls are already building, deep in the woods.
Ever so many small sharp valleys and ravines were revealed among the woods, some winding deep into the darkness of the pines and hemlocks. Their perfect curves were mademore perfect by the unbroken snow, and they were flecked all over with the feathery blue shadows of their trees. At the bottom of one we heard a musical tinkling, and found a brook partly open. We scrambled down to it, and knelt there, watching it, till we were half frozen. The ice was frosted deep with delicate lace-work, and looking up underneath we saw a perfect wonderland of organ-pipes and colonnades of crystal, through which the water tinkled melodiously.
We came out high on the north side of Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove that spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The tall maples were very beautiful in their winter bareness, and the slope about their feet was massed with a close feathery growth of young balsam firs and hemlocks, with openings between. The snow lay even with the eaves of the small bark sugaring-shanty. The sight of a roof made the silence seem almost palpable, but in March the hillside will have plenty of sound and stir, for fires will be lighted and the big kettles swung, while the men come and go on sledges. Sugaring goes on all through the countryside, and even inthe town boys are out with “spiles,” drilling the maple “shade-trees,” as soon as the sap begins running. The bright drops fall slowly, one by one, into the pail hung to the end of the spile, and the sap is like the clearest spring water, with a refreshing woodsy sweetness.
The high rough crest of Assimasqua dominates a wide stretch of country. The long sweep of the fields, and the lakes, lying asleep, showed perfect, featureless white, as we stood looking down; but all about, and in among them, the low broken hills, the knolls and ridges, bore scarfs or mantles of smoke-colored bare woods, mixed with evergreens.
All day the sky had been of an aquamarine color, of the liquid and luminous clearness which comes only in mid-winter, and deep afternoon shadows were falling as we came down the hillside. We were on snow-shoes, and had brought a toboggan, as the last part of our way lay down hill. The country was open below the sugaring grove, and the unbroken snow masked all the contours and mouldings of the fields, so that we found ourselves suddenly dropping intototally unrealized hollows and skimming up unrealized hillocks.
When we reached the small dome-like hill where we were to take the cross-country trolley, the blue-green sky had changed to a pure primrose, and in this, as the marvelous dusk of the snow fields deepened about us, the thin golden sickle of the new moon, and then Venus, came out slowly till they blazed above the horizon; the primrose hue changed to a low band of burning orange beneath the fast-striding darkness, then to a blue-green color, a robin’s egg blue, which showed liquid-clear behind the pines; but long before we reached home the colors had deepened into the peacock blue darkness of the winter night.
Just before the distant whistle of the trolley broke the stillness, we had a tiny adventure; we strayed over the brow of the hill, and came on two baby foxes playing in the soft snow like kittens.
I
The farms become smaller, and string along nearer and nearer each other, the hills slope more and more sharply, till suddenly, there below them lies our Town, held round in their embrace, its factory chimneys sending up blossoms of steam, its host of scattered lights at night a company of low-dropped stars. There is no visible boundary; but with the first electric light pole there is a change, and something deeper-rooted than its convenience and compactness, its theatres and trolleys, makes the town’s life as different as possible from that of the farm districts. Yet an affectionate relationship maintains itself between the two. Farm neighbors bring in a little area of unhurried friendliness which clings around their Concord wagons or pungs; hurrying townsfolk, stopping to greet them, relax their tension and an exchange of jokesand chaff begins. Leisurely, ample farm women settle down in our Rest Room for friendly talk and laughter, and hot coffee or tea.
Our dearest Town! We have perhaps some of the faults of all northern places. We, at least we women, are sadMarthas, careful and troubled, including house-cleaning with seed-time and harvest among the things ordained not to fail, no matter at what cost of peace of mind and health. We hug each our own fireside; but this is because, for eight months of the year, the great cold gives us a habit of tension. We enjoy too little the elixir of our still winter days, and hurry, hurry as we go, to pop back to our warm hearths as fast as ever we can.
Now and again through the year, the big cities call us with a Siren’s voice.
“My wife and I put in ten days at the Waldorf-Astoria each year, and we count it good business,” says one of our tradesmen, and he speaks for many. The clustered brilliancy at the entrances of the great theatres, the shop windows, the sense of beingcarriedby the great current of life, sets our feet and ourpulses dancing; but I think it is not quite so much the stir and gaiety which we sometimes thirst for as the protecting insulation of the crowd, to draw breath in a little and let the mind relax. The wall that guards one’s citadel of inner privacy needs, in a small town, to be built of strong stuff; it is subjected to hard wear. Indeed we share some of the privations of royalty, in that we lead our whole lives in the public eye. We see each other walk past every day, greet each other daily in shops and at street corners, and meet each other’s good frocks and company manners at every church supper and afternoon tea. It takes a nature with Heaven’s gift of unconsciousness to withstand this wear and tear; yet there are plenty of these among us, people of such quality and fibre that they keep a fine aloofness and privacy of life, like sanctuary gardens within guardian hedges.
But if our closeness to each other has these slight drawbacks, it has advantages that are unspeakably precious. Our neighbors’ joys and troubles are of instant importance to us, each and all. In the city one can look on while one’s neighbor dies or goesbankrupt. Too often, one cannot help even where one would; here wemusthelp, whether we will or no! We cannot get away from duties that are so imperative. Our neighbor’s necessities are unescapable, and a certain soldierly quality comes to us in that we cannotchoose.
An instinct, whether Puritan or Quaker, runs straight through us, which at social gatherings draws men and women to the two sides of a room, as a magnet draws needles. Perhaps it is merely the shyness inherent in towns of small compass; in all the annals of small places, in Cranford, in John Galt’s villages, the ladies bridle and simper, the gentlemen “begin for to bash and to blush,” in each other’s society. Whatever it is, it narrows and pinches communities, and does sometimes more far-reaching harm than the mere stiffening-up of parties and gatherings; it narrows the women’s habit of thought, so that children are deprived of some of the wider outlook of citizenship; and the woman’s ministry of cheering and soothing, which pours itself out without stint to allwomenin old age or sorrow or sickness, is too often withheld from the men, who may be as lonely and troubled,and may be left forlorn and uncheered. However, this foolish thing vanishes before rich and warm natures, like snow in a March sun.
I sometimes wish that our latch-strings hung a little more on the outside. It is easier for us to give a party, with great effort, and our ancestral china, than to have a friend drop in to share family supper; yet there is something that makes for strength in this fine privacy of each family’s circle, and no doubt, as our social occasions are necessarily few, a certain formality is the more a real need. It “keeps up.”
One grave trouble runs through our community, and leaves a black trail. Drink poisons the lives of too many of our working-men.
The drain to the cities, which robs all small places of part of their life’s blood, touches us nearly; the young wings must be tried, the young feet take the road. The restless sand is in the shoes, and one out of perhaps every twenty pairs sold in our street is to take a boy or girl out to make a new home, far from father and mother.
But this, although it robs us, is also our prideand strength. Many of the boys and girls who have gone out from among us have become torch-bearers, and their light shines back to us; and if the town’s veins are drained, it is, by the very means which drain it, made part of the arterial system of the whole country, and throbs with its heart beats. The enormous variety of post-marks on our incoming mail tells its absorbing story.
There is no sameness, even in a small town. Here, as everywhere, the Creator lays here and there His finger of difference; as if He said, “Conformity is the law—and non-conformity.” Why should one clear-eyed boy among us have been born with the voice and vision, and the sorrow-and-reward-full consecration, of high poetry, rather than his brothers? Why should another, of different bringing-up, among a din of voices crying down the town’s possibilities, have had the wit and enterprise, yes, and the vision, too, to build up, here, a vigorous manufactory, whose wares, well planned and well made, now have their market many States away?
I think of a third boy, the child of a well-read, but not a studious household, who at tenwas laying hands on everything that he could find to study in the branch of science to which his life was later to be dedicated. He had the same surroundings as the rest of us, we went to school and played at Indians together; and now, for years, in a distant city, his life has led him daily upon voyages of thought, beyond the ken of those who played with him.
Another boy, our dear naturalist, also lives far away. His able, merry brothers were the most practical creatures; so was he, too, but in another way. He turned, a little grave-eyed child, to out-of-doors, as a duck takes to water, caring for birds and beasts with a pure passion, as absorbed in watching their ways as were the other boys in games and food. It was nothing to him to miss a meal, or two, if a turtle’s eggs might be hatching. He had very little to help him, for his father, a very fine man, a master builder, failed in health early; but he helped himself. He found countless little out-of-the-way jobs; he mounted trout or partridges for older friends, caught bait, exchanged specimens through magazines, etc., to keep himself out of doors, and to buy books and collecting materials. By the time he wastwelve he had a little taxidermy business; and with the growth of technical skill, the finer part, the naturalist’s seeing eye for infinite difference—the shading of the moth’s wing, the marking of the wren’s egg—grew faster yet; and with it the patient reverent absorption in the whole.
People come to him now for accurate and delicate knowledge. His word gives the authority which for so long he sought; and, at least once, he has been sent by his Government to bring back a report of birds and fishes, and to plant his country’s flag on a lone coral island.
The other night we went to a play given by some of the school children. Their orchestra played with spirit; and from the first we grew absorbed in watching a little boy who played the bass drum. The bass drum! He played the snare-drum, the triangle, the cymbals, a set of musical rattles, and I do not know how many extraordinary things attached to hand or feet, as well. Our northern music is choked in the sand of over-business, prisoned by northern stiffness, but shy, stiff, awkward though it may be, the divine thing is there, as groundwateris present where there is land; and nothing can keep our children from buying (generally with their own earnings) instruments of one sort or another, and picking up lessons.
I know this little boy. His father is a laborer, a slack man, down at heels, but kind and indulgent. The boy is a chubby little soul, and he accompanied the showy rag-time as Bach’s son might have played his father’s masses, with a serious, reverent absorption, his little unconscious face lighting up at any prettier change in the rag-time. They live in a tiny cottage, and are well-fed, but very untidy. As the humming bird finds honey, this child had somehow picked up odd pennies to buy, and found time to master, his extraordinary collection of instruments, and he sat playing as if in Heaven. Surely we had seen yet another manifestation of the Power, which, together with the bright fields of golden-rod and daisies, plants also the hidden lily in the woods.
II
Of the town’s politics, the less said the better, but in every matter outside of theirwithering realm, I wonder how many other communities there are in which public spirit is as much a matter of course as drawing breath, where heart and soul are poured into the town’s needs so royally. Our churches, our Library, our Rest Room, Board of Trade, and Merchants’ Association have been earned by the hardest of hard work, shoulder to shoulder. Most of our women do their own household work, all of our men work long hours; but when there is question of a public work to be done, people will pledge, gravely and with their eyes open, an amount of work that would fairly stagger persons whose easier lives have trained their fibres less hardily. I wonder what would be the equivalent, in dollars and cents, of the gift to one of the town’s undertakings, by a stalwart house-wife (who does all the work for a family of five) ofevery afternoon for three weeks, and this in December, when our Town loses its head in a perfect riot of Christmas present-giving.
What is it in politics, what can it be, which so poisons human initiative at its well-springs? Here is public work which, we are told, wemust accept (must we?) as a corrupting and corrupt thing; it deadens and poisons; and almost interlocking with it is work for the same town’s good, done by the same people, which invigorates as if with new breath and kindles a living fire among us.
The peculiar problem of our town, the bitter, fighting quality of our politics, is a mystery to ourselves. One condition which presses equally hard on the whole State: the constant friction, and consequent moral undermining, of a law constantly evaded: may be in part responsible. But no doubt our intense, flint-and-steel individualism is the chief factor; yet this individualism is also the sap, the very life-blood, of the tree!
(Surely things will be better when the ethics of citizenship is taught to children as unequivocally as the duty of telling the truth.)
With this citizen’s work, goes on a private kindness so beautiful that one finds one’s self without words, uplifted and humbled before it; it is as if, below the obstructions of our busy lives, there ran a river of friendship, so strong, so single-purposed, that when the rock above it is struck by need or adversity,its pure current wells forth and carries everything before it.
How many times have this or that old person’s last days been made peaceful and tranquil, instead of torn with anxiety, by the hidden action of “a few friends”: (ah, the fine and sweet reticence!); and these not persons of means, but of slender purses; young men, among others, with the new cares of marriage and children already heavy upon them.
Doctor’s bills “seen to”; a summer at the seashore, for a drooping young mother, “arranged for”; the new home cozily furnished, and books and clothing found, for a burnt-out household; a telephone installed, a year at college provided for; a girl, not at fault, but in trouble, taken in and made one of the family; these instances and their like crowd the town’s unwritten annals.
I must not seem to rate our dear Town too highly, or to claim that these examples are anything out of the common, that they shine brighter than the countless other unseen stars of the Milky Way of Kindness. I only stand abashed before a bed-rock quality offriendship, which never wears out nor tires; which gives and gives again, gravely, yet not counting the cost, and does not withhold that last sharing of hearth and privacy, before which so many dwellers in more sophisticated places cannot but waver.
Have I given too many examples? How can I withhold them!
I think of the machine-tender and his wife, who, in a year of ill-health and doctor’s bills for themselves and their two children, took in the young wife of a fellow-worker who had lost his position; tended her when her baby came, cared for mother and child for eight months, till a new job was found.
Of two households, who took in and made happy, the one a broken-down artist who had fallen on evil times in a great city, the other a sour-tempered old working woman, left without kin. The first household have growing-up children, an automobile, horses, all the complexities of well-to-do life in these days, but the tie of old friendship was the one thing considered. The householders in the second case were not even near friends, merely fellow church members, a kind manand wife, left without children, who could not enjoy their warm house while old Hannah was friendless. They tended her as they might have tended their own sister.
Of the young teacher, alone in the world, who, when calamity came to two married friends (a burnt house and office, and desperate illness) tookallthe savings that were to have gone for three years’ special training, went to them, a three-days’ railroad journey, brought them home, and bore all the household expenses of the young couple, and of their baby’s coming, until new work was found.
The cooking and housework for four persons, (together with a heavy amount of neighborhood work,) would seem enough for even a very capable and kind pair of hands. Well, one friend, in addition to this, for two years cooked and carried inallthe meals for a neighbor (a good many doors away), a crippled girl, a prey, heretofore, to torturing dyspepsia. There was no chance of saving the girl’s life, she had a fatal complaint, but thanks to this simple ministry, her last two years were free from pain, and she was as happy a creature as could well be.
These and like cases crowd to one’s mind, till the memories of the town ring like a chime of bells.
I remember how troubled we were about one neighbor, a gentle, sweet lady, left the last of a large and affectionate family circle; how we dreaded the loneliness for her. We need not have been troubled. There was a place for her at every hearth in the neighborhood, and when the long last illness set in, kind, pitiful hands of neighbors were close about, soothing and tending her. One younger friend, like a daughter, never left her, day after day. Her own people were all gone before her, her harvest was gathered, there could be no more anguish of parting; and her last years seemed, as one might say, carried forward on a sunny river of friendship.
III
People from sunnier climates speak sometimes of our lack of community cheer and of festivals; but a temperature of twenty below zero—or even twenty above—does not conduce to dancing on the green; and it may be thatthe spirit’s light-footedness, like that of the outward person, is hampered by many wrappings. Yet once in a while even we northern people do “break out”; as on Fourth of July, when, in the early morning, the “Antiques and Horribles,” masked and painted, ride, grinning, through the streets.
After a football victory, our High School boys, like boys everywhere, break out in unorganized revel. They caper about in night-shirts put on over their clothes, or in their mother’s and sisters’ skirts, and with the girls as well, they dance down the street in a snake-dance. They light a bonfire in the square, and sing, cheer, and frolic around it. Though they do not know it, it is pure carnival.
The long white months of winter see us all very busy and settled. This is the time of year when solid reading is done, and sheets are hemmed, when our Literary Societies write and read their papers, when we get up plays and tableaux, and the best work is done in the schools. Nobody minds the long evenings, the lamplight beside the open fires is so infinitely cozy; and on moonlight nights,all winter, the long double-runners slip past outside, with joyful laughter and clatter, as the boys and girls—and their elders—take one hill after another in the Mile Coast.
With the breaking-up of the ice, all our settled order breaks up, too, in the tremendous effort of Spring Cleaning. It is as chaotic within the house as without. The furniture is huddled in the middle of the room, swathed in sheets. The master of the house mourns and seeks, like a bird robbed of its nest. We live in aprons and sweeping caps, and in mock despair. The painter will not come; the step-ladder is broken; the spare-room matting is too worn to be put down again; but every dimmest corner of the attic, every picture and molding, every fragment of put-away china, is shining and polished before the weary wives will take rest.
With the first warm-scented May nights, the children’s bedtime becomes an indefinite hour. They are all out after dusk, like flights of chimney-swallows. They run and race down the streets, they don’t know why, and frolic like moths about the electric-light poles.
Memorial Day, with its grave celebration, renews our citizenship. The children are in the fields almost at sunrise, gathering scarlet columbines in the hill crannies, yellow dog-tooth violets, buttercups in the tall wet grass, stripping their mothers’ gardens of their brilliant blaze of tulips, bending down the heavy, dewy heads of white and purple lilacs. The matrons meet early at Grand Army Hall, and tie up and trim bouquets and baskets busily till noon. The talk is sober, but cheerful, and there is a realization of harvest-home and achievement, rather than sadness. The little sacred procession marches past, to the sound of music that is more elating than mournful. Later, after the marching, the tired men find hot coffee and sandwiches ready for them.
With summer, inconsequence and irresponsibility steal happily over the town. Even in the shops and factories the work is not the same, for employers and employees have become easy-going, and the business streets look contentedly drowsy. Bricks and paving stones cannot keep out the wafts of summer fragrance, and with them an ease and gayety, ajoie de vivre, diffuse themselves,which are astonishing after our winter soberness. Our night-lunch carts, popcorn, and pink lemonade booths, with their little flaring lights, are ugly, if compared, for instance, to kindred things in Italy, but they manifest the same spirit. The coming of a circus shows this feeling at its height, but it does not need a circus to bring it out; and the Merry-go-round on one of our wharves toots its gay little whistle all summer. Music, sometimes queer and naive in expression, comes stealing out through the town. Our music is never organized, but the strains of brass or string quartettes or a small band, or of a little part singing, are heard of an evening.
Everybody who can manage it goes down to the sea, if but for one day, and the small excursion steamer is crowded on her daily trips to “The Islands.”
“It takes from trade,” remarks I. Scanlon, the teamster, “but you’ve only got one life to live. At a time!” he adds reverently; and he and his wife and six children travel down to a much-be-cottaged island, set up their tent on the beach, and for a delicious, barefoot fortnight live on fish of theirown catching, and potatoes brought with them from home.
We almost live on our lawns, and neighbors stray across to each other’s piazzas for friendly talk, friendly silence, all through the warm summer evenings.
By October every string needs tautening. The still, keen weather takes matters into its own hands, and we are brought back strictly to work. Meetings are held, committees appointed, plans made for the winter’s tasks, and soon each group is hard at it, for this and that missionary barrel, this and that campaign; and at Thanksgiving the matrons meet again at Grand Army Hall, to apportion and send out the Thanksgiving Dinner. It is a privilege to be with the kind, able women, to watch their capable hands, their shortcuts to the heart of the matter in question, their easy authority, their large friendliness; in more cases than not, their distinction of bearing as well.
Thanksgiving once over, the pace quickens. Each church has its yearly sale and supper at hand, for which months of faithful work have been preparing, and these once workedoff, the whole town, as I have said, loses its head in a perfect fever of giving. What does anything matter but happiness? Christmas is coming! Every man, woman, and child is a hurrying Santa Claus. The first snow brings its strange hush, its strange sheltering pureness, and the sleigh-bells begin once more to jingle all about. During Christmas week hundreds of strings of colored lights are hung across the business streets. Wreaths and garlands of fragrant balsam fir, the very breath and expression of our countryside, are hung everywhere, over shop windows and doorways, in every house window, and on quiet mounds in the churchyard and cemetery. The solemnity of the great festival, which is our Christmas, our All Saints’ and All Souls’ in one, folds round us.
The churches are all dark and sweet, like rich nests, with their heavy fir garlands, lit up by candles. Pews that may be scantily filled at most times are crowded to-night, for here are the boys and girls, thronging home from business and college. Here are the three tall boys of one household, whom we have not seen for a long time, and thereare four others. Here are girls home from boarding-school, rosy and sweet, blossomed into full maidenhood, bringing a whiff of the city in their furs and well-cut frocks. There is the only son of one family, who left home a stripling, now back for the first time, a stalwart man, with his young wife and three children. His little mother cannot see plainly, through her happy tears; and there, and there, and there again, are re-united households.
The bells ring out, and after them comes the silver sound of the first hymn.
Of late, on Christmas evening, the choirs of the different churches have begun the custom of meeting on the Common, to lead the crowd in hymns, round the town Christmas Tree. Later they separate and go about singing to different invalids and shut-ins, and many of the houses are lighted up.
“Silent Night! Holy Night!”
“Silent Night! Holy Night!”
So, within doors, we neighbors meet in reverent and thankful worship; while without, the pure snow, the grave trees, the stars, beartheir enduring witness to that of which they, and we and our human worship, are a part.
Peace and good-will to our town, where it lies sheltered among its hills. The country rises on each side of it, and stretches peacefully away to east and west. The valleys gather their waters, the wooded hills climb to the stars; they wait, guarding in silent bosoms the treasure of their memories, the secret of their hopes.
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